The Dining Rooms - Do Hipsters Love Sun (Ra)? (2015)

After a four years hiatus since the previous album Lonesome Traveller, The Dining Rooms are back with a work that reconnects to the early sounds of the Milanese duo: a soundtrack of cosmic funk, abstract jazz and cinematic avant-garde.

It only takes a glance to the title of the album to grasp its highly evocative power. On the one hand an homage to Sun Ra, an icon that infused a new meaning to the word ‘cosmic’, a space messenger able to bring new spirituality and vision to music. Hipster, on the other hand, is a word that in our age of social networks identifies one the most hated social species, but had originally profound social and political roots. Jack Kerouac described Hipsters as “rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere as characters of a special spirituality”. Hipsters were forward thinking cultural explorers, a social movement characterised by an appetite for novelty and experimentation.

And this is what Do Hipsters Love Sun (Ra)? is аbout: a soundtrack condensing cosmic elements, a thirst for exploration and discovery, and the ability to dream. Abstract jazz, cosmic funk, instrumental hip-hop: Do Hipsters Love Sun (Ra)? has all these typical traits of The Dining Rooms’ sound, but also a strong cinematic element that delves into the rich world of Italian film scores and library music. The contemporary reinterpretation of that influence is another theme of the album, pervading the tracks with the mesmerising quality of those soundtracks.