Essential Key

Essential Key

Sons of Freedom

Not Not Fun

Sons of Freedom is the culmination of a decade-long fascination with idyllic new wave library music. After retiring his ethnographic tropical ambient project Coconut Dealers in 2012, Konstantin Shkolnikov found himself drawn to a different muse: Essential Key. Across a series of self-released digital collections, the vision streamlined and solidified into a palette of soft rock licks, fretless bass, and 80’s drum machinery, in a sheen of velvet tape hiss. Inspired equally by Japanese prog, Patrick Cowley, AOR obscurities, and “the joy of life,” the album’s 10 instrumentals flow with cohesive leisure, warm and wood-paneled, spiked with sleek funk. It’s music for cruising, surfing, and soaring, on wind or water, in fantasies past or memories not yet made. Mastered by Jared Carrigan. Design by Britt Brown.