And so it is then, this is a record about love and resistance. After the broken frigidity of Classical Curves, Jam City returns with an urgent, fearless and strikingly sensitive album of modern pop songs, both crushingly heavy and glitteringly light. Made by modest means, made by any means, the DIY origin of the record speaks to the artist’s faith in the power of music to not only transcend, but also to confront, unsettle, and suggest an alternative to the total colonisation of art by neoliberalism. Always raw, always in the red.

They tore down the homes, sold us some other dreams. What’s left? Miles of wasteland, flowers in the peripheries. Chorus guitars swollen, drums narcotic. The brashness and unpredictability of post-punk lost futures sublimated into the softest and sweetest of chord clouds. There’s no question that you’re listening to the same artist responsible for some of the most intense and influential club tracks of the last 5 years, on an album that could only be realised by Night Slugs. Dream A Garden is not a total break from the world of Classical Curves, but rather an inversion: what becomes of the people struggling to live and love beneath the chrome-plated, vacuous and superficial machinery that we must fight to see beyond?

While drawing on a diverse musical history (sound system guitar dynamix, punk, hip-hop, grime, country, the gothic and the modern), Dream A Garden remains rooted in the bleakness of the present: everyday life under the regime of high capitalism. Turning the avenues of lifestyle fascism we walk through everyday into psychedelic, surreal daydreams, Jam offers his songwriting as a coping mechanism, a form of re-scrambling a landscape dominated by ideologies of selfishness and hatred. In our age, the act of loving, being loved and giving love is radical; Dream A Garden refuses greed, violence, and the impossible ideals that gloat from every surface of our cities, infesting the spaces where humans once dreamed dreams of their own. A rejection of our ‘fate’ as the generation raised on empty promises, SSRIs and indefinite war; curtains closed, alienated from our bodies, our voices, our earth.

Singing, shouting sometimes barely audible, these songs are embedded with the outside sounds of sirens, TV ads, birds singing, rolling thunder and, like Curtis Mayfield said, “the joy of children laughing around you”. Through the chaos, unashamedly hopeful song writing emerges from the wreckage, battle-damaged but resilient, into a landscape where weeds and borage flowers reclaim the ruins of a dismantled 21st century.

They want us to be sad, They want us to be selfish, They want us to be unhappy, So we dream a garden, it’s weeds quietly gatecrash this world.”

Since his 2011 debut LP “Bible Eyes”, Psutka has been busy with various studio production projects as well as recording and touring with his side-project Hiawatha.

His return as Egyptrixx takes the form of a multi-media collaboration with Berlin-based visual artist A.N.F. (Andreas Fischer).

Together the pair focused on a process – a set of ‘meaning-through-reduction’ principles applied to both sound and video – with atmosphere, repetition and texture given priority over traditional ideas of narrative and song structure.

Fisher’s visuals began to take shape, depicting molten off-planet environments, strange underground realms and volcanic caves lined with arrays of fluorescent light tubes, and Psutka responded by soundtracking these new digital environments.

The resulting nine tracks and their accompanying series of videos and images became “A/B til Infinity”, a mesmeric environment rendered in the crystalline HD that has marked out Egyptrixx’ work since his earliest productions.

The music is by turns meditative, violent and evocative; glassy and earth-shattering. Here sound-design and song-writing are one and the same – Psutka stretches a DX7 to its limits, its shuddering hits deployed throughout. 808 and Simmons drum machines pound extreme-metal blastbeats, then disappear into gaseous SFX, a rockpool in a virtual cavern. Digital choirs intone and beautiful synths envelop everything. Necessary forays into club territory on lead 12″ cut “Water” and the tribal locomotive “Alta Civilization” are seamless, their akinness to Techno or EBM feels incidental to this record’s greater experience, though DJs may definitely disagree.

Looking back, “Bible Eyes” now seems like a wide open expanse, while “A/B till Infinity” lets its listener hover with it in the eerie synthesised twilight depicted on its cover.

Released November 26th 2013 via Last Gang Records in Canada and Night Slugs everywhere else.

Tracklist:

[1] Ax//s (intro)
[2] A/B til Infinity
[3] Alta Civilization
[4] Bad Boy (reduced)
[5] Adult
[6] Disorbital
[7] Water
[8] My Life is Vivid, My Eyes are Open
[9] A.C.R.R.

Don’t miss his contribution to the Night Slugs Mixtape Series – NSMIX004, a self-defined scrapbook of ideas that went into the making of the album

This is a record about elegance, violence, electricity, water, marble, plants, trenchcoats, oily black jeep windows, crashed motorbikes, parks at twilight, clubs in the dark, broken DX7s and missed phone calls, written and recorded over a hot summer in a cramped flat with neighbours having sex through the walls.

“Classical Curves” comes from a teenhood spent obsessively listening to both Prince and Youngstar, a tumultuous period as a performance artist-cum-designer marketing ‘chrome body extensions’ to the fashion world, and a brief and bizarre spell as a corporate spy for a well known athletics brand. This is a record unique in its scope and vision, from a life that could only paint a world of romance and danger as vividly as this.

It’s a record that owes equal parts to Philly Club as it does to Laurie Anderson, The Neptunes as it does to Einsturzende Neubauten, Steve Poindexter as it does to the soft jazz leads of Pat Metheny. A record conceived out of (but not confined to) the legacy of the great rhythm trak muziks: Chicago House, Detroit Techno, Grime and Club. Classical Curves deconstructs, then reconfigures these blueprints as skeletal, emotionally charged pop songs. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: We are engulfed in booming, monolithic kick drums/We are floating on a pink cloud. We are thrashed and contorted by sheets of metal/We are suspended in breathy quiet of sighing voices and raindrops kissing the windowpane – and then it erupts again.

Classical Curves debuts its creators voice for the first time on record, taking on the roles of brazen alien catwalk commentator, crooning synth-pop pinup and whispering informant. And all the while the drums continue to snap, crunch, jerk and bump. There are also guitar synths, tape hiss, clouds of static, saxophones, lamenting fairlight choirs and slap bass. Listen carefully and you will hear a phone ringing (pick it up).

Art direction by Jam City & Sushon.org
Art Production by Bowyer - bowyerworldwide.com
Mixed by Bok Bok & Jam City at the Night Slugs Silo

> buy Digital here

> buy CD here