Unlikely places can sometimes breed unlikely music. Joe Corrales is from Texas, a place synonymous with country and western, slide guitar, classic rock and good ol' boys. Yet his debut as Yppah (pronounced "Yippah") draws on a cultural heritage that took in My Bloody Valentine alongside hip hop and has resulted in a unique sensibility. Corrales early teen years were spent playing guitar and bass in rock bands, his later ones as a scratch DJ who mixed hip hop and house in club sets, produced weird mashups (Outkast v Ted Nugent anybody?) and was part of a turnttablist group called The Truth.
However, when he sat down to write "You Are Beautiful At All Times" his aim was to combine all these influences and it's an aim he has achieved with some aplomb. Mixing in guitars shoved through massive delays, keyboards and loops sampled from real drums, Corrales has created intricate, multi-layered soundscapes of real beauty, which also have the catchy, insistent hooks of the music of his childhood.
Corrales' music has a certain air of melancholy to it and perhaps the wide open spaces of Texas have influenced the airiness of his tunes, the feeling that you are looking down onto tiny people from high in the sky. Certainly, he manages to make his modesty into something epic.
