harmonious thelonious: petrolia

Since 2008 Düsseldorf-based producer and live wizard Stefan Schwander deeply concentrates on his always evolving electronic venture named Harmonious Thelonious. It besprinkles the world with fractional musical structures in the spirits of American minimal music, in order to immingle them with African rhythm patterns. Exceptional hypnotic opiates, enlarged with twisted harmonies and tricky rhythm archetypes, and all heavily danceable. After five magnetic albums for labels like Emotional Response and his old home base Italic as well as a highly-acclaimed string of EPs for in-demand platforms like Asafa, Diskant, Disk, Kontra-Muzik, Meakusma, The Trilogy Tapes or Versatile Records, he has now produced the arresting Petrolia LP for Marmo Music, a label that is itself not new to Harmonious Thelonious. On the label's second release he remixed Tru West on The DOWC Part 2 (2014); his "Sunset Liturgy" fingerprints are audible with a moving remix. Now he delivers six epic tunes that only partly dance the familiar Harmonious Thelonious dance. There are deep traces from Africa and Arabia, there is the polyrhythmic witchery that makes his music special, but in contrast his new tunes are more mental than his former ones. They have a menacing industrial feel but yet continue to be enlarged with the enchanting spirits of the land of the Sahara. Furthermore, there is a slight manic touch arising from nervous electronic and foremost organic melodies. The live-played jittering is coming from the Berlin-based experimental musician Ghazi Barakat, also known under monikers like Pharoah Chromium or Crème de Hassan for mind-shredding ambient, drone, experimental, noise, industrial, free jazz, and free improvisation music from beyond. For Harmonious Thelonious, Barakat, who also worked with Marmo Music artist Günther Schickert on the collaboration album OXTLR (2014), tuned his wind instruments, Rauschpfeife and Kangling in a elflock-stricken Master Musicians of Jajouka way. Instead of giving them a prominent lead position, however, Schwander deeply implements their tones into his propulsive creations to evoke a modern rhythmic meltdown of Occident versus Orient, exhaling a deeply absorbing soul. This a record whose psychedelic energy fits perfect into the Marmo Music cosmos, a world where the progressiveness of the 70's continue to live in the current to disband all white-bread musical norms for the energy of music without classes.