I love music that pushes the boundaries, music that beats new paths into the future, music that plays by its own rules. However, while doing meaningful work, much of it is often quite unlistenable, too clever for its own good. But it is still essential that such music exists, in the same way that the most extreme designs at the Paris Fashion Show are critical to expressing ideas, or the way abstract art is more about making you think rather than wanting to hang it in your bedroom.
JeanRN also does important work, but unlike a lot of music made in the avant-garde, it is totally listenable, oddly infectious, and more accessible than most of its peers. Okay, you might find it hard to dance to, though much of it certainly has groove, but the three songs found here are more like an ever-evolving (or devolving, depending on your point of view) collage of sound ideas. Sonic statements. Music as art.
“JeanRNB” lays down a thick beat, a groove by any other name, before both building and dismantling itself at the same time, shot through with glitches and sonic shards, sometimes stablising into recognisable song, sometimes becoming an anagram of its former self, generally full of energy, sometimes the epitome of entropy.
And if “Lebensabschniffsgefahrte” (a title deliberately chosen to be as difficult as the music it labels, I suspect) takes the essence of hyperpop and puts it through the sonic juicer, “Chessnerd” wanders from disco-ballad to clubland banger to muffled ambience to searing future-drone to industrial dance to well….I’m mainly just making up genres at this point, but that is half the fun of music: finding names for these mad and marvelous juxtapositions.
And what does it all mean? Nothing. Everything. Anything you like. It’s just music, and that means it is simultaneously the most throwaway of products and most artistically important modern commodity there is.
Right, I feel so musically overwhelmed, so creatively violated, in a good way, that I’m off for a lay down.
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