It’s part Twin Peaks ... part Pink Floyd ... and it’s King Roc’s new album project...
WELCOME TO THE MUTUAL SOCIETY
The search is still on for the mythical dance-artist album that’s “not just for clubs”. A bit of mystery, a bit live, not just house - and more ambition than just cranking out the perfect dancefloor number...
King Roc’s new label the Mutual Society is the rehearsal for his debut album Chapters, due... Read more
It’s part Twin Peaks ... part Pink Floyd ... and it’s King Roc’s new album project...
WELCOME TO THE MUTUAL SOCIETY
The search is still on for the mythical dance-artist album that’s “not just for clubs”. A bit of mystery, a bit live, not just house - and more ambition than just cranking out the perfect dancefloor number...
King Roc’s new label the Mutual Society is the rehearsal for his debut album Chapters, due mid-2008. It’s part visual-art project - unlocking layers and layers of meaning through the Web and collaborations with Australian artist Sebastian Godfrey of Drunkpark. It’s part “a bit of a hippy thing”, as King Roc puts it - creating, across four EPs and an album, a new type of old-school concept album, taking in birth, death, and what drives people in the time between ...
But mainly the label will be an ambitious musical reworking of the four EPs to create a new, final album - turning ambient tracks to dance, complex electronics to rough live performance, crossing downtempo to techno, EPs to albums. Nothing will sound like it did to begin.
The first chapter EP? It runs from its ambient opening to house to techno to electronica, from birth to the random chances that change your life... "The album as a whole is about curiosities and questions," says King Roc. "But chapter one – Lunaris – is focused on the world of patterns and cycles - from the rotation of our planet around our sun and the moon around us, to the routines of when we eat, sleep, work and play.
"Day-by-day, we live in patterns, structured and repetitive. But it is often the random event within a cycle that has the greatest affect on our lives. This can come from meeting a person who ends up having a big influence on your life, to the personal experiences we have that inspire us and which drive us to create.
"Does everything that has happened to get us to this point depend purely on the fluke and coincidence? From the monumental creation of the universe and our planet, to a smaller but equally important event - how our parents met. Or is there some sort of pattern for it all? Do we believe in fate and destiny? Or is it really just because of chance events that anything is here at all? So we wonder…
"But asking the question," he says, is what makes us who we are and because we ask the questions, we reason. Perhaps then; reason is the definition of who we are? But this still leaves the question why? In Chapters, you you won’t find any answers. But there is a mutual desire to look at the questions to show we know they are there..."
For King Roc, that's the future. And the past? He's released records on labels from BuggedOut! to Simple to Love Minus Zero to Azuli to Beautycase to Playtime. He's remixed New Order, Future Sound of London, S'Xpress and Stakker. His dancefloor sound is deep, lush melodic techno to house, with gigs from Berlin to Sydney, Siberia to San Paolo. But his roots are in live music, and his first forays into music were a live band that has since split to become three successful UK DJs – the others were Tom Neville and Nick Fryer (Sentience).
Chapters, he says, is in some ways a return - from live to electronic and back to live again, from groups to solo to new collaborations. Start, change, return, change ... the journey, always, as important as the destination... Show less
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