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$25.00
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ARTIST
TITLE
Rekorder
FORMAT
LP

LABEL
CATALOG #
YNFND 031LP YNFND 031LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
4/12/2024

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.