Title: Two Worlds
Artist: Axel Thesleff
Genre: Future Bass / Fusion
Tracklisting
1. AKASHA (Eastern, beats, melodic, contrast, dreamlike)
The opening track ’Akasha’ takes the listener through a rollercoaster ride from slowly evolving beautiful melodies to hard hitting beats heavily featuring Indian percussion and instrumentation with a deep and rumbling bass. The song is all about contrast and surprise, keeping the listener engaged and interested in what happens next. It’s an interplay between soft and hard hitting, beautiful and catchy.
2. SALOMON (Peaceful, hectic, epic, deep, variation)
Salomon continues the theme of contrast that is present throughout the EP. The track calms the energy down a little bit, with soothing rhodes chords and dreamy melodies, but not for long, as the song intensifies in the drop with trap-esque drums and percussion, accompanied with a bouncing hybrid flute pattern. The breakdown features a beautiful melody played with an indian violin that builds up the tension for the second drop. Finally the song comes to a climax with a post-rock like intensity.
3. ECO (Sunny, beats, bouncy)
The third track ’Eco’ is more reliant on repetition with an irresistible flute melody that serves as the foundation of the song. The beat features bouncy reggae-esque guitars and a heavy-hitting beat with an equally bouncy baseline that transforms into a deep boneshaking variation. Eco is a catchy blend of eastern and western with a forward-driving and complementing drumbeat.
4. CASCADE (Deep, space, epic, trippy, dark)
Cascade represents a turning point in the musical journey of Two Worlds. Heavily influenced by old-school dubstep Cascade is a trippy and enchanting jam with morphing baselines and vocal melodies accompanied by groovy drums and percussion. The song explodes at the end with earth shattering square and neuro bass sounds with a hard hitting hybrid string pattern on top.
5. DUNYA (Eastern, euphoric, emotional, energetic)
The closing track ’Dunya’ brings the EP to an euphoric closure. Built around a glitching piano chord sequence and a south asian chant the song is an emotional and uplifting blend of east and west. It features futuristic and juicy synth sounds that inject energy into an otherwise organic mix of sounds.
Download here
Two Worlds, the Concept
The starting point of this EP dates back to 2016 when I started out a bunch of ideas but never got around finishing them. In 2017 I decided to pick the best ones of those ideas, finish them up and compile them into an EP. Now finally in 2018 those tunes are seeing the light of day with this release. At first, the EP seemed to become a non-conceptual one, unlike my previous non-single releases, but rather a collection of tracks that flow well together. But as it developed I couldn’t avoid attaching some conceptuality behind it all. I started thinking about the different aspects of the music that was being created and its relationship to me as a musician and as a person. It sometimes feels like I’m living a double life, and often find myself in contrasting ends of spectrums. I’m a student of musicology, which is the study of music as a science, but at the same time a practitioner of music creation, which I see as the study of music as experience and emotion. I love the human rawness of a band but at the same time love the superhuman precision of computing and the sonic possibilities it can harness. I love the sound and character of vintage records, but also love the purity and flexibility of digital production. I love western harmony and adore eastern melody. During the process of making this EP, I’ve been getting into meditation which has led me to think about the two worlds of our cosmos, the material and the spiritual. By spiritual here I mean the mental, the fact of the existence of experience, and its fundamental immateriality. We live in crossroads of these two worlds trying to make sense of it all, but so far we have no definitive answer to the meaning of our being, leaving some people in awe of the unknown and many people anxious and even desperate. I’ve also become more aware of the illusiveness of the ego, the driver behind the wheel, the genie in the bottle. There is a universe inside each of us and we are inhabited by spaces of experience, alive in the soil of the mother Earth. The name ’Two Worlds’ popped into my head, and I used it as a loosely guiding frame inside which the music creation happened. Amidst the production of this EP I teamed up with Pekka Keränen, a photo and video artist that I’ve been working closely with for the past two years, and we started sketching out an audiovisual realisation based on these ideas. This project became an integral part of the EP and sealed the concept around it, and eventually gave the names to the tracks that had remained unnamed up until that point. All of this being said, although a concept did emerge behind this release, I encourage you to make your own interpretations of it whatever thoughts, feelings and associations it awakens in you because there is no ”right” way to understand it. And above all, I hope you enjoy it!
<3 Axel
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