kangding ray: hyper opal mantis

The tension between the natural and artificial, the body and mind, are central themes in electronic music in general, and techno in particular, as the means of creation, focused around technology and interactions with machines, contrast with the emotional response to sound, the mystical ritual of collective dancing, and the ethos of liberation and tolerance embedded in the culture it produced. We're navigating a world of engineered pleasures, big data monitoring of movements and consumption habits, and falsely objective representations of reality, further blurred by a reduced attention span and several opaque layers of cultural interpretation and political manipulation. Manichean simplifications are used to create hate and fear in order to achieve domination and impose limits on freedom, and the irrational belief in endless growth, increasingly disconnected from nature, led to massive environmental destructions and waves of unprecedented extinctions of species. Our primal sensuous perception, vastly more abstract, emotional and sensual, make us feel the world as an ambiguous realm we are part of, but not in control of; a complex network of interacting forces and enigmatic patterns, a matrix of overlapping desires. Rebuilding our bonds with nature, reconnecting with our senses, and spreading love in the process become an essential act of resistance. Hyper Opal Mantis is a triptych on three states of desire, and the first long player of Kangding Ray for Stroboscopic Artefacts. Hyper is the primal, sensual lust, Opal is the emotional catharsis, a blissful desire for love. Mantis, like the insect it refers to, is the destructive, fatal attraction. French-born, Berlin-based composer and producer David Letellier, aka Kangding Ray, uses the combination of slowly swelling melodies and emotionally charged machine sounds to gives way to a sensitive, rhythmic symphony of staggering beauty - a juxtaposition of organic and synthetic, of acoustic instrumentation and digitized beats. His darkly textured techno grooves - a palette of throbbing bass lines, necromantic synths, processed guitar loops, rattling walls of distortion and unorthodox field recordings - accounts for a brooding, futuristic entity that connects him with both experimental and club culture. CD version comes in gatefold sleeve with hi-quality matte finish.