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YNFND 031LP
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Rekorder is "a kind of retrospective of myself", says M.RUX about his second, long-awaited solo album. For over 10 years, Marten Rux aka M.RUX appears as a DJ, producer, editor, remixer and multi-instrumentalist all over the world and has developed an idiosyncratic sound that opens up subtle fields of tension: M.RUX mixes a sound between experimental sound design and hooklines that stay in your ears forever. Between wild percussion and contemplative harmonies, between ecstasy and meditative calm. In his DJ and live sets, M.RUX usually steps up to the controls with a smile, discreetly bobbing his head, while the audience goes wild. He circumnavigates clichés with trustworthy certainty and develops his very own guiding threads in his selection beyond BPM or genre straitjackets. One constant is his warm, often stoically slow kick drum, which holds all that playfulness together. Rekorder is a manifestation of this typical M.RUX sound. Similar to his concept album Vermonische Melodien from 2020 (PING 069LP), the artist's curiosity is directed towards the musical visions of the past. When new music technology projected great visions of the future and when new sounds had not yet solidified into clichés. Rekorder refers to the recording device, spelled in a German way, because most of the recordings were made in Germany (and in England as well). Rekorder draws deeply from its own archive, which has flourished quite splendidly during the pandemic. Multi-instrumentalist M.RUX mixes his own recordings of banjo, guitar, auto-harp, synths, percussion and jews harp with fragments from sessions with friends that have accumulated since 2020. They unfold in the process of re-listening in the mix and transform into a solid musical tapestry. M.RUX bows deeply to the history of pop music -- especially the blues and its melancholy, coolness and shuffling groove. The harmonic framework of the album is based on blues scales throughout. Instead of conveying blue emotions via lyrics or the tone of the voice, as the original genre does, the synthesizer takes on this role on Rekorder. With his sound design, M.RUX achieves an ecstatic sorrow in his melodies, this gurgling portamento that is reminiscent of R&B (or even the ingenious title melody of the series Bojack Horseman). If voices are heard on Rekorder, then as hypnotic fragments that guide you through the groove as conjunctions. There are no lyrics, no literal weariness, no love-songs or storytelling, Rekorder processes all of this into timbres and groove as vessels for the album's individual, contemplative melancholy.
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YNFND 031RED-LP
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LP version. Red vinyl. Rekorder is "a kind of retrospective of myself", says M.RUX about his second, long-awaited solo album. For over 10 years, Marten Rux aka M.RUX appears as a DJ, producer, editor, remixer and multi-instrumentalist all over the world and has developed an idiosyncratic sound that opens up subtle fields of tension: M.RUX mixes a sound between experimental sound design and hooklines that stay in your ears forever. Between wild percussion and contemplative harmonies, between ecstasy and meditative calm. In his DJ and live sets, M.RUX usually steps up to the controls with a smile, discreetly bobbing his head, while the audience goes wild. He circumnavigates clichés with trustworthy certainty and develops his very own guiding threads in his selection beyond BPM or genre straitjackets. One constant is his warm, often stoically slow kick drum, which holds all that playfulness together. Rekorder is a manifestation of this typical M.RUX sound. Similar to his concept album Vermonische Melodien from 2020 (PING 069LP), the artist's curiosity is directed towards the musical visions of the past. When new music technology projected great visions of the future and when new sounds had not yet solidified into clichés. Rekorder refers to the recording device, spelled in a German way, because most of the recordings were made in Germany (and in England as well). Rekorder draws deeply from its own archive, which has flourished quite splendidly during the pandemic. Multi-instrumentalist M.RUX mixes his own recordings of banjo, guitar, auto-harp, synths, percussion and jews harp with fragments from sessions with friends that have accumulated since 2020. They unfold in the process of re-listening in the mix and transform into a solid musical tapestry. M.RUX bows deeply to the history of pop music -- especially the blues and its melancholy, coolness and shuffling groove. The harmonic framework of the album is based on blues scales throughout. Instead of conveying blue emotions via lyrics or the tone of the voice, as the original genre does, the synthesizer takes on this role on Rekorder. With his sound design, M.RUX achieves an ecstatic sorrow in his melodies, this gurgling portamento that is reminiscent of R&B (or even the ingenious title melody of the series Bojack Horseman). If voices are heard on Rekorder, then as hypnotic fragments that guide you through the groove as conjunctions. There are no lyrics, no literal weariness, no love-songs or storytelling, Rekorder processes all of this into timbres and groove as vessels for the album's individual, contemplative melancholy.
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PING 069LP
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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. You 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. "I've always been curious about musical visions from the 1970s", says M.RUX about his inspiration for Vermonische Melodien. "Those nifty Vermona machines can today be seen as future machines from the 1970s. They seem almost mystical to me. Like relics from an epoch long ago... and I wanted to find out how music from that time could have sounded." On the album M.RUX uses, above all, equipment by Vermona, a brand from Eastern Germany manufacturing electronic musical instruments until 1990. The drum machine Vermona ER-9 (1976) was the first instrument M.RUX ever possessed. It forms the rhythmical backbone of his studio on this record. The melodies on the other hand have mainly been played on a Vermona Formation-1, a suitcase synthesizer from 1980. Although these two machines are joined by countless other instruments and effect units, their particular soft sound is present in every single moment of this soothing album. "I also take a deep bow to the late Reinhard 'Lacky' Lakomy", M.RUX adds. "His releases were the first electronic instrumental records on the Amiga label which has been a huge influence for my work in general and this record in particular." M.RUX has appeared as a solo producer with his In the Hold EP (2016) on his own YNFND imprint. Before that he had become famous for his edits which gently transform songs by Nina Simone, Townes Van Zandt, Tom Zé, and many more into slow, dancefloor-ready gems. Pingipung present this first full-length album by M.RUX. He is not only a talented multi-instrumentalist and original producer but also a skillful remixer -- as he has shown twice to the Pingipung audience with his touches on Umeko Ando's Ainu folklore songs.
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