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CD
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VISTA 009CD
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Minimum Resistance is Jonas Munk's most abstract and minimalist album to date, ten ambient pieces based on guitars -- often processed into soft, slow billows of sound. There's a rare aesthetic clarity in these pieces, allowing each sonic component to breathe and resonate. Here Munk works with a restrained sonic palette and it's an album which demands patience from the listener. Yet, in its bold simplicity, it carries enough emotional weight to be deeply rewarding. It's an immersive album, an invitation for the listener to sink deep into a series of mesmerizing, but peculiarly undefined, moods. Minimum Resistance celebrates slowness, reclusiveness and simplicity. There's hardly anything ground-breaking about this kind of music, but rarely does it flow as naturally and effortless as on this set. It's clear this is the work of someone who has been refining his craft over the course of two decades. Besides producing his own music, Jonas Munk also works as a recording and mastering engineer, and has slowly but surely established his own sonic signature. It's the kind of work where subtle gradual changes and minuscule textural details has a tremendous impact on the listener.
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LP
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VISTA 009LP
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LP version. Minimum Resistance is Jonas Munk's most abstract and minimalist album to date, ten ambient pieces based on guitars -- often processed into soft, slow billows of sound. There's a rare aesthetic clarity in these pieces, allowing each sonic component to breathe and resonate. Here Munk works with a restrained sonic palette and it's an album which demands patience from the listener. Yet, in its bold simplicity, it carries enough emotional weight to be deeply rewarding. It's an immersive album, an invitation for the listener to sink deep into a series of mesmerizing, but peculiarly undefined, moods. Minimum Resistance celebrates slowness, reclusiveness and simplicity. There's hardly anything ground-breaking about this kind of music, but rarely does it flow as naturally and effortless as on this set. It's clear this is the work of someone who has been refining his craft over the course of two decades. Besides producing his own music, Jonas Munk also works as a recording and mastering engineer, and has slowly but surely established his own sonic signature. It's the kind of work where subtle gradual changes and minuscule textural details has a tremendous impact on the listener.
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LP
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EPR 024LP
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Second solo LP from Causa Sui guitar player and producer Jonas Munk. This is pattern music, characterized by slow builds and subtle, but refined transformations, where gradual tectonic shifts and tiny harmonic gestures generate vivid emotional responses. Instead of imposing any direct intention or meaning, it's an album that can create a mental environment for the listener to expand and open up into. "Absorb," taking up the entire A-side, is a piece of meticulous balance, structured from techniques recalling the classical minimalists: soft-glowing analog synthesizer patterns in perpetual motion, creating new harmonic content as each bar progresses. Gradually, randomized modular effects are introduced as well as layers of white noise and detuned, heavily tube-overdriven guitar drones, slowly bathing the piece in warmly filtered fuzz. The B-side opens with two identical organ lines played against each other. After a few minutes the organs lock into a an effortless flow, gently rolling toward a pastoral peak several minutes later, where piano and various layers of electronics enters the soundscape, recalling the blissed-out spiritualism of Alice Coltrane or Popol Vuh. The album's last track, "Cascade," opens peacefully but soon enough crosses into an oscillating flood of sound. Gradually the intertwined layers of sound rise to enormous billows of sonic saturation, where each drone harmonizes against layers of distorted pulses. LP pressed on colored vinyl; includes download card. Limited to 500 copies.
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EPR 009LP
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2015 repress; LP version. This is the first solo effort from Jonas Munk released under his own name. Jonas Munk is a musician and producer from Odense, Denmark who has been active in a wide range of musical styles for the past decade. In the European psych-rock community he is mostly known as the guitar player in the respected stoner/jazz/Krautrock-outfit Causa Sui as well as related projects such as Chicago Odense Ensemble, a joint session project featuring members of Causa Sui, Chicago Underground Collective and Tortoise, which resulted in a 2LP released in 2011. Outside of these circles, Munk is best known as a producer of electronic music, most recently with a full-length collaboration with German synth-meister Ulrich Schnauss. Munk also holds a masters degree in philosophy with a thesis on music and consciousness. Pan simultaneously betrays his connections to the European stoner-rock community and the world of electronic ambient music -- this album combines ideas from both worlds, while the result really doesn't belong to either of them. With Pan's motorik analog synthesizer patterns and its warm, fuzzy drones, the influence from 1970s German synthesizer and new age music, such as early Kraftwerk, Ashra and Popol Vuh, is apparent from the first note. But there's also definite traits of American styles running through this album, from the flowing optimism of Alice Coltrane and Terry Riley to the modern-day psychedelia of Comets On Fire and Bardo Pond. While large parts of Pan have been programmed on electronic equipment, there's a jam-like quality emanating from the album's seven tracks. The album reflects the idea of giving up rationality and control with the purpose of letting the music flow towards it own ends. The compositional ideas are incredibly simple while still carrying a certain depth. Soundwise, Pan is all about analog machines, 30+ year-old synthesizers, detuned guitars and heavily-cranked vacuum tube amplifiers weaving together in fuzzy, pulsating glory. The title Pan refers to the ancient Greek word meaning "all" or "everything."
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