Vodka doesn’t often get terribly excited about instrumental-only music. It happens though, and quite a lot more often than it used to. It’s not that I don’t like instrumental music, I do. Listening to instrumental music is a pleasant experience, I just have a tough time getting my mind into it enough to review much of it. Some notable exceptions are Lydian Collective, Snarky Puppy, a handful of others, and now Carlos Eiene. 

Carlos Eine has been a big force in the music-for-video-games movement for a long time. It wasn’t until recently that he decided that he needed to make some music that was just for him, and if Forward (seen/heard here) is any indication, then it’s going to be great for him, for you, and for me too!  Forward is the first track on Eine’s upcoming (October 2022) LP, which uses Eiene’s well-known alias as the title: Insane In The Rain. 

Forward blends the structures of pop melody, with the variations on a theme common within jazz. The sound comes off as accessible and very cross-genre. Here, Eiene performs on an electric wind instrument, which gives a very up-to-date sound to the melody. He’s joined by Josh Vasquez (electric guitar), Rob Kovacs (piano), Nico Mendoza (electric bass), and Dom Palombi (drums). There’s not a slouch among these players. They are in tune with each other, following the ebbs and flows with natural fills. There is rhythm galore provided by the drums and all of the other instruments as well. You *will* move your head and your feet… I mean, you have to!

Carlos Eiene started playing music on the piano at a young age. So young, in fact, that he isn’t sure exactly when-simply around the age of 7 or so. He eventually learned to play the saxophone through his school’s band program. He graduated from the Berklee School of Music’s 2020 class, majoring in Contemporary Writing and Production while minoring in Video Game Scoring. He believes that the immersive nature of video games makes them a natural medium for storytelling and that the music added aids in the telling. 

You can find more information on Carlos by visiting his website. As websites go, it’s misplaced a bunch of details. For instance, none of the social sites are listed prominently, yet Carlos has plenty of those under his moniker insaneintherainmusic. I mean, you can find them on his website too, they just aren’t front and center on every page. I would think that at least on the “Home” and “Contact” pages that he would have those listed, but in this case, you need to click on the “FAQ” page and scroll to the bottom to get any of that information. From a strict marketing point of view, you need to make it very easy for people to find all of your sites. Vodka hopes that this oversight will be fixed. It should be simple enough to link those social, streaming, and purchase sites to every page. Luckily, Carlos Eiene has a pretty large following already, so I’m sure most of those people know where to go to find more, But what about new fans? I would think there will be plenty with the release of Insane In The Rain. Just in case, here’s a snapshot of those links: Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Google Play, Facebook, Twitter, and Bandcamp.

Website issues aside, Carlos Eiene (or insaneintherainmusic, whichever you prefer) has a talent for music composition and production and he deserves your purchase dollars! You can pre-order Insane In The Rain right now and lock in your copy in October. In the meantime, if you are as yet uninitiated, check out the remainder of Carlos’ content on any of the links previously provided. Great stuff!  Vodka is looking forward to the October release!