Innovation, creative nirvana, and clinical psychosis tend to share a lot of common ground, and the differences between the three are oftentimes simple lines in the sand. Gary, Indiana multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and jazz and soul vocalist, Diggs Duke, has a set of lines seemingly drawn different than most, and his new EP, Elevator Ditties 2 is here to challenge the preconceptions of your own sanity. 

 

The project speaks as if it is your own drunken sub-conscious - quickly shifting gears, deeply creative, and if outwardly literal, perhaps perceived a little left of center. But it's clear Diggs Duke is not concerned with perception, and chooses to work strictly within the liquid confines of his own vivid imagination and self-being.

 

The result is a project we don't dare try define. Bold, bubbly, inviting, and yet deeply personal and emotionally challenging, Elevator Ditties 2 achieves more in its quick pass of seven minutes than most modern artists achieve with a full-length project. 

 

The instrumentation is an odd take on modern jazz hewn almost exclusively of low-fidelity simplistic key strokes and subdued analogue percussion. But the true focus of the project is Duke's classically soulful vocal range and the poetically étrange penmanship it delivers - adding further to listener's imminent feelings of offness, opacity, and perhaps even an inner realization that Duke's music is more parallel to reality than our own false projections.