Self-released
Release date: 07.06.2019
Production: Aleksander Arsov
Album length: 45.03 min
Genre: electronica / ambient / chillout / psychadelic
Aleksander Arsov is a very experienced, seasoned musician. And more than that. He’s a many-layered musician, a subtle and skilled composer, a producer, and above all, especially in the latest era of his career, a sonic experimentalist. His musical career actually reaches deep into the eighties, where we find his first notable collaboration in the cult band Gastrbajtrs, with whom he put out a debut album and which later grew into the well-known and much-loved kings of the Slovenian alternative rock underground, Demolition Group.
Later on, Aleksander kept expanding his artistic “consciousness”, developing his sensuality and instincts, and so he kept maturing artistically. He tried his hand at writing music for commercial jingles and music for kids, hopped very skillfully between genre fusions, took part in a good number of challenging musical projects, but above all he fell in love with loosening up and stretching the sonic expanses, when he started experimenting more intensively with sound manipulation, bending elemental guitar tones, which through processed effects he reshaped into a tightly expressive tangle of pure sonic esotericism, made of layered, harmonious glowing pastels of electronic sound.
For “Contribution To the Common Mandess”, his fourth solo album overall, Arsov transformed into his alter ego Unhappy. As the album title hints, there was quite a bit of personal wrestling with inner and past demons. The cover art alludes to this too, split between schizophrenic mental chaos and a state of zen. Indirectly, we can also take the album as a work of social criticism. The “Common Madness” and the artist’s “contribution of bitter disappointment” is anything but the work of someone who’d be enjoying the careless abundance of material comfort and spiritual, emotional “fulfillment”.
The album is full of floating, light pastels that unfold in a charming web of electronic manipulations and synthesized sonic veils, all of which is entirely 100% pure guitar playing (though run through effects that guitarists don’t normally use in their standard stage gear), and it develops as something very cerebral, actually hypnotic and intoxicating, if not downright transcendental. That’s also thanks to the many repetitions of the lead motifs, onto which Arsov attaches and gradually layers his chosen sonic pastels.
The songs are often underpinned by programmed rhythms that call for a bit of dance-floor swagger. Musically, it’s a hugely appealing piece of work that gets under your skin in an instant, since the soundscape is built from big imagination and free-spirited, unbridled ideas, which under the command of a refined aesthetic of detailed, filigree-like fusion create an unusual musical story. In it, avant-garde adventurism and ambient electronics join hands, and there are moments you can link sonically to the grandeur of NDW new wave, as well as krautrock. In short, it’s music of interest to anyone into the wide range of electronic manipulators, from the legendary Tangerine Dream to Schiller and everything in between. Unhappy has certainly kept some classic guitar sound in the songs, which further enriches the sonic picture, and in Connection Overflow he also brought in a charming female vocal and stirred up a bit of a trip-hop vibe.
There are moments of world music caught here, as well as neo-classical (Falling Apart), guitar sounds can ring out very “exotic – Asian” (parts of the song Obsessive Habits (Out Of The Woods)), and then at another moment you get the feeling you’re listening to a violin, even though it’s a processed guitar sound, and so on. So this is an album that will surprise you in every way, and one that demands more spins as you slowly discover and unfold it. Veil by veil. “Contribution To the Common Madness” is certainly, to some extent, “Mihe Kralj’s Andromeda for 2019”. Despite its electronic character, it carries an exceptionally warm production, a rich blend of mid-range harmony pastels, with which Arsov builds an extremely powerful atmospheric backdrop. There’s no shortage of gripping moods.
The album is woven from a refined squeezing and stacking of sound loops, which echo like sonic veils, one over another, and create the core of vivid, distinctive harmonies that speak to the transcendental. But as we said earlier, the alter ego Unhappy isn’t all that innocent after all, and quite a few moments are palpably dark (Asynchronous Mind, Screaming Thoughts).
It’s hard to find parallels to the approach Unhappy takes. In fact, in what he does and what “Contribution To the Common Madness” offers, Arsov is unique. Although the album is a work of fine-mechanics, dedicated arranging that calls for perfectionism, it unfolds in a glow of spontaneity and unexpected turns of events. That’s the final impression it leaves when you listen. And yes. It touches the listener and wakes them up. Despite the ice and the gale, the dark vistas, there’s quite a bit of sweet intoxication on it that leads the listener without limits into a special musical adventure, one that especially pays off if you know how to switch off your ratio while listening. That’s when the album grabs you especially hard and intense. Disconnecting your thoughts makes room for taking in music in a way we denied ourselves long ago. An album like “Contribution To Common Madness” can bring you an effective, tripoid shortcut to the “unconscious” awakening of those “receivers” of your being that we’ve completely neglected over the centuries and with which we no longer communicate.
If two years ago we enjoyed the new Bowrain album, “Contribution To the Common Madness” is a new, superb gem of Slovenian electronic music for 2019 and certainly one of the boldest, most daringly exploratory adventures into the field of undiscovered dimensions of boundless musical expanses.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 10 / 10
Tracklist:
01 Awakening
02 Screaming Thoughts
03 Desolation Mind
04 Asynchronous Mind
05 Connection Overflow
06 Falling Apart
07 Predator (In Shorts and A Tie)
08 Structural Misbehaving
09 Seaside (Memories From My Future Life)
10 Modeled Truth
11 Obsessive Habits (Out Of The Woods)
Musicians:
Arsov aka Unhappy: music, arrangements, performance and lyrics
Kaya Tokuhisa – vocals, vocal lines
