Giraffage

Charlie Yin provides creature comfort as San Francisco-based Giraffage. His affinity for mastering and mixing with soundboard gadgetry sparked a career of creative remixes and sampling nostalgic tracks over melody and tight drum machine percussion.

He has put out a slew of remixes, such as Janet Jackson’s “Someone To Call My Lover,” as well as do-overs of songs by R. Kelly and The Dream. He also stars in many collaborations and production (XXYYXX,Teen Daze), and has a side project called Robot Science.

His work is a bright and steady flow inside an ongoing dream. Needs, Yin’s last album, is more heavily sampled and was created in what he says (on his Bandcamp site) were his “best of times and the worst of times.” Taking inspiration from late ’70s and early ’80s and ’90s R&B, he spins tracks into a shuffled ambiance of desire and longing. He speeds up the vocals of Cathy Dennis’ 1990’s “Touch Me All Night Long” and then drops the track into a dark sludge for his “Close 2 Me.” Keith Sweat’s “Don’t Stop Your Love” warbles on “Thinking About You,” and the track “Money” is soft- dubbed so that it somehow sounds like the words “honey” or “love me.” Using pieces of lyrics and tempo changes, he is able to detach the ideas of the minimalist originals and isolate them into his own emotional cache. »

 – Brandy Crowe