dedicated to my sweetest Love Gesine
Popnoname – Spaces – Pop! Records 2010
Brut! Records baby sister label, Pop!, sees its second release with Popnoname’s Spaces. An eclectic line-up, including Joerg Burger, Freund der Familie and Paid for Fame, remix the original three times over offering varied perspectives of the same brave track. Revving its engine, Spaces drives you to experience things: it invites you to crack yourself open so that some new future might pour through that voluntary rift. Bold and beautiful and formless, it emerges: a baby nebula, cradled in the spiral arms of a distant galaxy, patiently building mass as it clumps gas and dust together.
The important things often creep up unaware. Only once they arrive do you recognize them, even though you had given them no shape in your mind prior to their arrival. Space gives possibility to what these forms might be, boundless in four-dimensions. It’s that expanding medium that allows imagination to roam without end…where the need to distinguish between what you know and invented evaporates and flows pure and clear.
With Spaces, Popnoname adds an “s” to the end of this giant 5-letter word and a plurality emerges. Definition shuffles its feet and looks to the ceiling, uncertain of just whom it might be. This record examines ‘spaces’ with different dimensions and structures. It invites you to explore sonic relationships. Each artist applies a creative force to the word and a preferred geometry settles into form: one moment a handled-cup, the next a donut, a tire, a steel nut, a pipe…ever-shifting manifolds.
On the A-side, the original track is perhaps an imprint of Popnoname’s inner shape: a confident energy creating a place where rare river otters lounge on sun-warmed rocks and thick water fills your mouth when you inhale to drink. Joerg Burger’s remix follows with a poetic sprung-rhythm. Stripping away the pop and sparkle, he studies the beauty of its reduced structure: comfortable in its naked form.
The flip side offers Freund der Familie’s abstracted take. Removing the vocals, the track slowly melts away into decaying reverb. Billowing echoes subtly elongate deep belly growls and stretch your sight beyond the visible horizon until intuition emerges. Paid for Fame closes out the record by layering the excitement of live crowds over Popnoname’s strength. Mirroring the original track, it offers a reflection in a different context, with a new interpretation.
Spaces, with its uplifting sounds and expanding surfaces, offers a solid theory as to what the elusive content (that missing mass called dark matter) of the universe might be. But you’ll have to first listen and reach for the dangling string floating by, attached to a red helium balloon, allow yourself whatever transformation might unfold once you grasp hold.
words by rayna de niord
[POP! 02]
Original track from forthcoming release “Spaces”
BY POPNONAME
Produced by BASTIAN WEGNER & VOLKER PANNES
Mixed by VOLKER PANNES
Coming on POP! RECORDS
February 17.02.2010
(Joerg Burger / Freund der Familie / Paid For Fame remixes)
