Photay

From the perspective of people who categorize music by genres and types, Evan Shornstein, better-known under his production moniker Photay, has created lots of different kinds of sounds over the past decade. There’s the Hudson Valley-raised, Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist composer’s quasi-IDM and electronic almost-pop tracks with the occasional vocal; the improvised organic and and experimental music sessions he participates in alongside new age giants, Laraaji and Carlos Niño; the diaspora electronic folk-jazz he makes with veteran musicians from all over the globe; and the disco and house adjacent records he tag-team DJs with Brooklyn producer Cesar Toribio and engineer Phil Moffa (who also masters all of Photay’s records — and those of dance-music dons around the world). But if you’ve listened closely to Shornstein’s prodigious output, you know that separating and classifying the work is actually contrary to the energy of Photay music. That what on-the-surface may lazily appear as differences, is actually brought together by a shared sonic warmth, a hardware pastoralism at play. Whatever category he engages, Photay makes outdoor music under the spell of the elements, for the purpose of different human movements — some physical, some spiritual, some emotional, some philosophical.

 

On Photay’s fifth solo album, Windswept, that pastoralist unity is even more explicit: It is an album about wind. The project began with the producer designing a synth patch to, in his words, “mimic the ‘wind’ as a powerful, deep, unpredictable and at times overwhelming spirit.” So use of that “wind” patch became Windswept’s instrumental throughline, and the element became the album’s thematic maypole. The natural world had always been one of Photay’s calling cards, and now it had invaded the machine, and his writing.

 

Shornstein comes to his naturalist aesthetic…well…naturally. He grew in Saugerties and Woodstock, New York, one of America’s historical epicenters of hippie idylls, environmentalist ideals, and new sonic ideas. This is not simply the parish of Big Pink, of a globally famous 1969 festival and other boomer fantasias, of tourist-ready tie-dye shops and organic food markets. Woodstock is also the birthplace of John Cage’s best-known piece (“4’33”) and the Maverick contemporary music festival; of Creative Music Studios, an improvisers collective co-founded in the early ‘70s by Ornette Coleman, Kale Berger and Ingrid Sertso; and was a longtime residence of the late Malcolm Cecil, inventor of TONTO, a self-built early super synthesizer, made famous on recordings by Stevie Wonder, Minnie Ripperton and Gil Scott-Heron, among many.