Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Edition of 333 black copies, white discobag with sticker on the front, double-sided printed insert sheet, plastic collector's sleeve, manually stamped with numbering and release date on the back to mark the 1st edition. The vinyl includes an extended version of Gudrun Gut's remix of Installation I by The Visitor. There is a download link for the vinyl version on the back of the insert.
Includes unlimited streaming of Mischpoke #2
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
After Mischpoke #1 with BKGD Audio, Gras, Sonae and Lucrecia Dalt, this time Clark, Oval, Electric Indigo and Gudrun Gut are at the controls for #2. The Düsseldorf/Brisbane underdogs Tidy Kid, Pondskater, Ai and The Visitor provide the source material for their remixes. The music ranges from the living room to the club.
Georg Seeßlen on Mischpoke #2:
MISCHPOKE #2
What does the music of the future sound like? With the current hype, one immediately thinks of AI. An artificial intelligence that knows the history of music as well as the tastes of millions upon millions of people, sorted by age, gender, region or level of education. So everyone will get exactly the music that is somehow already in him or her. New and yet completely familiar. Alexa music. Boooring.
But that's not exactly how the music of the future sounds. Because AI - it may be highly interesting as a "partner" - always works with the past, the tried and tested, the mainstream-coded. Perhaps it can also do things differently, but it lacks economic interests and perhaps a bit of critical theory.
In any case, the music of the future is a music in motion, a music that permanently changes itself and in which one can intervene democratically, anarchically, in solidarity or critically. Music that does not confirm but provokes. A film in which, by the way, "Oval" appears as an act, from 1996, has the fitting subtitle: "Über die Gewalt des Zusammenhangs." ("On the Violence of Context").
Making the future audible in music means listening to it (and processing it accordingly) in such a way that what is possible emerges. Mix and re-mix are the common genre terms for this. However, the words "mixing" and "re-mixing" seem almost a little too gentle for what can actually happen.
Mischpoke. That means, if you take the word at its word, a combination of mixing and kinship. And then there is the (decisive?) push in it, the poke, with which one gives a thing or a being in motion a different direction. Now then:
Mischpoke #2
This time they are the ones who change things:
Oval alias Markus Popp. In the radio play "Ovalorama" he deals with the connection between smell (here better: scent) and music. "With an undeniable instinct for the pleasantly irritating, the drastic and the dreamy, Oval continues to inspire and provoke to this day". So says the website, and if it's true, so be it. It's the thing about dreaming that the most horrible appears in the most beautiful and vice versa. Do dreams actually have soundtracks? In any case, soundtracks are the dreams of visual, narrative or olfactory events.
Clark, or Chris Clark, is a violinist and composer of film music, including the mystical thriller "Daniel Isn't Real", the story of an "imaginary friend" who becomes terribly real. Clark's story is that of a solipsist who gradually opens himself up to collaboration. And the story of an electronic musician who gradually (re)discovers the sounds of "old" instruments for himself.
Electric Indigo - Susanne Kirchmayr - is also expanding her compositional work from the concert hall and club to the theatre, for example for "Phaedra in Flames" (2023) at the Vienna Akademietheater, a non-binary overpainting of the ancient Greek myth. The founder of the international female:pressure network for the support of female, non-binary and transgender artists in electronic music is moving from earlier computer-based music to work with modular synthesizers in order to transcend the "pre-fabricated" in concert as well. It's all about making things move more and more fluidly. Liquid like water dancing over stones.
Gudrun Gut (Gudrun Bredemann) once helped open the doors between punk and art with DIN A TESTBILD and MANIA D. And that, too, must first occur to you: Vogelmixe - Heimatlieder Aus Deutschland (Berlin / Augsburg) (2016). Everything can be different - art doesn't need more democracy.
Four extremely interesting musicians intervene and play with four extremely interesting pieces of music. What unites them is the high degree of reflection and self-reflection and the openness to the most diverse influences, stylistic means and techniques.
