Mas Ysa – “WWW (Champion),” “Gates,” & “RSLW2011”

Mas Ysa – “WWW (Champion),” “Gates,” & “RSLW2011”

Electro-acoustic singer-songwriter Thomas Arsenault, who records as Mas Ysa and snagged an Album Of The Week nod back in July for his debut LP Seraph, is the latest artist to be featured in audio company Master & Dynamic’s recently launched In-Residence program. Their profile coincides with the release of three previously unheard tracks, “WWW (Champion),” “Gates,” and “RSLW2011.”

“‘WWW (Champion)’ is a jam I open with live 90% of the time,” Arsenault told Consequence Of Sound. “It hypnotizes me, it gets me ready to sing and shed a normal headspace for the emotionally unreasonable one my set requires. I’ve thought about making a studio version, all clean and club friendly, but stopped. [This is] a mixed version of a live recording: raw and hairy.”

“Gates,” on the other hand, “is one of those songs that is named after a word that is in it,” as he told The FADER. “Sometimes 160 bpm vamps start as woe-is-me ballads over at the Mas Ysa camp fire. In this case, I couldn’t find a place for this track to live and I didn’t feel like bringing it to the show Shark Tank and having it developed into something greater…I basically freestyled it and it came out just the perfect size to be true. I didn’t want to move it around too much.”

The third track, “RSLWW2011,” was inspired by the compositions he created for modern dance companies while living in Brooklyn in 2012. Hear all three below.

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