Benedek Noble
World Gruuv

RSD022 // From Over The Hills Beyond by Blair French

SR06 - US - 2017DROOL by NNAMDÏ

This mini LP is an explicit message from Lustpoderosa’s sonic continuum. These 7 tracks show the deep connection of Marlene Starks’ work as a writer and an artist to her role as mother and DJ in times when there is an urgent need to dismantle the patriarchy in our society and rave culture. Marlene Stark is telling us much more than a great musical story with the symbolic title “Hyäne". Marlene wants to direct our attention to a reviled creature while she reflects on its literary and symbolic meanings. Although hyenas live in a matriarchal society, its transmutation can be perceived as the ongoing struggle of the non-male body in an androcentric world view. Marlene Starks reinterprets the figure of the hyena in a very poetic, self-ironical and honest way, as shown in the tracks ‘Hungry As a Hunter’, ‘Hyäne’ and ‘Language Of Old Woman’. It’s a neo-ceremonial call to rethink established structures without missing out the turbulent landscape of today’s politics. From early trip-hop to post-rave elements, Stark combines her sonic adventures with an impressively nonchalant and colloquial vocabulary. Her voice, as well as the voice of guest singer Stefanie Mader, achieves a remarkable vocal structure that goes beyond the mainstream. This is the contemporary body music for the next generation.

It’s the turn of AM/PM to bring some drama to What About Never, ushering in an ‘Age of Distraction’ with an EP of dark, pulsating techno, brittle dub polyrhythms and nebulous ambience.'Dance for Me’ takes the lead, locking into a propulsive, strobing groove, rolling out tension that ebbs and flows before the alien stepper, ‘Nobody Knows Anything’ shifts the tone. The mood changes further over the sparse, chattering, electronic fusion of the title track, before melting into the gaseous, ambient coda, ‘Now’s the Time’.

Under ~ Between by Dialect