Audiopile Review: After months of waiting patiently, we’ve finally got copies of CINE, last year’s collab between Cavalier & Child Actor issued on Backwoodz. If you’ve been tracking the Backwoodz family tree, both of these names ought to be familiar to you at this point—Cavalier’s been a frequent scene stealer through his many guest vocal spots across the label, while Child Actor has been a significant presence on Backwoodz in recent years as one of their go-to producers. 2024 ended up being a bit of coming out party for Cavalier, dropping three full lengths over the year, including a collab with longtime pal Quelle Chris, plus a much hyped double album, Different Type Time, which was also issued on Backwoodz. While Different Type Time was wide-ranging in scope, taking on several stylistic twists through its four sides, the choice to stick with a sole producer for CINE gives the album a singular sound that lends to Cavalier’s focused vision for the album. Presented as a “rhythmic biopic”, Cavalier spins his fragmentary memories into a sticky webbing that, much in the same vein as his label boss billy woods, draws more on impressionistic imagery than gritty details. While Cavalier’s serpentine prose has already proven to be adaptable, teaming up with Child Actor is certainly a purposeful and wise move here. The producer’s melted sample palette of warbled soul and jazz loops, which float eerily atop bleary, lo-fi breaks, fade into the dream-like flow of Cavalier with utter ease. The Backwoodz catalog is now stacked with many classics, we’re happy to add CINE to the growing list. Edition of 1000.

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CINE is the first collaborative project from rapper Cavalier and producer Child Actor, dropping November 15th, 2024 on Backwoodz Studioz. Both artists have already had an active year; Child Actor crafted big singles for ELUCID, Navy Blue, and Open Mike Eagle, alongside a full album with shemar. All Cavalier did was put out what might be the album of the year with Different Type Time in April, as well as We Gon’ Need Each Other, a side project with Quelle Chris. It is a special moment when you have two artists on the rise team up for a project of this weight, and CINE delivers. This is a midsummer’s dream of an album: languid, alluring, mysterious and beautiful—and through it all danger lurks in the wings.

Cavalier is a visual artist in every sense of the word, so it is fitting when he describes the album in cinematic terms. “This is a rhythmic biopic,” he says. “Child Actor didn’t just produce this record, he scored chapters of my life for processing, framed buried thoughts, and illuminated the grittier parts of my journey.”

If Different Type Time was Cavalier’s sprawling magnum opus—his Do The Right Thing, if you will—then CINE is his Crooklyn. Equal parts memoir and memorial, CINE pulls from sepia-toned summers and black-and-white nights; one of ten million stories from a city that is gone but not yet forgotten. For his part, Child Actor saw where Cavalier was going and built upon those themes and ideas as their collaboration deepened.

“We talked about how these beats were somehow drawing him into a specific period of his life for whatever reason, and I wanted to find a way to have my post production provoke a feeling of genuine recognition, to use sounds and textures to turn whatever vague notions those beats might have been giving him into true sense memories,” the producer explains.

So, on “Sojourn,” while Cavalier immerses us in a world of bus depots and liminal spaces that are the province of all traveling salesmen, Child Actor weaves air brakes, running engines, and stray conversations among passengers into the soundscape. That creative feedback loop became their shared process on CINE, working hand-in-glove like a director and cinematographer.

“I first met Cav at the Armand Hammer pop-up WBDTS release show. woods surprised us by using the occasion to pitch us the idea of doing a collaborative EP,” Child Actor says. “woods went back to greeting fans and Cav and I got to talking through initial concepts. Cav told me something like “I don’t do small projects, I always make sure to give people a full meal.”

While Different Type Time came to Backwoodz as a work-in-progress, CINE was conceived, developed and nurtured entirely under the label’s auspices. Cavalier traveled back and forth from New Orleans to Brooklyn to record with Backwoodz mainstay Willie Green, who also mixed and mastered the album at the GreenHouse. Meanwhile, Child Actor’s come up started with Backwoodz Studioz, having produced extensively for Armand Hammer (Shrines, WBDTS, BLK LBL) and for woods and ELUCID individually (Terror Management, I Told Bessie), as well as big records for Fielded (Plus One), Moor Mother (Brass), and ShrapKnel (Metal Lung).