Picks Of The Week (14.05.22

1. Moonaddict - Caffeine EP [Dissonance Audio]

Recommended if you like: Amoss, Particle, DLR

Today's topic is: Moon Addiction. A fixation on all things lunar might sound harmless to a lay person, but for this particular young man from Hanover, Germany it's a serious disease that affects his life not just every single day, but every single night too. Since it's so rare that it affects literally only this one person, funding is extremely hard to get. Call 0800-M00N now to find out how you can help.

This addict's name? Benjamin Schulz. Originally from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, so in the Rostock area, which is in the North East of Germany, i.e. "North from Berlin", this 27-year-old has had quite the tumultuous life. In his teenage years he played drums and sang his heart out in various different bands, one of them being the Osnabrücker collective Metada, but it didn't take too long for him to add "& Bass" to his love for Drums. While still in school, his mate Cuepric, which I'm hoping is a real name because it's kind of sick, introduced him to the wonderful world of fast-paced electronic music and he was hooked ever since. Soon after he started DJing and producing around 2012, he started studying Pop production at the Osnabrück University, further cementing his love for the craft. The first publicly available fruits from this intensive labour of love started cropping up around 2017, with a bootleg of Nubiyan Twist - Hypnotised being the first to appear under the Moonaddict banner, followed by a few remixes and further bootlegs here and there.

Another few laters, in 2021, Benjamin made a huge musical leap forward: Not only did he put out his first proper paid release, a collaboration with DnB-loving drum enthusiast Stixonspeed, on StornoBeatz, a few months later he was already releasing his debut album Shut The Door on that very same label! Remixes for Neonlight's classic Sprech Funk and Jaycut & Kolt Siewert's flute tune follow-up Altobelly followed, with the latter one leading Moonaddict to later also release another tune on their PLAY! Music label.

While it's not unusual for people to take a break once in a while, be it for personal reasons, not having enough time due to studies etc. or just (temporarily) falling out of love with the genre, it's safe to say that Benjamin has made good use with his Moonaddict-free time in between these time jumps. Remember the band thing from above? With the HAIÓN collective he used to play whole festival tours throughout Germany! Nowadays he's also a part of the alt-pop band MODESHA, in which he is able to experimentally expand his now quite big electronic music experience in a band context. Furthermore, he's also part of the Elektronischer Dauerurlaub crew with annca and lotschey, with whom he's now organising the BASSERIE event series in Osnabrück. Man's been doing quite a lot of different things!

What brings me to talk about all of this today is Benjamin's newest release: The Caffeine EP on Dissonance Audio, a brand new label from the wonderful Spanish city of Seville that started putting out Free Downloads in 2020 and only recently switched to paid releases, with this EP actually being the second paid one in their catalogue so far! So let's see what Mr. Addict has brought to the coffee table, shall we?

The three-tracker starts off with the title track, Caffeine. While the title indirectly suggests some high-intensity adrenaline-inducing caffeinated action, it's actually more of a moody tune that's focused on an amazing deeply rolling atmospheric vibe, in line with the vibe of the artwork. Less of a in-your-face coffee and more of a I am on my way to work the night shift on a cold and quiet winter night drink. The way these seemingly simple yet extremely effective echo-y synths hit you, these drum loops driving the listener's head to start moving, those growls that go from slowly rumbling in the buried depths of the mind to making the walls of my apartment wobble, everything is just one perfectly progressing mood. Then we get to the second half. Oh boy. Little bits of reversed and just generally very uniquely processe synths make it known that the Schnitzel Power Button™️ has been activated. In the second drop Moonaddict goes all in on that Camo & Krooked-esque, goosebump-causing wall of synth style that I can't enough of, with minimal drums to give the wall maximum space to cause carnage while some additional beautiful melodies on top round things off very nicely. I was already really enjoying myself in the first half of this track, but this second part hits so damn well that I just had to put it into my Best Of 2022 playlist.

There's two more tracks to go though! On Slurp our lunar junkie shows us that he's also a virtuoso when it comes to the murky steppy sounds that you would usually only get from the sofa enthusiasts in Bristol. While not my personal favourite style of DnB, I can still appreciate the quality work that went into production. The snares sounds like they should, the wobbles wobble quite nicely, the drops have a real nice progression to it, I'm quite sure lovers of the steppy deep style will slurp this right up. Lastly we've got Cups, which very quickly tells us what it will be able to offer us here: Lots and lots and lots of continuously rolling fast-paced strangely sounding bongos! Paired with some seriously massive distorted bass, these ever-evolving bongos make for quite the ride that makes you feel like you're speedrunning Crash Bandicoot on ten cans of red bull.

A lot of different engaging styles, each executed perfectly, neatly packaged into one amazing EP. Moonaddict's best work so far.

Other deep and dark stuff from this week:

[BORDERS] - In A Dream 💎
Monolith - Make You Mine EP 💎
Art1fact, REEBZ - Grey
Kevela - Stationary 💎
Phonetick - Offgrid 💎
Monolith - Make You Mine 💎

2. Mazare - Wide Awake And Dreaming EP [Ophelia]

Recommended if you like: Feint, Fliwo, Drvmmer

After all this deep and dark business, I think we need some feel-good stuff. Let's talk about Mazare's newest EP!

Yes, that Mazare, the very same Italian uplifting DnB mastermind I've been raving on and on about a few months ago on here! While this is his first solo release since Spirals, Massimo Pezzetta has certainly been busy with a whole of other creative endeavours: Absolutely perfect bootlegs of Lil Nas X's Industry Baby and Fallout Boy's Sugar We Are Going Down, the brand new monthly radio show The Paracosm hosted on Insomniac Radio and one heartbreakingly beautiful remix of Skybreak's Into The Light. Now he's returning to one of the places his DnB career first started taking shape: Seven Lions' label Ophelia.

