Charleston instrumental act Hot Mustard unveiled a musical atmosphere tempered by funk, hip-hop and soul properties with its debut LP Mother Sauce in 2021. The group’s new album Seconds rises from that same ether, a vivid orchestra of breathable, cerebral, spacey sounds.
“With instrumental music, you’re not really boxing the listener into feeling a certain way,” Hot Mustard instrumentalist Nick Carusos told the Charleston City Paper.
Carusos and multi-instrumentalist Jack Powell are the recording duo behind Hot Mustard, a concept mixed up in collaboration with two Brooklyn-based musicians known as Big Brass Beats, trumpeter Jordan McLean of Antibalas and trombonist Dave “Smoota” Smith of TV On The Radio.
“We’re huge fans of ambient stuff and cinematic, old funk — the stuff that makes you move, makes you feel a certain way and is open to interpretation,” Carusos said.
McLean told the City Paper making music with Hot Mustard is like forming a sculpture. He starts with a big block of ideas and carves away.
“The rhythmic language, structural concepts and phrasing I incorporate with Hot Mustard come from evolution of the Afrobeat language we spent decades developing with Antibalas and that Smoota and I continue to do with our band Armo,” McLean said.
Powell and Carusos have been playing together since 2001, and this particular venture sprang from what Carusos called a “Covid project.”
“We didn’t have any expectations up front, and it just started taking off,” Carusos said.
Mother Sauce and Seconds both arose from a pool of 20 tracks that Powell and Carusos laid down and initially sent off to McLean and Smith in 2020 to record the brass section. Powell produced both albums at his Johns Island spot, Opus Thimble Studios.
“Covid was like — you lost all your gigs and that whole part of your life goes away,” Powell said.
“There was time and space for Jordan to focus on Hot Mustard. We got along musically and it just worked.”
Collaborative combustion
Powell said the initial songwriting starts with a percussive idea and basic groove, and it works well partly because of Carusos’ creative mentality.
“Nick is a fountain of ideas and reactive in the moment. He’s able to just connect,” Powell said. “We kind of have completely different approaches. I’ll work on some things until I find something that I think is interesting to me, and something will click. A big part of it is knowing when to just let it be something simple. I try to not not be too busy in the arrangements before they go to horns — I want [the horns] to come through as much as possible.”
While Mother Sauce was a bit more stripped back, Seconds harnessed additional sonic detail with instrumentation from Charleston keyboardist Ross Bogan on Hammond organ, cello player Helen Gillet and instrumentalist Alan Brisendine on combo organ. Powell brought guitar, synth, keys and drum arrangements. Carusos brought bass, guitar and Rhodes piano.
“Helen does avant garde cello work,” Carusos said. “She added some conventional and abstract cello elements.”
“Ross came over and laid down wonderful organ parts, and that changed things,” Powell said. “He comes in with the same kind of spirit of Nick and just connects.”
Seconds feels heavier than Mother Sauce, Powell said, even melancholic at times.
“There’s a couple of tracks in there that feel sad to me,” he said. “Particularly one track, ‘Low Boy.’ We had Helen play cello on that track because it felt that way. Cello is such an emotive instrument. She really just dug into that vibe and made that track super special.”
Another collaboration was with vocalist Alanna Royale for, believe it or not, a lyric section.
“I briefly explained to her the nature of the track, ‘End of Time,’ the last one on the album,” Powell said. “It has subway vibes, like a train leaving and someone standing on the platform with a sense of longing and a little bit of emptiness. And she took that and wrote that little verse at the end.”
Powell is also the visual artist Opus Thimble behind the retro animations that complement Hot Mustard’s discography.
“The music is a reason to do something way bigger than I would have done if I was strictly doing visual art,” Powell said. “The music made it so that I had to really think about storytelling and make something that felt like an art piece that wasn’t just purely aesthetic. So I was matching that energy, spontaneity and creativity and letting those things meld together.”
Since Hot Mustard’s musical mood is not guided by lyrics, the listener’s imagination does some interpreting — but not all of it.
“Music is very good at communicating a complexity of emotion that language doesn’t always sufficiently capture,” Powell said. “It’s the same for everyone that loves music: It’s something that’s just been there — reliable and comforting.”
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