Athens, GR. based composer, music producer & sound artist and industrial group Mechanimal mastermind, Giannis Papaioannou (aka ION) has released today his 8th album “No Signal”, via his own label Ionmusik, WL//WH is very pleased to premiere.
After last November’s conceptual ambient LP “North Wind”, via Same Difference Music imprint, based on a series of field recordings captured in isolated and uncontaminated places by the Swedish sea, ION returns with an atmospheric dub techno sound, inspired by the striking, equally anguishing and eerily fascinating, alienated emptiness of a city during the current lockdown, in order to relieve and momentarily sweep away anxieties and frustrations accumulated in this unsettled period for humankind under the haze of disillusionment.
All in all, new scenery composed,
Arrested from my senses on empty streets
Moments that cannot be defined,
But still remembered,
Like the face of this ghost city, early, one beautiful spring morning.
The movement of disenchantment,
Without any mystery, feeding,
Into the realm of happiness and freedom
Like the permanent development of productive force
Expanding into mass production of unused consumer goods.
From this mere handful of isolation memories
Joined together by invisible keys
In an almost limitless number of combinations
Come the hundreds of thousand grey pixels,
Compounds discovered in the nature of digital light
Or manufactured, once again, in the chemical laboratory of the mind.
Pulsating dub-charged bass reverberations, deep spectral echoes, spacious soft clear synth chords and bouncy, mesmeric rhythms meet, mix and recompose themselves, as if in a captivating enigma, while suspended in an otherworldly dimension, at the same time hypnotic and ethereal, glacial and warm, hazy and bright, replete of a genuine and refined melodic clarity, warble and flutter among the streets of an empty and unreal city, wrapped in an uncanny and unusual spell, under a long-forgotten sky-blue of an ethereally dazing beauty, haunted by an anxious and disenchanted reality, devoured by the silence of unknown echoes.
Keep up with ION:
photo by Paris Tavitian
