maelstrom: her empty eyes

RAAR present the first full-length album from label co-founder Maelstrom, entitled Her Empty Eyes. Both an evolution of the producer's rich history and an intellectual departure from its predecessors, Her Empty Eyes is a work that is uncanny, challenging, and meditative. Continuing upon the cross-media mission of RAAR, the LP is the outline of a sonic novel. Maelstrom describes: "During the last 12 months, my music started to become the soundtrack of an imaginary novel taking place between 1936 and 1939 in Spain. The novel depicts the life of Marina, a news photographer covering the war during these four years, meeting John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway at 'Hotel Florida' in Madrid, George Orwell and Buenaventura Durruti on the frontline, or anonymous volunteers of the International Brigades in Barcelona. We follow her investigating the death of Jose Robles, a Spanish intellectual who was allegedly killed by members of the soviet secret police lead by Alexander Orlov, also believed to be responsible for the torture and death of Andres Nin, leader of the POUM, during Barcelona's 'May Days' of 1937. While looking into the murder, Marina keeps on covering the war for international magazines, travelling with the Lincoln Brigade during the Battle Of Jarama or with Spanish civilians fleeing Malaga by the road as bombs fall and planes strafe the ground with machine-gun fire. . . . The album's title refers to our heroine's untimely demise, and the evidence of what was captured in her empty eyes, burned forever into the film in her precious Leica." Maelstrom explains the recording process: "My recording method has drastically changed since I started experimenting with Milton H. Erickson's self-hypnosis techniques about a year ago. I went from overthinking every part of the recording process multiple times over, resulting in dozens of versions of each of my tracks, to a state where thinking wasn't part of the equation anymore. Self-hypnosis is quite impossible to describe -- more than anything, it's a way to fully exist in the present. After a few weeks of experimentation, it became possible for me to record tracks in one take, without feeling any urge to refine or rework them. I would switch on the studio, work on a sound palette, and then press play and record, every day." Rather than focusing on club bangers, Maelstrom depicts a future of techno that is intellectual, historical, spiritual, and emotional.