megiapa's 'Intentions' Is a Warm, Patient Masterwork of Beat-Scene Neo-Soul
Nereya Otieno, writing it up as Bandcamp Daily’s Album of the Day, found the description nobody will beat: Intentions is “a self-help book you can bop to.” That sounds like a joke until you notice how much structural work it is doing.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Otieno identifies the record’s spine as “a deep, slow pulse persists throughout the record” — a tempo choice that lets fourteen tracks pass in well under forty minutes without ever feeling hurried. megiapa mixed it with Dave Vettraino at International Anthem’s Chicago studio; David Allen mastered. The recording moved between Chicago and Los Angeles, and both cities are legible in the result.
The Spatial Dynamics: This is a beat record with a live band inside it. Ahmad Muhammad plays piano and Juno, Mekala Session drums, The Growth Eternal bass, Allakoi “Mic Holden” Peete percussion, Aankha Neal adds vocals. Clash, covering the announcement, reached for “glo-fi soul with a shimmering sense of the poetic” and “skittering Madlib-adjacent beats,” and the two halves of that description are the whole tension: sampled grain against players in a room.
Standout Performance
Will Miller, whose trumpet and EVI on “Can’t Believe” is the moment the record stops being a bedroom and becomes a band. Otieno’s read on how it all coheres is the key structural observation: megiapa’s “serene and measured vocals stitch it all together to elevate what would be a masterful beat tape into a lyrical diary.”
Why It’s Certified
Because it is an optimistic record that earned its optimism. megiapa, quoted in Marcus J. Moore’s liner notes, is blunt about the title: “The record is literally my intentions.” Otieno’s closing thought is the reason this one stays on the shelf rather than the playlist — it is “a record that understands that noticing a shadow also means noticing the light that cast it.” Start at “Open Your Eyes.” Let “rising_outro” close the door behind you.