It's techno Jim, but not as we know it... welcome to the warped musical world of Jonatan Traffic...
1. Soda Sodo
2. Roasted P.C
3. Overhead Image
4. Sad Hurry
5. Explain Me Later
Download the release for free here: http://www.clevermusic.net
As part of a conceptual exploration of the modern minimal zeitgeist, Clever Music recently created a 5 room interactive installation at the Venice Biennale art festival. The installation featured the works of burgeoning reductionist Jonatan Traffic and sought to directly engage with audiences through a method of direct response.
Each visitor was exposed to high volume digital recordings and asked to shed their clothing. Wearing only Clever Music branded eye covers (available in pink, blue and yellow) the wearer, disengaged from habitual notions of self and reflecting upon the subtleties of minimal extrapolation of universal themes, was asked to describe their sonic experiences.
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Here’s a sample of their responses:
With 'Soda Sodo' we are confronted with a central issue of the present time: cinematic piano echoing a Descartian obsession with identity. The fractured rhythms suggest narrative forms that elude the listener’s grasp, an evocative mood conjured through powerfully suggestive contemporary reference points distilled through an increasingly polarized cultural hegemony. Very Kandinsky.
In 'Roasted P.C' Grandiose fragments of reconstructed techno reference the fragmentation of techno as medium and, in quite a witty manner, manages to hybridize the forms of Berlin minimalism while subsuming the archetypal counterculture of organic naturalism inherent in the visceral historicism of tribal chanting.
There is something almost primal with 'Overhead Image' in the artist’s transfixed manipulation of recurring sound signs, which manages through recurrence to evoke deeply self-referential quasi-funk. The overlaying of synthesized stabs is a masterstroke in contemporary sound design which I have not witnessed since my time as a roady carrying Herbie Hancock’s jazz mags.
'Sad Hurry' Hucontains tight rhythms and brooding cinematics that engender something of a stark social commentary, interwoven by iconoclastic sound branding. Evolving glitch fusions here suggest a burgeoning subspecies of granular micro techno.
Who the fck are all these poncy twats wearing masks and groping in the dark? 'Explain Me Later'? I sat around for ages and couldn’t get any of the music at all but I boshed a couple of beans and had it off with this chick while stumbling around to this track that just built and built and built for ages with sick beats and weird noises that somehow managed to be funky in a sort of pip pop pop kinda way. Where the fck am I anyway?
http://www.clevermusic.net
