Marking My Time (Again) Elmiene

• 1 Remember 03:56
• 2 Mama 03:41
• 3 Mad At Fire 03:52
• 4 Someday 02:42
• 5 Marking My Time 04:29
• 6 Diane 03:18
• 7 Shame 02:32
• 8 Lover, You Should’ve Come Over 06:01
• 9 Someday (Unplugged) 03:13
• 10 Marking My Time (BADBADNOTGOOD Edit) 04:13
• Total Runtime 37:57

Info zu Marking My Time (Again)

British singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Elmiene makes poetic R&B with a contemporary tone and organic neo-soul feel in the vein of Sampha or Brent Faiyaz. After gaining notice with the nimble 2021 single "Golden," he released his debut EP, EL-MEAN, in early 2023. Additional singles like "Someday" and the psychedelic-leaning "Marking My Time" followed later in the year.

Growing up in Oxford, Elmiene began writing at a young age, gravitating to poetry and lyrics. His influences developed from 2Pac to Prince and Stevie Wonder as he nurtured his own lyrical and vocal style, which is a smooth, airy tenor that often dips into falsetto. Elmiene released his debut single, "Golden," in December 2021, a week after premiering it live at the late Virgil Abloh's final show in Miami. The catchy, percussive track earned Elmiene plenty of buzz over the coming year as he began teasing his first EP with eclectic follow-up singles like the breezy "Why (Spare Me Tears)" and the acoustic ballad "Endless No Mores." Both appeared on the five-song EL-MEAN EP, released in March 2023, and led to Elmiene signing with Def Jam a few months later. The silky "Mad at Fire" arrived in June, followed by a succession of interesting singles like the Sampha-produced "Mama" and the trippy "Marking My Time." (Timothy Monger)

When you think of Elmiene’s debut entrance in music, which was his colourful single ‘Golden’, for the late Virgil Abloh’s final Louis Vuitton show back in 2021, thanks to Benji B. One can not help but feel mesmerised by such a distinctive journey and type of artist we have not seen in the UK scene since the come up of a powerful figure like Sampha in 2013. To fill us with even more anticipation, Elmiene appeared on COLORS 8 months ago, positioning himself as an artist not to take lightly whilst embarking on an exclusive unplugged version of his meaningful single ‘Endless No Mores’. One can not ignore his quick yet noticeable appearance on the 2022 enigmatic project ‘Yesterday is Heavy’ by producer Lil Silva. This would also explain a couple of note-worthy collaborations which are all very prominent on his latest EP.

Elmiene

Elmiene
Elmiene's voice is undeniable. Born Abdala Elamin and raised in Oxford since the age of 5, the now 21-year-old has been called on for his sweetly soulful croons, since his living room concert days, singing Young Money's 'Bedrock' with his cousins, or going micro-viral at secondary school for his cover of Michael Jackson's 'Man in the Mirror' in music class. And yet, despite his love of performance and a knack for poetry and writing, it wasn't until he was discovered via his effortlessly silken cover videos on social media that he realised he could merge the worlds of his words and melodies and shape a future for himself. The next chapter of unearthing who he was as an artist was another fairly speedy one. Within the span of a week, he'd experimented with incorporating spoken word alongside singing on a track, then just spoken word over an instrumental. And then it hit him: "I realised that marrying the two doesn't have to mean them being separate things, like water and oil in a song. It could be the same thing. And the first song after that was 'Golden.'"

As debuts go, his was quite a monumental one. After a chance encounter with Louis Vuitton's musical director and DJ Benji B, the track struck a chord and went on to form the soundtrack of Virgil Abloh's final show for the brand, taking on an entirely new cultural gravitas. Since then, Elmiene has graced Lil Silva's critically-acclaimed Yesterday Is Heavy project, Stormzy's This Is What I Mean and the majority of his own debut EP EL-MEAN was produced by cult British folk-soul artist Jamie Woon. His sophomore EP Marking My Time sees his impressive pool expand further, with collaborations from Sampha, Jim-E Stack, BADBADNOTGOOD, Syd, DJ Dahi, James Vincent McMorrow, Courage and a return from both Silva and Woon too. And if his debut EP EL-MEAN was the scribblings in the first few empty pages of a diary — as he described it in his COLORS debut interview — figuring out how to transform all these stories into art, Marking My Time (Polydor/Def Jam Recordings) feels like getting into the rhythm of things and growing used to a new way of communicating with and grounding himself. "The general theme of this project is trying to mark my time not in terms of history but just for me personally, so I don't get lost. Almost making a checkpoint to anchor myself. Even sonically it's like I'm marking my stamp that I put on things," he says.

"Soul has shaped basically the whole structure of my artistic being, I was just steeped in it for my whole teenage years," he says. His music world opened up after discovering Craig David's 'Seven Days' and the years that followed saw him track back through the likes of Usher, T Pain and Blue to find Boyz II Men, Jodeci, Dru Hill and Tank, who led him further back to Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway. Today, he follows that same thread to indulge in artists such as Brent Faiyaz and Cleo Sol. And aside from the velvet fluidity of his vocals, the imprint of those greats can be felt instantly too in the poetically heart-on-sleeve approach of his songwriting. Lead single, 'Mad At Fire,' Elmiene calls on the forces of nature as the justification for an enduring love, comparing his deep feelings to the universal truths of fire burning and water flowing in impossibly soft falsetto. "Those romantic aspects of life and nature feel so ethereal, it feels above the common ground…beyond our comprehension."

Those philosophical leanings also seep into Elmiene's framing of his Muslim faith and this new creative life he finds himself in. 'Mama' is a meditation on trying to maintain a sense of balance — grappling with these two rivalling forces of Elmiene and Abdala Elamin and treading a path untrodden. Over silvery drums and a chorus of tender pleas, he outpours 'tell my Lord I've tried, held my faith inside.' 'Diane' sees him try to suspend that reality altogether for a moment, as he sings in muted echoes over mournful strings. "It's about a girl that I like and it's me trying to come to terms with the fact that because of my way of life, it'd never work. But for the duration of the song, I kind of build this world where it would." His sound resurrects the theatrics and vocal chops of old-school R&B loverboys with the timeless musings of our soul titans and filters it through a refreshingly modern production prism of jagged synths, metallic chords and soaring strings to create something entirely new and compelling. And his mission with it is a simple one: "I just want to show you what I am. And then you take it, however you want."

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