MUSIC RECOMMENDATION

FULL REVIEW

A fabulous EP is waiting for you if you jump through the keyhole, reviewed by our deep writer Tina Camilleri. She knows the author personally, which gives her privileged access to his creative process, and us a deeper review. We invite you to spend some minutes in her musical company and come back here 🙂👋

ATMOSPHERIC TECHNO

Deep with a pictorial amplitude, a well-mastered “crystal clear” sound: no doubt, we are in Secuencias Temporales‘ territories. The label “does it again”, achieving one top-class release after another with outrageous consistency. In charge of the present EP: AH&N (“Attention. Here & Now.”) from France, founder of the collective Exocet, which groups artists such as Sanjib, Solarythm, Vardae, Porunñ and Amadeus: they form together a “fellowship of the hypnotic ring” and it is certain that you are in safe hands to get lost in their music…

Alex Tomb is also a great DJ, as seen in his MNMT Live Stream, teasing Emotions Festival’s 2022 first edition:

EXPERIMENTAL

“What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play.” (John Cash, 1957).

Cypriot artist Alex Tomb, atop more than a decade of productions, is what you call “a dreamer having fun with the music tools”. After a personal Big Bang, his production world emerged with “approximative” remixes of famous artists, such as Plastikman, Björk and Depeche Mode, before following up on solid labels, including on Maeve and on Claudio PRC’s 012. Some of his tracks have eloquent titles: “Kids will be kids“, “Paradisaea“, while we see him exactly like that: “a kid playing around in his paradise of sounds”. On the present EP, he’s accompanied by another vivid comrade, our dear Polygonia, and together, they offer us a great “purposeless play”, fun and mischievous.

“Aedi” refers to “Temple” in Latin, a name suggested by Hypnus artist Rambadu. If you’re a producer, you’d better join it 👇🙂

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Warm welcome to the world’s most democratic label, Aedi, from the creative mind of our dear Michel Iseneld from Hypnus! 

Like Dumbledore in Hogwarts, Michel is the headmaster of a deep techno wizarding school, whose hundreds of students form a close community. Technical, cultural and philosophical contents are taught through posts, discussions and coaching, giving a great overview of the art world to our dear “Harrypnotic Potters”. It’s very efficient, as we noticed some being signed by major labels down the road, thinking for instance of Inskape on Edit Select and Circular Limited, Einerlei on Norite and Diffused Signal on Lowless.

Aedi is basically the label of the school, managed by the students themselves, who vote anonymously on various topics, from the music to be released to the titles and artworks. Tracks are posted and collectively evaluated, sometimes in the context of a fun challenge.

In “Lichen” for instance, the recruits were invited to form random duos and in this experience, four pieces have been selected among 13.

For us, some tracks present an obvious symbiosis between the artists, some slightly less: we let you judge… Yet we think that it’s an overall successful challenge and we love the concept.

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Talking about Norite, things are getting more serious with the works of four well-established maestros.

With releases on Affin, Annulled and Silent Season, our dear genius Toki Fuko opens the EP with mental shimmering grooves building up to one of the best integrations of hi-hats ever heard, after the break starting at around 4:00.

Then, Hypnus‘ spearhead BLNDR follows up with a funky interlude, dialoguing pretty well with his 2018 EP on Intervision.

On his side, Mown, whom we “venerated” on his previous self-released EP, opens up the chakras, while Josef Gaard closes the journey with an impactful cinematic fixation, persistent long time after the listening…

TRIBAL TECHNO

A very important – vital – question before commenting: Do you need socks? If yes, the wacky Dutch label Flippen Disks, representing mainly local artists, sells some on its Bandcamp page… No doubt that we are in a casual environment and Nikos, well-established in the DJ world, releases his first solo EP. Various influences can be instantly sensed in the percussive melting pot, from bass music to psytrance, and we visit the multi-vitamin release with certain joy and exhilaration. A must-have to boost the day without cocaine.

DUB TECHNO

Let us end our selection in the pure tradition of the old Shinobi martial art: with a smoke screen… You can sense it in the dense atmospheres of both the music and the artwork of the present EP. BMS soberly named it “Three” (after “One” and “Two“), titled the tracks just with numbers and is unfindable online. Only one question remains: is he “real”? Yet the sound is what matters and the EP, foggy, original and consistent, is for us highly hypnotic.