marsen jules: shadows in time

Marsen Jules releases his concept album Shadows in Time on Oktaf Records Ever since Steve Reich's "It's Gonna Rain" and Brian Eno's Music For Airports, musicians have used different techniques to create music, which modulates on the basis of strict rules of varying over and over and thus emerges from the very moment itself. Thereby, it is the great depth of a composer's artistry to determine the possibilities, to define the fine line between stagnation and chaos, to sound the limits between monotony and cacophony. Following this tradition is also german ambient musician Martin Juhls aka Marsen Jules. For more than a decade, the sound poet has been reviving touching acoustic moments and condensing them to musical jewels. While doing so, he likes to compare his way of working with the approaches to abstract painting: The sound particles turn into timbres and tone colors that Jules arranges on the compositional canvas of time and space as quietly flowing snapshot. Marsen Jules has refined this technique more and more over the past years and has developed it further in every detail. Thus, his compositions vary on all sorts of levels and modulate in all ranges of the spectrum of sound, reaching deep into the granular structure of the sounds. That way, seemingly static sound structures are created and they vary endlessly, making every single moment absolutely unique. A simple process that is so complex in itself, that even modern high-performance computer systems cannot capture it. Shadows in Time is a generative composition that originates from within itself over and over again in unique forms. What, on the surface, conveys the impression of steady repetitions, in detail turns out to be a constant variation of continuous uniqueness.