TRIPPY SOUNDS CHILL VIBES
Cecil Purihin is the birth name and moniker for Las Vegas based ambient and hip-hop producer Christopher Marshall.
Cecil creates music inspired by places that he has travelled to, capturing the feeling and reflective mood of these areas. He gathers most of his inspiration from the American Southwest where he lives. Surrounded by long stretches of desert landscapes, endless mountain ranges, and juniper and pine filled forests, with unique wildlife, there is infinite inspiration for Cecil to gather from.
Instead of a traditional music background, Christopher’s music journey started later in his teenage years, and without instruments. He started breakdancing as a teenager, and got heavily into breaks, Hip-Hop, and electronic music. His friends would swap mixtape CDs with artists from labels like Warp, Ninjatune, and anything coming out of the LA Beat Scene at the time (thanks to the weekly residency Low End Theory). All of this music inspired Marshall to save up money he had made working for Nike as a teenager, and he bought a Roland SP 404SX and began collecting records and making beats. Over the years Marshall grew bored of just making hip-hop beats, and got more experimental as time passed by. He became heavily influenced by experimental sound artists and ambient music, and eventually began creating ambient soundscapes himself out of the records he was still collecting.
His 2017 EP The Persistence of Sound was his first full-fledged dive into making something completely different that somehow had his stamp on it. There is a contrast in his work of beautiful peaceful ambient, and also an absolutely terrifying dark ambient sound. This can be heard even more so on his 2019 release Temporarily Unavailable, which was his first full length ambient album. Originally the album was created for an art installation on grief and depression, but then later self-released as an album. In 2019 Cecil was travelling in Spain and Portugal with his best friend, when he decided, he was going to pick up records all around Portugal and collect audio with his phone and make an album out of it. This birthed the album Lisboa, and also forever changed how he approached his future releases. From then on, his music was inspired by the places he had been to, and he wanted to create soundscapes. Since then, he also released an album titled Hildale, inspired by a short stay with his girlfriend in a small Utah town where they were snowed in for a weekend. On February 18 of 2022, he released an album on his birthday titled Desert Sunsets, inspired by beautiful small desert towns, and is working on releasing it as an audiovisual album filming the sunsets in these places. HIs most recent release Desert Soundscapes, (released on eclectic international ambient label Mystery Circles), contains 3 longform ambient tracks inspired by all the places that Purihin frequents directly surrounding Las Vegas. The physical copies of this album came with a custom polaroid taken by Cecil in these areas, limited to 50 copies.
Cecil is also a member of the experimental electronic band Chocolate Jesus 702. The band started in 2017 as a jam session with his best friends and has since grown exponentially. Chocolate Jesus has played all over Las Vegas opening up for acts such as Quintron and Miss Pussycat, Empath, and Ryosuke Kiyasu. They have been on several tours, including an all Nevada tour, San Diego and Slab City with sound collage/ noise artist Cody Brant, they also played the Pacific Northwest with Headwinds and Spacey Blurr, and most recently did a SXSW tour playing Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas. They have an EP on all streaming services, and are currently recording their first full length album.