REC_OVERFLOW

madrid

CD, spark releases

Say hello to the summer. If I see a record called “Madrid” I’ll think of Spain and thinking of Spain I’ll think of summer. But I’ll also think of Fibla and Spark releases, and doing that I am already real close to Rec Overflow, who has been around in the Spanish electronic scene for quite a while now (think in the direction of Sonar), doing remixes and releasing on underground-netlabels. If that is what is usually called “promising” for a young artist, then go on, call Rec Overflow a promising young artist. You could also call him a overflowing creative spring of great multi-levelled electronic music. Without producing too much fuss about it, rec overflow has produced an album – his debut by the way – that offers a lot of things in a lot of ways. To make this a little clearer and to name what I like best about “Madrid” right in the beginning: I can listen to this record lying down lazy in the sun and either fly away on dreams all of my own or dive into the music here. The gentle beats, even if foraying into the sphere of breakbeats or distorted soundscapes, mixed with gentle scapes and floors and sparked with various kinds of samples and bitparts leave a lot open to the listener while weaving a tight and dense net to get caught in at the same time.

All the while he uses a lot vocal samples and voices, at times mixed sparsely and without context into the track, at other times forming an atmospheric soundscape that makes a political statement, which is rarely ever happening in electronic music[1]. For instance the track “Division Thing” with its dark, brooding and sombre atmosphere, filled with bass-laden bells and gongs, and added onto that vocal samples that sound like political analysts and the first sample clearly naming the US-president.

The overall atmosphere is more laid back, though. The music, especially beats that were constructed from all kinds of percussive noises, gets quite complex, but you can lean back and digest at a superficial level as well without losing any of the basic pleasures. Depending on your inclination and interest in music you might gain more by listening closely, but that is all up to you.

I vividly remember the effects those old-time video games had on me, whose soundtracks didn’t have much variety in them but at times they would have a computer voice saying something like “rocket rocket” or “contender eliminated”, very much like the voice does on the title track here. Yes, I am talking about “Wipe Out”, one of the most favoured games among electronic music artists as far as I know and also one of the first games to feature product placement (Red Bull of course). But as opposed to the soundtrack to that game, “Madrid” is laid back and relaxed. Moreover it features a lot more experimental stuff and noise-bitparts, like the drumparts built from scratch on the very interesting “organico” or the weird birdsound-sounds in the beginning of “Acuatico”.

Electronica fit for summer has to fulfil that certain trance-like, lucid state and infuse it into the listener. Trance here, obviously, means the mindset between sleep and comatose that you sometimes fall into when staring at the sun or being hypnotized or taking long intercontinental airplane-travels. When “waking up” everything has become dizzy and slightly distorted, people seem to move slower, time contracts and expands, your eyesight is out of focus, zooming in on unnecessary details and your perception is unable to grasp the whole picture. A flurry, fuzzy feeling grabs hold of you and you find your way to the refrigerator in the kitchen, back to the audience or via taxicab to your hotel room as if you were pulled on strings. Now, who is pulling? You never ask that kind of questions in such a state of mind. But your ears as well as your other senses are open for new ways of perceiving what is usually called reality. And an influx of such perceptions may give rise to some new ideas. And that’s where you have it and we might start this review over again.