Audiopile Review: Carlos Niño is on the creative roll of a lifetime. Fresh off his André 3000 victory lap and the very recent album on Leaving alongside Nate Mercereau and Surya Botofasina, all of whom feature prominently here, he brings us the newest instalment in his ongoing Carlos Niño & Friends series. The guest list is as stacked as ever—Sam Gendel, Jamael Dean, Ariel Kalma, Iasos (RIP), Photay, and Deantoni Parks are just a few of the notable names that Niño has called upon. Easily the most low-key of his recent run of already subdued ambient-jazz, Niño works his way further into the corners of his already established sound, each track a splendid microcosm of the work that has come before. Placenta, as the name of the album might indicate, draws on the inspiration from the recent birth of his child, the tracks dedicated to the miracle of birth itself and the many helping hands along the way. It’s becoming a less and less inviting proposition to bring new life on to this planet, especially in our horrible age of non-stop doom-scrolling, but Niño offers a positive light with which to view our limited time here, urging us to put the digital hell screens down for a minute. Sorry to get all new age woo woo on you here, but it’s hard not to get sucked into the radiant glow of the album, one that flits from breezy fourth world-isms, oceanic ambience, ecstatic peace-jazz, and collage-like space jams. It’s quite a ride.

Placenta is the fourth collection of broadly imaginative and highly collaborative Carlos Niño & Friends music released on International Anthem in the last four years. It is also the first new music to be released by Carlos Niño & Friends following the November 2023 release of André 3000’s New Blue Sun – an album which Carlos produced alongside André, while co-writing, co-creating/playing, and co-mixing every song.

Placenta is announced on April 11th, 2024, a date chosen because it is the 1st solar return of Moss Niño (a new being in human form, who Carlos and his partner Annelise are Earth parents of). Their experience of pregnancy, labor and delivery were all profoundly impactful for Carlos. Becoming a father again (a whole 24 years after the birth of Azul Niño, who has become a regular artistic collaborator with Carlos) he felt total Inspiration for this set of recordings, and hence it is perhaps the most conceptually-grounded Carlos Niño & Friends album we’ve yet to present – fully connected to the spirit of family, birth, and “how we get here.”