Review
Genre and Mood
Hijacked’s Seewhat comes from a Paris duo that describes its own music as electro and acoustic experiments joined to the warm harmonies of soul. Discogs files their EP under electro. Electronic, electro and soul are the page’s genres for it, and soulful and warm its feelings, taken from the duo’s own words.
Song Summary
Seewhat is the second of four tracks on Rising Path, an EP that Hijacked released themselves, without a label, in May 2016, between Good Life and Ways, with Home to close. The split of the work is clear from the credits: Clément Bazin composed, mixed and produced it; Jésabel Domberger wrote the words and sings them. Discogs credits the mastering to Blanka and the artwork to Dadamint; the video credits Kasablanka Mastering. Discogs lists the CD’s second track as Seewath, the YouTube release as Seewhat.
Musical Breakdown
Main Section
No review we could find describes Seewhat at all, so this page describes much less than usual. What the sources give is the people and the frame: Domberger’s voice and words, Bazin’s music and mix, four minutes and thirty-eight seconds on the EP. Listen for the meeting the duo describes, the electronic and the acoustic around a soul voice.
Concepts in Focus
The music video is the duo’s own work as much as the song. Jésabel Domberger wrote and directed it, with Macha Tsarenkov as director of photography, Quentin Danos as editor and Felix Oziel on the grading. Its credits repeat the division of the music: composed and mixed by Hijacked. The video cut runs about twenty seconds shorter than the EP version, so this page plays the EP version.
mixing is usually a specialist’s job, the stage where every part is balanced into one finished track. Here the composer did it himself, so the balance between Domberger’s voice and the music around it is Bazin’s choice, before mastering gave the record its final level.
Artistic Context
Hijacked formed in 2012, and their Bandcamp page carries OGGIT, a five-track release of January 2014. Clément Bazin, the same Bazin whose solo records Discogs lists beside this EP, is a specialist of the steel drum who has taught it at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris and played for two years on Woodkid’s tour. His solo music is often called tropical house, and he calls it euphoric; hear it on Clement Bazin – Come to This.
Impact and Reception
Rising Path was a small, self-made release, and Seewhat is on this playground as one of the owner’s songs of 2018, the side of Clément Bazin that works with a singer and a songwriter. Listen to it next to his solo tracks and hear what a voice changes.
