With Yemaja, Justin Robert's most experimental effort to date, he has reached far beyond conventional modes of music-making and sculpted an album's worth of dazzling computer music. The tones which comprise the beginning of "Salty Threshold," a piece submitted to Germany's annual Linux Audio Conference, fall somewhere between the sound of digital blips and bleeps, and the experience of hearing a live, crisp bell ringing at the peripheral of your eardrum. The title of this composition refers to the practice of throwing salt over the threshold of a doorway in order to keep negative spirits at bay, and one can almost envision a ritualistic ceremony unfolding as the piece gradually invokes meditative percussion. "A New Start" is an apt title for Yemaja's next track. Justin Robert has built upon the serene mysticism of his "Manasota" album by incorporating enhanced technology and a broader compositional approach that allows this piece to reinvent itself several times over the course of its six and a half minutes. Track three, "The Whale's Song," is a brief, but rich, interlude. It succeeds in masking a great deal of emotional breadth beneath a strikingly simple motif that recalls music made for the Chinese lute or "pipa." This work is a precursor to the epic "Sun Bubbles" Perhaps the most playful of all Justin Robert's offerings, the undulating sounds encased herein are a light-hearted foil to the brooding nature of "Salty Threshold." "Swim With Yemaja" begins with an all-encompassing, harmonic-laden synthesizer drone permeated with an arpeggiated bass. Easily the most contemplative piece on the record, "Swim With Yemaja" not only simulates the prolonged sensation of floating downstream alongside a mythical goddess, its warmth and profundity grant the listener momentary enlightenment for having accompanied Yemaja across her rejuvenating waters. The album closes with an emboldened soundscape. In "Earth Music," Justin Robert has applied his sensibility for virtuosic production techniques to the aesthetics of his Lunar Flower counterparts, M. Persson: Sounds and Deepspace. In so doing, he has created a divine ambient meditation bathed in swirls of sound-color. It is fitting that Yemaja is named after an ocean goddess. Like the cleansing action of the ocean's waves, the music of Yemaja continuously renews itself with the incarnation of each successive track, and at times, within the compositions themselves. Given his endless versatility and exhaustive experimentation, with Yemaja, Justin Robert has renewed himself in much the same way.
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Reviewer:k.attman - - September 15, 2009 Subject: very unique I've noticed this guy many albums on archive.org and each one that I've listened to seems to be brilliant in it's own way. This album is very minimal and stylish electronic music that sounds very original. I don't even really know how to describe it, it just conveys real feeling behind it's blips and beeps. It quite mellow, but I wouldn't really call it ambient either. The songs aren't quite soundscapes, but rather arrangements of a non-traditional manner that has and almost classical feel.
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