»Normal« by Normal Music - Let's Do Really Strange Things And Call Them

“Normal Music is the choice of music for Normal people” is the statement of this mutual project of the swedish designer Thomas Ekelund, the Zeromoon Labelowner Jeff Surak and the Puerto-Rican Raphael Isarri. “Normal Music” is not so normal as the name might imply - not just another boring laptop trio. They focus on merging real instruments, synths, bass guitar, autoharp, field recordings and record players to shape those many sound sources into “normal music” tracks. But what is this “Normal” all about? The referential review magazine “Vital Weekly” points it by claiming influences of Pan Sonic, Goem or Pole - a mixture between dubby, clicky rhythms in combination with rather noisy ambient fragments. The core is relatively dense, fleshy - if that’s a suitable epithet - beats, at times slightly irregular and not easy to follow, bristling with electronic beeps, crackles, hisses, and what have you. Somewhere between the lines, or notes, to be precise, electroacoustic gratings, hardly perceptible ambient wafts or field recordings push their way through.

From the track titles, one might consider Normal Music to be political or with a certain Punk attitude. There is indeed a musical approach to click-punk, as the beats are sometimes quite cold and heartless (“Migratory Patterns Of The Youth”) - detailed, clear cut-up beats and complicated, clicky crunches characterizes this whole release, whereas “Pills, Pills, Pills for Mental Health” is more of a slo-mo slacker click-dub, which is a totally different direction to “Machines startle me with Great Frequency”, which is more sort of industrial field-recordings.

“Let’s Do Really Strange Things And Call Them Normal” is an exciting piece of work that evolves with every more bit of listening, it is a big appetizer of contrary music for contrary people, Precise placements of sounds and constantly evolving textures ensure that this release holds quite a few secrets for you, even when listening to it repeatedly Normal Music is all about rhythms and beats, with a distinctive, darker edge, where rich electronic textures, surface noise from vinyl and various unidentifiable sources, looped or seemingly random, form these five tracks of blissful beats and minimal rhythms.

Run time 22:12