The Mast will be releasing their full-length album Pleasure Island on January 28th, 2014 on Channel A Records, a lush and inviting collection of songs that soaks the mind in a bath of endorphins while propelling the body to dance.  While their style skewed more towards organic, acoustic-based dance music on their first album, Pleasure Island is more modern and seductive, borrowing influences from artists like Massive Attack, Bonobo, Purity Ring, and Mount Kimbie.  Warm, sultry vocals and infectious melodies along with driving beats that bring to mind early IDM, post-dubstep, and experimental beat music all merge into finely crafted songs.
 
Vocalist Haleh Gafori and beatsmith/percussionist Matt Kilmer created the blueprints for Pleasure Island on planes and between gigs and recordings sessions for various projects in their hometown of Brooklyn and overseas.  Over the past year, while composing music and recording for Louis CK‘s show Louie on FX and working with artists as diverse as Reggie Watts and new music cello pioneer Maya Beiser, Matt always had his laptop in tow and was consistently sending tracks to Haleh. Between directing or editing music videos, Haleh would write lyrics, record melodies, tweak arrangements, and send the tracks back to Matt.  Through this volleying of ideas, Pleasure Island was born.
 
The opening track “Luxor” highlights Matt’s infatuation with early UK drum ‘n bass released on the Metalheadz imprint, detectable in the skittering beats under Haleh’s  winding vocal lines and velvety chants.  The euphoric and mysterious “Raining Down” follows, with a victorious middle section that first introduces the tribal element that recurs through the album. On “So Right,” a minimalist verse featuring a bell-like synth slowly builds, eventually bursting into a chorus that could easily be at home in a Deadmau5 or Hardwell set.  “Cliff” follows with a wide-open booming 808 beat that drops into a crushing double-time chorus as Haleh’s vocals soar.
 
The dance floor banger “Breathless We Go” follows, leading us into the mysterious cave of “Voices” which like many of the songs on the album features found sounds, in this case the swoosh of windsurfing as well as percussion samples Matt collected during his years of traveling.  Continuing in this vein, the impressive beast of a song “Nuclear Dragon” features an African balafon deftly played by Matt and “Lean Into It” opens with a sample of Pygmy water drumming from the Congo.
 
In their dazzling live shows, where they have performed alongside Blonde Redhead, Reggie Watts, Teebs, Susanne Sundfør & more, Matt and Haleh incorporate live electronics, percussion, and vocal improvisation, preserving the spontaneity they cultivated as instrumentalists. Speaking on their live show, Haleh said “We know we’ve succeeded when our audience is sweating by the end of the show.  When we see them jumping and moving, we know they’ve had a good time.”
 
The duo has created two videos so far for the album, both of which have met much acclaim. “UpUpUp” which features the pop and lock dancer Pandora Marie in butoh-esque body paint and beat-synced projections screened at Bumbershoot and has gotten over a quarter million views.  The second one, “So Right” which features a clever baby DJ who escapes from his crib and throws a rave, premiered in Interview Magazine and was chosen as Tubefilter’s must-see video alongside Arcade Fire’s “Afterlife.”  They are currently in Brooklyn working on the next video for Pleasure Island.
 
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