Felipe Gordon is back on Shall Not Fade with his new album Tezeta

Felipe Gordon returns to Shall Not Fade with Tezeta, an album that arrives with the quiet authority you’d expect from an artist who has become a fixture on the label. Since A Landscape Onomatopeya in 2022, a debut that ran to three pressings, Gordon has delivered seven 12″ EPs on SNF and another on Lost Palms, building a body of work that rewards patient listening.

Tezeta is a complete record. Played front to back it doesn’t fatigue. Returned to dozens of times it keeps offering the same feeling that drew you in on the first pass. For anyone who came up with Moon Safari or Tourist on rotation, the parallel with Air and St Germain won’t feel forced.

The album takes its name from one of four modes within Qiñit, the traditional Ethiopian modal system most closely associated with Mulatu Astatke, the founding voice of Ethio-jazz. Tezeta is usually translated as nostalgia or longing. Gordon describes Mulatu’s tezeta recordings as carrying “feelings of melancholy and longing from a point of affection,” and that’s the feeling he has woven through every track here.

It runs through everything. The jazz-sampled house cuts that have become a Gordon signature. The synthesisers that fan out across the record. The forays into trip-hop. His vocals, the guitar tunings, the running order itself. Tezeta is the base note in the recipe, present whether the tempo is locked at 4/4 or sliding into a breakbeat.

The closest English-language analogue might be the Portuguese saudade, a bittersweet longing for something absent or lost. Gordon nods to the parallel himself. The difference, listening to this record, is that nothing here feels lost. Something has been found.

Gordon attributes the shift to circumstance. Tezeta was made in a period when he allowed himself to work without deadlines or self-imposed pressure, a window that coincided with significant personal growth and gave him space to reflect on his practice. You can hear it. There is a looseness in the playing and an unhurried confidence in the arrangements that suggests an artist working without anyone leaning over his shoulder, including himself.

What lifts Tezeta beyond the run of strong house records is the emotional register. Most of us, given a brush, can produce something recognisable. Far fewer can produce something that moves you. Gordon does. Familiarity while it plays, an itch to return to it once it stops, a sense of small absence between listens.

Tezeta lands as the kind of album that quietly settles into a collection and stays there. A record you remember why you own the moment you press play, and miss the moment it ends. Gordon has made a proper album, and on a label that has put out a fair number of strong ones, this one stands apart.

Available here

by Decoded Magazine

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