SRR008

STEVEN DAYVID MCKELLAR 
"NAMA"

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Tracklist:

One and Zero

Nama Wind

Slow Fade

Stop Running

Pull Away

Trillion Tiny Waves

Edge of the Garden

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All songs written, produced, and performed by Steven Dayvid McKellar

Recorded at Camp Dayvid in Los Angeles, California during the summer of 2021
Additional guitar, synthesizer, percussion and backing vocals on "Nama Wind" and "Edge of the Garden" by Bucky Shorts
Mixed by Brendyn "Rusti" Rossouw
Mastered by Zino Mikorey at Zino Mikorey Mastering, Berlin
Mastered for vinyl by Dave Gardner at Infrasonic Mastering
Artwork and Layout by Stevie Kin, Toddrick Spalding, and Steven Dayvid McKellar 
Photography by Lauren Stocker
A&R by Toddrick Spalding

“It’s a call to my future and past self, in an attempt to be more present while the world frothed with uncertainty and change," says South African-born-Los Angeles-based singer songwriter STEVEN DAYVID MCKELLAR about his new meditative full-length album, NAMA. A follow-up to his 2020 debut solo album ETHIO, NAMA furthers McKellar's internal exploration of the last two pandemic years, observing the current state of the world as affected by isolation with the larger cultural context that the polarized socio/political environment has bred in this country - but it also serves as a reflection of personal self-realization of coming to terms with oneself from the social and mental environment that was brought from the social distancing. 

NAMA balances self-examination with an outward push into the unknown. Despite the seemingly restrictive minimalism of its construction, the album is teeming with a dense atmosphere, layers of crunchy, trancing beats, haunting melodies, and back-road, windows-down introspection. At the heart of NAMA, however, with its wide range of human expression, is an odd, paradoxical sense of joy -- that particular sort of quiet pleasure that can only be found in the unsatisfied desires of life that, by their mere existence, that point us hopefully toward the unknown and the numinous. As McKellar sings in the record’s playful track "Nama Wind," "Nama got a wind a blowing everywhere I be / In the darkest cave, in silence or in city / A foreign tongue hiding in the melody / The blade on the shoulder cutting through the deep bringing in."

Deftly self-produced, the record is a musical psychoanalysis of McKellar’s own identity, where the primitive utterances of the subconscious are quite literally coaxed and arranged into fully realized expressions of song throughout the album, from the minimal electronic heartbreak of lead off track “One & Zero” to the haunted claustrophobia of second single “Stop Running” and the fractured beauty of album closer “Edge Of The Garden.”