29th March 2020
M. RUX – Vermonische Melodien
released 6th March 2020
Pingipung label
Vermonische Melodien is a collection of compositions by DJ-producer M.RUX, made with old VERMONA machines from Eastern Germany. The nine Electronica tracks can’t conceal their influences from Exotica records of the 1960s as well as their fondness for vintage music technology. We hear voices singing lullabies (“Magische Time”), mumbling chopped up syllables (“Seelnatrax”) or reciting a Shakespeare quote (“Bakelit”) – are they real? Yes! But they are mostly generated by the world’s first speech synthesis hardware, the IBM 704 from 1954, and processed into off-key melodic beauty with vocoders.
Nicolas Jaar – Cenizas
released March 27, 2020
The music comes from a desire to feel everything — a few years ago, I stopped drinking alcohol, smoking, consuming caffeine, eating animals, etc., and, for a period of time, I also quarantined myself alone somewhere on the other side of the world to be able to work on music for months on end. I didn’t want to keep feeding the system. Its hunger, its past. I didn’t want to work from ambition. Where I would work to impress first, and love second. I wanted presence first. Love first. I thought that if I had this privilege and this luck, to be able to talk to people through sound, then I better work on myself &get rid of negative shards within me. I didn’t want to unwittingly throw them back into the world.
Of course, this didn’t happen. (Sorry..!) The more I tried to get away from negativity, the more it kept piling up in a dark room, but as shards of sound. A lot of these shards can be heard in the last Against All Logic album, and countless things you’ll never hear (thank goodness!). It made no sense to me that the more I tried to escape negativity, the more it could surface in the creative process. But the shards kept piling up and I had to accept the fact that the darkness that I was trying to get away from would always rear its head. Regardless of what I abstained from. And even more so when trying to orient myself towards the positive. Hopefully Cenizas only shows darkness so as to show a path out of it. I want this music to heal and help in thinking through difficult questions about one’s self, and one’s relationship to the state of things. We are living in a time of complete transformation, a metamorphosis— and the transformations are happening within as well. There is potential for great healing and great destruction.
In a way, the music goes ‘both directions at once’, to quote the John Coltrane record.
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