Welcome to paradise kiddo. Sit down your old E-gobbling Uncle Roger for a motorway trip down memory lane: Dinamarca has a new EP coming out, and it is, in the parlance of the era, “spiritual.” As a founding member of TMT favorite STAYCORE, Dinamarca has helped cement the Stockholm label and crew’s position as one of the most consistent forward-motions of the European club scene, teasing out global currents in the hardcore continuum with a joyous focus on the dance floor.
The dude has personal form here: 2014’s debut No Hay Break EP cleaved out junglist breaks and space between scattered bashment vocals, while the incendiary STAYCORE SUMMER JAMES 2K15 compilation, many listeners’ first exposure to the label, foreshadowed a year dominated by dancehall rhythms and edits. Dinamarca followed this last year with the aggy as fuck Holy EP, focusing this time on a whole dark palette of gabber and hardcore, plus a certain notion of the dancefloor as sacred, cleansing.
Ideas of constant mutation are a key animating factor in the constellation of club labels and parties that STAYCORE move in; with NON, N.A.A.F.I, Bala Club, Salviatek, and #KUNQ tearing through whole genres and styles at a combative speed. Trance music has been a key touchstone for many of these groups throughout, particularly those (like Dinamarca’s friend and collaborator KABLAM) associated with Evian Christ’s Trance Party, which just saw its sixth iteration. But Dinamarca pushes these investigations out of the mainly “live” contexts they’ve explored previously and into the more intimate realm of “studio production” with his new Himnos EP. Out digitally April 25 on Staycore and featuring some suitably-cosmic cover art by Jonna Mayer, the new disc comprises a seven-song dialogue between the trance classics (PPK (ППК), ATB, Robert ‘couldn’t think of a three letter acronym’ Miles) as well as the dancehall, kuduro, and baile-funk rhythms that have become an anchoring signature of STAYCORE’s diverse outputs.
The EP’s lead song “Paraíso” — which TMT is proud to premiere for you today — finds him teetering on the edge of trance euphoria and harsh melancholy, toying with the genre’s conventional builds and drops within the overall context of an EP full of beautiful and weirdly moving stuff, unashamed in its scrutiny of a musical form so often labeled profane by its detractors and sacred by its loving acolytes (of which Dinamarca is clearly one).
Himnos EP tracklisting:
01. Aylita
02. Paraíso
03. Feel Love
04. Resurrection
05. 9PM
06. Sunbeam
07. Niños
More about: Dinamarca
