Audiopile Review: The third member of the trio who helped shape André 3000’s New Blue Sun, multi-instrumentalist Nate Mercereau, joins his collaborators in a 2024 victory lap with his own solo album, plunging even deeper than the releases we’ve already heard this year from Surya Botofasina and Carlos Niño. Created entirely out of samples culled from years of recording his fellow musicians, Excellent Traveller is essentially a sonic collage of every aspect that’s been pulsing out of the vibrant “all genre” LA scene, that slippery sound that our weekly readers will surely know we’ve been totally enamoured with for some time now. With samples taken from Laraaji, Kamasi Washington, André 3000, Shabaka Hutchings, as well as his usual associates, Botofasina and Niño, among countless others,  Mercereau embarks on a lengthy journey that touches on temporal ambience, warped astral jazz and trips down fourth world wormholes. Malleable wind instruments bend and sway while synths set their sights on distant stars, looped flutes lock into abstracted grooves, and Mercereau’s liquid guitar lines flit among a thickening haze of chimes and crumbling percussion. It can be just as jarring as it is transcendent, the entirety of this epic forges a grand overview of the ineffable, genre-less sound that’s had us in its grips for years.

Excellent Traveler is Nate Mercereau’s version of a solo guitar album following the release of his critically acclaimed records Joy Techniques and SUNDAYS. As penned in the album notes by Carlos Niño, this exquisite album of spontaneous solo composition, nuanced improvisation, and exploratory world creation features living legends Laraaji, Luis Pérez Ixoneztli, Idris Ackamoor, André 3000, and frequent collaborators Carlos Niño and Surya Botofasina. Mercereau’s (3 years young) daughter Juniper is also on the album. Kamasi Washington, Shabaka Hutchings, Cavana Lee, V.C.R, Anaiah Rasheed Muhammad, Dwight Trible, Andres Renteria, and Aaron Shaw all intersect in Mercereau’s psychedelic quests and adventures as well. Known for his writing and production credits on records by household names such as Jay-Z, John Legend, and Leon Bridges, Nate Mercereau is currently buzzing for his contributions to André 3000’s album, New Blue Sun. At the vanguard of electroacoustic compositions, he seized the opportunity of recording duets with the Golden Gate Bridge in 2021 after reading an article on San Francisco residents complaining about the landmark’s eerie hum.