Flwr Chyld & Grimm Lynn Float Timelessly Across R&B, Soul, and Funk Through the Lens of Café Noir
Evan Dale // May 29, 2024
A space to escape, a place to consume, to learn, to experience, to evolve, to connect, to let go of expectation and inhibition. A coffee shop, a bistro, a bar, a club, a dance floor, a venue, a hotel, an album. A ‘third space filled with ambiance for a night of pleasures and an escape from reality. Every listener in attendance becomes one with the rhythm and grooves provided by the duo on the dance floor, indulging in champagne filled moments with hopes of leading to passionate memories.’
Conceptual, but not to a fault, the duo in question: Atlanta friends, collaborators, and multi-disciplinary artists each in their own right, Flwr Chyld and Grimm Lymm, deliver Café Noir - a space, a place for escape via immersion in all that is timelessly soulful and playfully funky.
Through eight cohesively composed cuts – the kind that can be played in order of storylined track list or on shuffle to elicit the same flowing result from a musical point of view – the duo explores a mosaic of what Neo-Soul and Alternative R&B mean in a world where the constraints of sub-genre at times feel overly niche and the grandiose definitions of genre at large fall underwhelmingly flat. In Café Noir, anything goes, so long as it pairs well with a glass of Fumé Blanc, evokes bottles on ice in dim-lit rooms, and fits into the meticulously curated constructs of the two artists' Venn diagram center.
It's a center, to be fair, that doesn't limit, but rather expands, the sonic reaches of both Flwr Chyld - a multi-instrumentalist, producer, songwriter, and vocalist whose past exploits producing collaboratively pulsating projects underlined by blooming chords and expansive composition have earned him his self-realized title as the Sommelier of R&B; and Grimm Lynn - a vocally soft-spoken yet sharp songwriter whose romantically leaning thematic discourse and affinity for acoustically entangled beats have delivered his solo work along with has past collaborative touches next to Flwr Chyld to a space of emotional bliss sans the need to be defined by epoch or era. Rather, both create music defined by feelings and emotions.
Together, the duo was seemingly always meant to create. And they have been doing exactly that for years. Flwr Chyld appeared on Grimm Lynn’s first two albums, Pragmafrom 2019, and Southern Grooves from 2020; while Grimm Lynn was present on Flwr Chyld’s Iridescent Love in 2019 and Luv N Chaos in 2022. In harmony, those little moments in the past are zoomed in on, expanded, and detailed heavily with a collaborative expertise throughout the entirety of Café Noir, building upon the throughlines that define the majority of each artists’ solo and collaborative work to date.
Track to track, the evolution of their communal direction feels defined first by the form their conceptual space is taking in the moment; by the form the hypothetical connections that their abstract storylines take. Starting in the evening, en route to soirée, with Nights Like This, Café Noir opens as a place for the opportunity that a night out lays before all of us, laying the framework, too, for the runway about to unfold for anyone listening.
A beat pulses and grows through the mire of car doors closing, steps on gravel, and voices slowly coming into focus as our senses approach Café Noir for the first time. Let’s get loose to the delicate layers of myriad insturmentation folded into one another by the compositional hand of Flwr Chyld, and the crystalline vocals of Grimm Lynn inviting us inside. Alongside Planet Giza, the next cut turns up the tempo, stirs us a martini, and pulls us onto the dancefloor alongside a mysterious figure, who no doubt, can Move. Ms. Ebony Brown introduces us to that mysterious partner; introduces us, too, to a slower tempo, and expands on the sultry sphere that modern R&B is still as capable of exploring as even the most Golden of Eras gone by. Alongside Allen Love, Suite Love pulls us from the club, into the hotel, and up the elevator to a suite where there’s a bottle on ice. Lust turns to a full out Summertime fling with the vocally expansive, and keystroke ridden soul of Fallin 4 Ya Luv, where both artists, though slowed down yet again, reach their emotionally evocative zenith on the project. By the time Beautiful Day rolls around – after a beautiful night, doing beautiful things – the musical direction of Café Noir again shifts alongside the thematic change of pace at work, opening a listener to more sunshiny chords, and some uptempo funk fit for a coffee walk. And C U Again says goodbye for now.
All good things must come to an end, but Café Noir will last the Summer and long after as an emotionally fluent, stylistically sharp, conceptually apropos exploration of R&B, Soul, and Funk’s modern reaches, by two of the most ardently talented artists pushing our current boundaries.
They’re also heading out on a Café Noir Tour so check their dates for your city below.