Review
Genre and Mood
Radio Citizen with Bajka made Summer Days for an album its label filed under electronic, downtempo and jazz, and recommended to fans of Bonobo, Quantic and The Cinematic Orchestra. The feelings named here, warm and relaxed, follow the title and the label’s description of the track as the more organic and live of Bajka’s three appearances; they are a reading, not a quotation.
Song Summary
Summer Days is the third of twelve tracks on Hope and Despair and runs about four and a half minutes. Unusually for a guest on a producer’s album, Bajka did not only sing it: according to Ubiquity’s press sheet she wrote the music and the lyrics, and the credits name her, as Bajka Pluwatsch, as composer and lyricist. On Hope and Stop or Go she adds what the label called her “dusty vocal flow” to busted beats; here the song is hers.
Musical Breakdown
No review describes Summer Days section by section, so the parts below are listening prompts built on what the label wrote about the album, not a map of the song.
The Voice
Listen to Bajka first. Wikipedia describes her voice as jazz and soul, and notes that she began as a spoken-word poet before she became a singer and composer.
The Band
Listen for players rather than loops, and for the interplay that the press sheet credits to Schabel’s large ensemble of musician friends.
The Low End
The press sheet says the whole album is rooted by heavyweight bass lines. Listen for how the bass anchors a song that never raises its voice.
Concepts in Focus
Bajka is the <a href=“https://korczis.github.io/sonic-playground/concept/featured-artist/” class=“concept-link font-medium text-primary-700 underline decoration-dotted underline-offset-4 hover:decoration-solid dark:text-primary-400” data-concept=“featured-artist” title=“A guest performer credited on another artist’s track, usually as “feat.”: a rapper’s verse, a singer’s hook or a second voice. Features bring together different styles and audiences and are central to hip-hop, R&B and dance music.“>featured artist here, but the credit undersells her. A featured singer usually adds a voice to someone else’s music; on Summer Days the guest is the songwriter, and the producer is the host. Compare Waldeck – Midsummer Night Blues (feat. Zeebee), where Zeebee wrote and sang a summer song on the Viennese producer Waldeck’s album.
The second idea is mixing. Ubiquity describes Hope and Despair as raucous live instrumentation worked into gritty songs with deft mixing and subtle studio trickery. Schabel put it more simply: if his first album was 8mm film, this one was cinemascope, with more layers, more space and more depth. Mixing is where that happens: the balance and placement of each instrument decide how wide a recording feels.
Artistic Context
Radio Citizen is the project of the producer Niko Schabel and his friends. Their debut, Berlin Serengeti, came out in 2006; Pitchfork wrote that it leaps dozens of genres in a single bound, and its music ended up in Grey’s Anatomy and Californication. Bajka appears on six of its tracks. Born in India and raised in Portugal and South Africa, she studied music in Prague, appeared on four tracks of Bonobo’s Days to Come the same year, and is based in Berlin. Ubiquity released Hope and Despair on 19 October 2010.
Impact and Reception
The label’s sheet quoted Gilles Peterson (“Brilliant!”) and Blues and Soul, which gave the album five out of five; no review singles out Summer Days. Put it on early in the evening and let the band do the talking.
