NYC-based composer/pianist Nick Marks kicks off 2024 with ‘Back To Life’ - the first single in a slate of new releases that will culminate in the launch of two EPs, ‘Cinematic Chromatics Vol. II and III’.

The song follows an exceptional 2023 for the Australian artist, a year in which he gained widespread attention and acclaim, culminating with the release of his debut EP ‘Cinematic Chromatics Vol. 1’.

With ‘Back To Life’, Marks takes listeners into a different place within his sonic universe. Traversing boundaries into the neo-soul/hip-hop worlds while fusing flavours of jazz, lo-fi beats and cinematic elements, Marks keeps joining the dots between different musical landscapes. In doing so, he marries two disparate paradigms of his artistry: that of the concert music/film scoring world, and the underground scenes in which jazz, hip-hop, neo-soul and electronica cross-pollinate.

On ‘Back To Life’ traces of golden age hip hop brush shoulders with modern soul and lo-fi beats - this is the first vocal collaboration track in the Cinematic Chromatics series, featuring MC/Rapper and drummer extraordinaire Doron Lev. Lev wrote the lyrics, raps, and performs drums on the track (in fact, Lev is the drummer on all tracks in Cinematic Chromatics Trilogy).

While being a rap/beat track, Marks’ through-composed roots come to the fore in yet again as moves seamlessly between genres. ‘Back To Life’ consists essentially of two parts: the first half features a beat that mixes trap and hip-hop in equal parts, before a surprise neo-soul twist. The track’s opening is laced with an ear candy hooks, featuring lyrics that speak to the song’s origin. Marks originally wrote this chilled as two separate instrumental beats while scoring a show he works on for NPR. The intention was for one to morph into the other from the outset. The producers didn’t think it was a good fit for the show, and so the beat got ‘killed’. Marks felt there was something special in the groove, and so he was determined to bring the track ‘back to life’ for an independent release. After creating an instrumental, Marks hit up his long-time collaborator Lev, who freestyled the lyrics in a late-night/early-hours session at Marks’ studio in Manhattan.

Marks composed all elements of the track, performed, recorded and produced all the keyboard and synthesizer elements (as well as sings on vocoder), while Lev wrote and performed the lyrics, drums/beat programming, and with horns from Andrew Gould (Ron Carter Big Band, Village Vanguard Orchestra, 8-bit big band) and Dave Levy (LCD SoundSystem, Ray Angry, Norah Jones).

Nick says about the track: “This track is about resilience: how we respond when we receive rejection: whether it’s our ideas, for being different (see the lyrics ‘I’m a weirdo, I’m aware of it’) or experimenting to find solutions to problems. Even in the face of being told ‘no’, or ‘that’s impossible’, you keep going in pursuit of finding a way to achieve your goals. I initially wrote these beats as part of a podcast score for an NPR show. It was rejected by one of the NPR producers, and after, I imagined it would go nowhere, like many ideas I had at that point. It turns out there was a silver lining in that rejection. Instead of letting it just sit on a hard drive, I was determined to get it out there, and I had the freedom to whatever I wanted with it. Neo-soul and hip-hop music have been as much a part of my listening diet as classical and jazz, so it felt like a natural progression to move in this direction. Initially, I thought it would just be an ‘interlude’ track on an album. That all changed when Doron Lev came and freestyled, creating the lyrics that took this track to a whole new place. This track is a departure from the cinematic jazztronica of Cinematic Chromatics Vol. I, and that’s intentional: I always wanted to cohesively morph between my different worlds in concert/film music and jazz/hip-hop in a seamless, dynamic, and tasteful way that listeners can enjoy and relate to”.