Inspiration is an unpredictable thing. For example, while Swiss producer/percussionist Samuel Rohrer was at work on his upcoming full-length, Range of Regularity, a friend forwarded him a “banned TEDx Talk” by author/‘fringe archeologist’ Graham Hancock. The video, centered on Hancock’s ayahuasca experiences, left a mark on Rohrer, who wrote to us via email that it fed into his ongoing rumination on “the current world situation and its tendencies.” He further elaborates:
I assume it must be difficult to not become a political person these days…
Even if there are only a few people who do not care about all the others, about the planet, our surroundings,
these few people are too powerful and are most likely the ones who create most of the damage. And they have built an industry and system behind them, for their own sake, which supports and covers them, but which finally is not working.
So we ended up in a place where material success, greed and competition is more important than life itself …I say we can come back to a conscious mind, we can reset our way of understanding what we are and what we are surrounded with. But we have to work for it. We have to really want that change. And probably we need to fall much deeper to finally give up what we think is so precious …
The artist ultimately named one of his tracks — the 10-minute, groove-warping “War On Consciousness” — after the talk, and while it might have a slight sense of the post-new age/ancient alien energy one might associate with Hancock, Rohrer is onto something else here. As with the rest of the album, “War” is based on Rohrer’s own live, flesh-and-blood drum recordings, which he has painstakingly re-edited and assembled into a digital collage which, for all its headiness, feels deeply rooted in the rhythms of earth, and call out to his collaborations with such electronic explorers as Ricardo Villalobos and Laurie Anderson.
Tiny Mix Tapes is thrilled to premiere “War On Consciousness,” which you may stream right here. Range of Regularity will be available April 21 from arjunamusic, to be followed soon after by two remix EPs, both featuring reworks of the Range tracks by Villalobos, alongside interpretations from Max (Vilod) Loderbauer and Burnt Friedman.
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