Each song on Ghost Funk Orchestra’s 3rd album, A New Kind of Love, resonates like the soundtrack to a scene from an imaginary movie. The music could score a romantic drama, an action thriller, or a modern twist on a classic film noir. The spare, cascading vocals accentuate the lush instrumental orchestrations composed, performed, arranged and produced by multi-instrumentalist Seth Applebaum, whose latest brainchild was conceived and conceptualized during The Great Pause of 2020, a time of tension, bewilderment and isolation. Evoking the grooviness of an era which preceded his arrival on earth, Applebaum draws upon sonic devices of mid-century exotica and the succinct but dense arranging style of the leaders of the pop orchestras which dominated the hit parades of the 60s and early 70s. He blends impressions of this bygone era with an expression of his actual experiences as a young filmmaker coming of age in the 21st century, citing influences such as Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings and Antibalas. A New Kind of Love encompasses a reverence for the past without attempting to recreate it.

Born in the 1980’s in Mexico and brought to California, Rudy de Anda’s debut solo album, “Tender Epoch” (2020) is a love letter to the long historical lineage of rock ‘n’ roll music interpreted through his multicultural lens. “I write my own history; I don’t want to be defined by defined by any one scene,” De Anda proclaims about his personal journey, and his ability to adapt and flit between cities and cultures is part of the reason L.A. Record has called his sound “deliberately difficult to categorize, familiar but novel at the same time.”

De Anda’s origin story has more locations than most and the staging is a perilous task: his childhood in Compton, his move to Long Beach, then a few months in Mexico, then back to the States. As an adult, he had a solo trip to Chile to see El Guincho’s show, a trip that meant so much to him that he realized the profound impact Latin music has on his adult life.