Adrian Quesada

Released November 18, 2022 on ATO — Quesada's second album of 2022, following Boleros Psicodélicos by five months. Jaguar Sound is the all-instrumental flip side of that record: twelve tracks of cinematic mood music drawing on '70s Italian film scores, hip-hop's golden-age production, and the psychedelic-soul vocabulary Quesada has been building since his Grupo Fantasma days. He wrote, performed, engineered, mixed, and produced almost all of it himself at Electric Deluxe in Austin.

The starting point was the early-pandemic lockdown, when Quesada — like a lot of producers stuck at home — started building tracks for himself rather than for vocalists. The throughline is the kind of instrumental-soul vocabulary you'd associate with The Alchemist sample beds, Ennio Morricone's Italian western scores, and Nico Fidenco's library-music output.

Cool stuff:

• Mary Lattimore plays harp on the record — the Philadelphia-based ambient harpist whose own albums on Ghostly International and Thrill Jockey have made her one of the go-to "credible weird harp" credits of the last decade
• Neal Francis plays piano — the Chicago Wurlitzer/clavinet specialist whose own ATO records (Changes, In Plain Sight) sit in a similar '70s-soul lineage
• Ikebe Shakedown, the Brooklyn instrumental Afrobeat-soul band, makes a guest appearance — labelmate-adjacent on the broader ATO/Colemine instrumental-soul scene
• The record was conceived during the early COVID lockdowns as a deliberately inward, score-style project with no vocalists
• Quesada cites Ennio Morricone, Nico Fidenco, and The Alchemist as direct touchstones — the rare album that openly traces lineage from spaghetti-western soundtracks to modern hip-hop production

Spin it for: instrumental psychedelic soul, harp-and-strings cinematic moodscapes, and an excuse to let an album play through without anyone singing over it.

Standouts: "Bolero Maldito" · "Mareado" · "Starlight" · "El Paraiso de Tu Mirar"

Sources: ATO Records · Bandcamp · Shore Fire Media · Adrian Quesada official · Colemine Records