Premiere: Maymind’s latest single “Left To My Own Devices”

LA-based musician/producer Maymind (aka Leo Maymind) is releasing a new album tomorrow, November 5th called June but today we are going to tease it out by premiering a sample single “Left To My Own Devices”.

The track, much like the album, is a complex, deep groove, cinematic electronic composition. Starting with a simple beat the song builds up layering vocals and understated undertones. When speaking about the track Maymind explained: 

“There’s a story in ‘Left to My Own Devices,’ though as a lot of the best stories, I don’t think you need to understand exactly what it is to understand the feeling. In some ways it’s a love letter to both the canon of American electronic music and my younger self, giving that person a way forward, saying that all the struggles were worth it, to keep going. I think a lot of the journey of making June was trying to find the balance between headphone listening and club music.”

When “reflecting on the production of the track Leo adds: “I kept on resisting the urge to take the basic idea and turn it into a full-on club track, but instead this version of the track (which is essentially how the first version of it was arranged) is what I stuck with. A friend described it as ‘super articulate, hyper produced’ which I feel is an apt description for how I make music. While it’s still essentially loop-based music, there’s an extreme precision to how each track is taking its own voyage”.

Leo Maymind moved around a lot growing up so his true home was the music in his headphones but settling in New Orleans and seeing street jazz musicians has had an incredible impact on his young self. After spending time in New York working on various projects Leo ended up in Los Angeles where he settled on this final musical identity as Maymind and dropped his full-length debut Illumina in 2017 followed by Cheap Storage (2018). The new record, June, is inspired by all the different things Maymind loved in his life like “R&B, house, disco, sample-based electronic music, spiritual jazz and much more”. “To me, this album just feels like a complete sentence- something I’ve been trying to say for years but didn’t quite have the vocabulary at the time,” he shared.

Stay tuned for the album drop tomorrow, but today we have “Left To My Own Devices”

Upcoming live dates:

1/7 – Zebulon, Los Angeles, CA w/ Leech
1/12 – Berlin Under A, New York, NY w/ M. Geddes Gengras and Heathered Pearls
1/13 – PhilaMoca, Philadelphia, PA w/ Jeff Zeigler
1/14 – Pie Shop, Washington, DC w/ Jackson Ryland
1/15 – TBA, Baltimore