Image credit: Ryan Blackwell & Nastassia Winge – Beyond Photography
Have you ever felt yourself standing at the edge of calm and collected? It could be anything that triggers it, like your partner deciding to call it quits. Or maybe you just lost your job or even your beloved sentimental possessions being stolen. Musician Ilja Alexanderprovides a solace for all the bruised souls with his latest meditative and reflective work Nature via Green Monk Records which talks about healing and growth amidst adversity.
The musician elaborates on how dear this particular EP means to him: “We breathe and live by all that Nature gives us. We reach to her for calmness and peace. The message of this song is to remind everyone how precious Nature is and to restore harmony and balance in today’s world. It’s a song about gratitude and love. This song is also about finding individual harmony and balance, peace of mind. I found inspiration for the songs on this EP while processing some profound childhood traumas. Nature, as well as my previously released single Butterfly, are about self-awakening and guidance.”
We can all take a leaf of wisdom from this latest EP that takes an honest look at humanity and how we can fix it if we start looking inward. A sweet-sounding and light production leave to access the heartfelt lyrical content that the musician shares freely. Let your mind wander into a dreamlike pop landscape with this new EP.
French indie-pop artist Dude Low released his jazz-inspired single “Bottle”. The new single sharply contrasts the artist’s previous release, “Amnesia,” which heavily leaned into synth-pop elements. However, a steady trait throughout Dude Low’s music is an undeniable softness of the chords and an incredible sense of depth through jazz influences.
“Bottle” touches on his infatuation with parties – which commonly include bottles of liquor – that brought him into a delusional lifestyle. Dude Low talks about the addictiveness of partying, “Why paradise is always a mirage,” he sings. “Once you taste it, you’re stuck in it.” The song calls attention to how drinking, partying or doing drugs create illusions for people searching for a vice. Like in many of his songs, Dude Low effortlessly merges serious discussions with wildly interesting soundscapes.
Dude Low, the modern proletarian, is back for 10 tracks with rich sounds that explore his wandering Egotrip. From his headquarters (Rennes), he calls for a journey after a year of solitary therapy, far from his tribe: humans. Neither too political nor too fatalistic, Dude Low spits on what annoys him without claiming to know the solution. Through beats that rub up against hip hop, the artist wants to be uncompromising by creating his own artisanal mix ready to swing his left hook in the unbearable gloom of routine, or by enhancing it with a melancholic caress. Who said romance was dead? Not Dude Low. Life is like a Wes Anderson movie, it all depends on how you perceive it. Gathering momentum from a run of shows in France, Dude Low has wrapped up recording sessions in anticipation of his upcoming album Ego Tripon Fogwood Records due to be released April 2022.
Now, if you’ve been following RCRD LBL for the past year, chances are you would have heard about the Chinese-British songstress Fifi Rong and her fantastical build towards releasing her latest crowd-funded album, There Is A Funeral In My Heart, For Every Man I Loved. The singer first arrived on our radar in February 2021 with the release of ‘Another Me’ and the artistic music video that accompanied it. In the nearly full year to follow, we saw Fifi Rong investigate the world of live performance, become a forerunner in the NFT community and launch the impressively successful crowd-funding campaign that helped her give back to her followers and collaborators alike.
It seemed only fitting to round off the year with Fifi Rong as we explore her mind, creative process and plans for the future. Find it all in the exclusive interview below.
Tell us about your first memory of music and how it inspired you
I was 4 watching this TV show about pianists and I developed this aching desire toward it and begged my parents to get me a piano.
In your biog, you mentioned how you’ve struggled to reconcile the two different sides of society (Western and Eastern). Do you feel you were able to bring the two together in your latest album?
Yes absolutely. It’s effortless now, and I can dial to any side as I wish.
There Is A Funeral In My Heart, For Every Man I Loved was crowd-funded, reaching the goal before the campaign ended. Tell us how you feel about this success and what you envision the next step to be
I’m very proud and loved. We reached the goal 2 weeks before the end of the campaign and ended at 164% crossed Indiegogo and my website’s crowdfunding period. This is proof of the ‘1000 true fan’ theory of how modern artists can have true creative freedom and full support from a relatively small number of true supporters instead of millions of distant listeners/fans. Going forward, I will be taking my connection with my real supporters to web3, which is an environment where this culture I have developed in my community can really thrive.
What is your favourite aspect of your video for ‘Out Of Clock’? What makes it stand out from the rest?
I speak in Chinese and English in the monologue at the intro, and tell the story of Why There Is A Funeral In My Heart in Chinese on one of the stereo fields, whereas I kept repeating the Album title in the other stereo field. It sums up the album really, and the production style is my favourite type in all my productions too: ‘passive aggressive’. Also, the chorus really spells out the general emotional signature of the entire album. ‘My heart is running out of love, for anyone, to stay’… after every funeral I gave to every single love affair. It’s a memoir of love after all.
The world of NFTs is quickly evolving, with you as one of the forerunners in the community. Tell us why you believe this new digital world is so important?
Cryptocurrency and NFT is a new technology, a disruptive one. Technology is a one way street, and NFT as a technology will take over the whole world before everyone realises it. It creates a better, fairer world and financial system, a win-win situation for creators, fans, and collectors, and adds much more utility and ownership to the relations between them.
Metaverse is the immediate future that will integrate with most of our lives and NFT is the builder block of this meta universe we are moving into.
Where is a good starting point for an artist looking to enter the NFT game? What tips would you give to a newcomer?
Web3 is powered by people and communities and the key is self governance, so education and connection with others in the community is the first and foremost aspect of longevity in NFT. So I’d recommend finding us on twitter, we have community space to educate and connect all the time around the week/cock. My twitter is @fifirong so follow me and connect on my daily onboarding show and I’ll set them up.
Tell us about your latest album. Which track shouldn’t fans sleep on and why?
‘I’m Enough’ has been talked about a lot from the feedback so far. I didn’t expect that, as I didn’t get special ‘love’ earlier during the making of the album from my peers, so I was sleeping on it. But now the album is out, people are loving it, and felt that it should have been a single as well. But then, the traditional industry may think there’s no single in my album, whereas my true supporters think every song is a single. Guess whose view I care more about?:)
Cinematic singer-songwriter Hannah Schneider has unveiled ‘We’ll Be The Only Sound In The World’ shared from her upcoming album Ocean Letters which will be released in September next year via Midnight Confessions.
Born into music, her parents are both classical musicians. Her sound has been compared to the likes of Ólafur Arnalds, Sigur Rós and The Cinematic Orchestra.
‘We’ll Be The Only Sound In The World’ is characterised by its serenity, and although the track is spacious and minimalistic, Schnieder’s voice creates a tapestry of intense sonic detail.
Speaking of the song, Hannah Schneider tells us: “This is the first single from my forthcoming album “Ocean Letters”- an album that is thematically inspired by Danish poet Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen and her little book of the same name, that talks about the evolution of the world as it is seen by the Ocean. This song is written from the perspective of a conch shell, telling its stories of the grains of sand and the waves that indented it, playing with the fact that seashells actually are a kind of amplifier of ambient noise. The song was written during a lockdown in Denmark this January, and it reflects the feeling of pandemic stillness – the lack of aeroplanes in the sky, and traffic sounds that usually create eternal background noise.”
‘We’ll Be The Only Sound In The World’ features on the Spotify playlist CHILL_GROUND.fm
