It’s of influence that has bled omnipotent over the course of the last few years, that which British-Ghanaian producer, Juls has woven into the diasporic nature of the West African Cultural Renaissance’s influence on global music, fashion, art, photography, and cinematography. For its part, Sounds of My World comes as Juls’s proper debut album, folding into the frame of other works he’s released that, too, tell a story that transcends the mosaic of places towards which his sound calls home. It’s a mosaic that boasts of even more vibrancy when one takes into account the fact that in so many ways what Juls is doing with the spectrum of sounds that he and his many collaborators inhabit is what artists like Kaytranada and Sango are doing within their own frameworks. Sounds of My World has 15 tracks and runs nearly an hour in length. And even so, it also features 27 accompanying names, each with a distinct sound and flavor that effortlessly weaves into the Ghanaian-rooted, London-modern experimentalism of Juls’s vast creation.

 

Above all else, the album’s amalgamate auditory journey exists within the walls of a long night spent dancing at a club in Accra; an early morning emerging from a South London basement party where the DJ, like Juls – or maybe Juls himself – bleeds of a musical understanding that is especially wide-ranging. Tethered akin with a case study on West African rhythm, the highlife of beachy guitar strums tied to choral progressions, brassy, warm jazz infusions, and the ever-present sparkle of our protagonist’s signature tagline – Juls baby – Sounds of My World is a wide-ranging, yet tightly knit sonic display of everything it is that makes Juls such a productive gem.

 

With the consistent touch of such a uniquely dualistic sonic foundation, tying together through music a series of cultures that have been intertwined for centuries, Juls’s approach to something all his own has an ability to simultaneously feel globally communal. From track to track, Sounds of My World plays like the vivacious DJ sets that he’s long scripted as signature. From track to track, the album flows effortlessly forward, even while weaving together the sounds and stylings of so many collaborative forces. And that is nothing if not a nod towards his prowess as one of our moment’s most sought after producers.

 

The Eastern hemisphere Kaytranada, Juls’s ear for hearing the perfect collaborative features for his one-of-a-kind auditory aesthetic – one that so curatedly transcends the jazzy underbelly of London and the traditionally-founded yet new-age, re-envisionment renaissance of Accra – is he and the album’s most fervent trait. Not a voice out of place, Sounds of My World is a thesis on the many vocal registers and stylistic differentiation that Juls’s own oceans-spanning world brings to a modern era of genre-defying global music. Rather defined by its vibe and its many positivist moods, Sounds of My World rings with the resonances of something as simple as good times.

 

An impossible-to-choose-a-favorite set of 15 tracks, the album thrives in order, thrives on shuffle, thrives in general. It’s easy-going, highlife-rooted nature grants it the ability to adhere to any time, place, and occasion. The perfect soundtrack for the club, for a house party, for a rooftop kickback with friends, and on the beach listening alone with a pineapple filled with rum and citrus, Sounds of My World explodes as with a bottomless pit of situational application. It’s ability to blend jazz, hip-hop, highlife, Afrobeat, Neo-Soul, electro-funk, and altè is an homage to Juls’s rangy genius. Jysr take one listen to the trumpet and jazz flute founded altè cool of Close To Me, and then imagine that spectrum of musical diversity stretched and reimaged to the same perfected note 14 more times. There, in the masterful, diasporic exploration of Juls’s innate nature, you’ll find – and indisputably enjoy – Sounds of My World.