The changeable ones:
Axel Ganz, aka Pondskater works on a process of "transparency" or "visibility" of music and interactions. What happens when you make music? What happens when listening to music? Comparatively adequately dealt with. But what happens in music? He has also worked for film and theatre, editing an enormous range of musical material. For him, music coding is not the smooth and "perfect" part of making music, but at the same time an object of research. Where do I want to go with the music? Yeah. And where does the music want to go with me?
Tidy Kid likes to play. He makes music like you paint and paints like you make music, it's music perforated by strange but not arbitrary things. Probably Tidy Kid would be the ideal composer/performer for a new, deconstructive version of Alice in Wonderland.
Ai is what krautrock is when there is no more kraut and no more rock, a transformation into the universal and fluid. One is on the way in many directions from jazz to electronic, and in the world anyway anyway, in order to find out what is substantial. What remains of Krautrock that sometimes it's hard and tough work.
"Once the process is set in motion, it runs for itself" is what one could call, loosely based on Steve Reich, what happened with installations by The Visitor. No stranger to the art world as a painter and student of Gerhard Richter, his music sometimes knows a similar photorealistic depth of field, as much science fiction as present.
Gudrun Gut's mix of "Installation I", to start with the last track of the album, seems closest to an acoustic film; although there are rhythmically driving passages again and again, it never just goes forward; in a way, one looks around in very unreliable spaces before there is a spur level with "Der Besuch". There we learn what we might already have suspected, namely that it's about someone who is exhausting but friendly, perhaps. You meet, and then it's over again. With a final "yes" we say goodbye. A visit that lingers. I begin to think about what it actually is: "a visit". A subject in another space, with the possibilities of kindness and effort. Nothing is taken for granted in a visit. Otherwise it wouldn't be a visit, but just a being there. Every visit is a crisis.
Electric Indigo's remix of "Aruki Ikura" deflates the original without suppressing a mocking Krautrockiness, a distant CAN wave. The bass says it has to go somewhere, and the bells are like euphoric children who prefer to dance back and forth a bit. Definitely a feelgood track, along with its wonderful little stumbles. And every single note, every single sound is audible in itself. The music of a walk, perhaps above the clouds.
Of course, "I lost my mind" is not called that for nothing. The lead is taken by the voice of an ancient video game, in which presumably mice have to flee from elephants, or vice versa. We remember: there are no breaks, you have to keep moving at all costs. And then it comes after all, the pause. The game has changed. It no longer really gets going, instead voices from another sphere. From another world of sound. Which side will they turn to? And for the third time the movement of the jump and run starts. Briefly. A childlike musical basic structure gets into a mysterious ambience. You have to react, one way or the other. Almost like in real life. (But of course you can also think of a completely different story to go with it, one that fits in with a momentary loss of sanity).
Lastly, the first track, "Reverse Interlock", is ideally suited for embarking on a Mischpoke journey, one could easily write "Get going" or "Set off" over it.
Electronic music in general, remixes in particular, and most especially "Mischpoke", that is also a form of storytelling, of inventing and critiquing the fundamental things in it: space. Time. Subject. Narrating into the future. With music. That's what it's about. Among other things.
credits
released February 23, 2024
Artwork, design by Torsten G. Mauss.
Painting "Der Dackel" by Norika Nienstedt.
Digitally, vinyl distributed by WAS - Word and Sound.
Inlay, Sticker printed by TIAMATdruck.
Mastered by Bob Humid (Fat of Excellence).
Original tracks by Pondskater, Tidy Kid, Ai, The Visitor.
Presstext by Georg Seeßlen.
Promoted by Hype Filter.
Released by Hauch Records.
Remixes by Oval, Clark, Electric Indigo, Gudrun Gut.
Vinyl made by Neophon.
absolutely beautiful debut album by Squarepusher, managing to be both colourful and playful as well as gritty and mysterious. warm and glitchy pads, inventive melodies, crazy breakbeats and groovy bass sections are what this album are all about and there's something for everyone to enjoy here. this is an album i revisit very often and relisten to tracks many times throughout the day, and it's helped me get through the toughest times and bring some needed light to them. SQUAREPUSHER MASSIVE! misteki
The Singaporean producer samples and recontextualizes Malaysian music with love, care, and just a touch of irreverence. Bandcamp Album of the Day Jun 28, 2018
