TWICE LIVE

Menelaos Tomasides – 31minuten playing Dreamhike
Phanton playing in EXO

DJ Keri Y

Samstag 16.11.2024 / 21 Uhr
Eintritt: 10 €
674FM Konzertraum
Ubierring 13, 50678 Köln

Menelaos Tomasides – Dreamhike

The unconscious and unknown must be really nice places. In any case, if you take the second album of Menelaos Tomasides under his given name as travelogue. A trip into dreamlike territory, yet concrete enough, a journey without target yet looking forward and looking back into familiar places, „Dreamhike“ both continues and departs from the style Menelaos has found earlier. We are rambling between the real and the imaginary. From the border triangle of Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands to the capital of Cyprus, where Menelaos grew up, the tracks are about real places, about real experiences and emotions yet interwoven with a dreamlike fabric. Something concrete that manifests in the genuine and special sound design of this records his really special treatment of dynamics and loudness.

It is one of the very few records where the established language of music making, specifically Techno, House, Dub, and early 2000’ Electronica, the clicks, thumps and plops from an earlier age of electronic music, transmogrify into slow movements of something new. Something that is gentle and truly personal. Quiet music no matter how high you turn up the volume. The album can be described as a product of openness. It comes from a lot of taking in the world, of travel, of places and people met, of friendship and conversation (not necessarily with words). The deep trip of “Dreamhike” further manifests Menelaos as one of the truly independent voices of electronic Cologne and beyond. Uncompromising yet gentle to the core: kind sounds from a kind spirit.

Michael Springer aka Phanton – IN EXO

Up from the ashes, Sonic.Trips returns for a special post to highlight our old friend from Germany — Phanton. Way back in August of 2021 we wrote of the enigmatic artist that his songs “are typically lengthy odysseys merging world-music sounds with tight production, samples, and dance beats,” and all of that is, somehow, built on and expanded with his latest record In EXO. The record is an abstract sonic adventure that fuses seemingly every style of music you have ever heard. Sparse, dynamic percussion often forms the foreground whereafter seemingly anything is possible. Abstract tech and synth experiments may  layer over in one moment, Spanish guitars another. Hypnotic vocals often add to the trance experience of the tracks as they seamlessly blend elements primarily from electronic and world music genres. The simple fact is: there is absolutely nothing like this record. Having produced music since the 80s in Cologne, Germany, Phanton has perhaps seen, er, well, heard it all at this point — and he channels that into this record which is as much an exploration of his sonic consciousness as it is any sort of outward expression. Stand out tracks include the 9-minute opus “Heartbreath,” and our personal favorite “Mehr Zeit.” The latter is an enchanting psychedelic track that ranges from funky to outright avant-garde in a manner that only an artist of Phanton’s stature could achieve.