So what did Mazare come up with for his sophomore EP, Wide Awake And Dreaming?

Beauty in its purest form! Okay okay, allow me to elaborate.

For this EP Mazare set out to find a way to create hybrids of his two favourite electronic subgenres: Melodic Dubstep and Drum and Bass. Nothing embodies this more than our first stop on this journey, and also the first and only single of the EP, Otherside, with Amidy on the vocals. Oh sorry, forgot a word: on the phenomenal vocals. Better. While we listen in awe to the outstanding vocalist taking us on this emotional voyage through the emotions of a lost but not yet forgotten love, Mazare shows us how absolutely fine-tuned his talents are when it comes to creating a beautiful auditory scenery. Even though he's giving the vocal a lot of space to shine, he still manages to work with what is available to wrap it into a warm, uplifting blanket of stunning synths, giving the rather sad lyrics a more melancholic feel to it. This culminates into a rather epic, for lack of a better word, Half-Time/Melodic Dubstep drop, complete with a delayed drop and synths that are so full that you can't help but get lost in the beauty of it all. The second delayed drop then sneakily introduces us some muted drums that soon enough turn into full-on slapping snares, giving us a proper DnB version of the first drop and fulfilling the promise of the Melodic Dubstep DnB hybrid plan. We're only one track into the EP and I'm already in love.

Next up we've got Lifeline, with Monika Santucci, the LA-based vocalist you might remember from Mazare's 2020 track That's On You. Another truly excellent vocalist choice. This time the lyrics talk about how even in the worst moments of our lives, love can pulls us right back up and keeps us going. Cheesy, I know. I don't care though, give me all the cheese in the world, I eat that kind of stuff up. In alignment with this more positive spin on love, compared to its predecessor, the instrumental now also goes all-in on the uplifting part of the vibe. Marvellous pianos playing off of each other left and right, accompanied by some of the most beautiful risers I've heard, lead us into the drop, where Mazare hits us with that "fake-out", "hands in the air", "wait for it" drop (there's gotta be a proper word for this) not once, but twice, before unleashing the full DnB tempo on us. The combination of the vocal doing its extremely catchy back-and-forth and the full-speed hype of the instrumental is just entirely too good. If that isn't a true RainbowPls moment for me, then I don't know what is. In the second drop the fake-out actually goes on for so long it actually becomes a short Half-time part, but soon enough Mazare puts the pedal to the metal once again. Second track, still in love. This was probably the part where I decided to review this EP. And we're still only half-way through!

Our third stop is Wide Awake, with none other than Fiora on vocal duty, who some of you might know as the vocalist from Andy C's Heartbeat Loud! Not just that, she also provided the vocals for Seven Lion's Dreamin', which Mazare remixed way back in 2018 as one of his first steps into the world of DnB! I feel like I don't even have to mention it at this point anymore, but obviously the vocal performance on display here is breathtakingly amazing again. While Fiora tells us all about the confusing feelings that a love that feels so good it makes you question whether you're still dreaming or not can cause, Mazare pulls out all the stops to provide a stunning instrumental backdrop. Distant pianos and wind chime-esque sounds floating through the air introduce us into this dream world, but once Fiora's goosebump-inducing I feel the world closin' in part of the verse hits a mixture of constantly more powerful becoming drums, whirley synth melodies and that aforementioned lovely riser lead us to the explosion of emotional energy that is the drop. You know the drill by now. Long note "fake-out" drop, before dropping us into this whirlwind of pure beauty in the form of a DnB drop. While I recognize it's kind of a formula for this EP, I'm not complaining one bit. It works on me every single time. Similarly to Lifeline, we also get a little Half-time version of the drop in the second half, before being drop-kicked right back to full speed. Amazing, amazing, amazing. Those are my thoughts on all the tracks so far. Will the EP closer be able to hold up that level of quality?

Oh most definitely. Just in a different way than you might expect after the other tracks so far. Mazare ends this wonderful EP with Sleepwalker, with the delightful The Arcturians on vocal duties. Not only are the vocals performed in quite the haunting way, their contents are also noticeably more gloomy than the things that came before. Instead of uplifting synths leading the way, or pianos soothing our brains, we've got sinister strings and fast-paced melodies spelling out some kind of impending doom. This doom takes on the form of a completely and utterly outrageous Neurofunk drop. Wait, what? Avid listeners of Mazare will know that he doesn't just love all things uplifting, he's also a massive fan of the harder sides of DnB. So far we've only seen that side of him on his Paracosm EP and especially in his recent string of bootlegs, so it's great to get another glimpse of his glorious type of Neuro. Massive basses, syncopated drum loops that will sweep you off your chair, ridiculously action-packed energy, all the good stuff, all produced extremely well. As anyone who reads these reviews will know I love myself some dramatic vocals on my Neurofunk tracks, so I obviously love this tune quite a lot, which means this EP has been a completely flawless experience for me.

At first the vocals that are as catchy as they are beautiful and the trance-y melodies that are so out-of-this-world they make me drift away into alternative realities lulls the listener into this amazing, warm cocoon of pure happiness, but then he slaps you with the might of a thousand suns with this huge banger of an EP closer, reminding you that he absolutely is a master of both styles. Basically the quintessential Mazare release so far. A Mazasterpiece, so to speak.

Other uplifting/dancefloor things from this week:

Jon Void, Voicians - Strong Now / Memories
T & Sugah - G.O.A.T
Various Artists - Liquicity Spring 2022 LP
Vikijoes, Oli Starr - Good Ones Go 💎
1991, Empara Mi - We All Need Someone
Sophon - Dance
Fox Stevenson - Miss You (Fox Stevenson Remix)