With the Back To Life + Keep Goin’ Gotta Keep Up instrumental releases, 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 further cements his reputation for defying genre, joining the dots between different musical landscapes.

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 beats 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.

On writing these as tracks as instrumentals, Nick says: “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. These tracks are 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 while doing regular activities of their daily lives”.