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Pre-order 'Love Letters, Nine Through Six': http://96back.co.uk/loveletters

96 Back concludes his trilogy of 2021 releases with Love Letters, Nine Through Six, a new full-length album.

Following March’s 9696 Dream mixtape and July’s Flex Time EP, this new album sees 96 Back shine the spotlight on his own vocals for the first time, at points (such as on lead single ‘9 To Find 6’) operating fully in the realms of experimental pop. At other times, such as on ‘Teach Me Tenderness’ and ‘Feel Hard’, 96 Back stretches and processes his vocals to almost breaking point, while album closer ‘Melt You’ sees him duet with past collaborator Iceboy Violet, ending Love Letters on a sombre but romantic note.

That’s not to say Love Letters is fully removed from the dancefloor, however: tracks like ‘Don’t Die’ and ‘Love Compact’ are precision-tooled for the club, while the likes of ‘Felzin’ and ‘Vibrant Colours’ continue to explore the intricate but emotive electronics that 96 Back has been so successful with in the past.

More varied and vivid than any of 96 Back’s releases to date, Love Letters feels like a coming of age moment. It casts its net incredibly wide at points, and it’s an album full of ambition, but it meets every challenge it sets itself — as affecting in its quieter, tender moments as during its dramatic peaks.

In 96 Back’s words: “This is a record I feel like I’ve been trying to write for years, it feels like the most accurate body of work to match the ideas in my mind. Trying to project a lot of the records I hold very dear to me through this lens, interpreting how they sound to me and merging them with ideas of finding the drama and excitement in the full spectrum of emotions on the tip of my tongue, that’s what ended up being Love Letters, Nine Through Six.”

Love Letters, Nine Through Six

96 Back - 9 To Find 6

Notumato

Sithi Shwi (feat. Big Zulu, DJ Maphorisa & Kabza De Small)

Giving form to a broad personal project of continuous inquiry and existential expression, ‘A World Of Service’ marks the Ostgut Ton debut of Spanish producer, DJ and artist JASSS [@jass-29] aka Silvia Jiménez Alvarez.

Buy ‘A World Of Service’ as 12" LP, digipak CD or in digital formats: https://berghain.berlin/jasss
Boomkat: https://boomkat.com/products/a-world-of-service

Listen at
Bandcamp: https://ostgut.bandcamp.com/album/a-world-of-service
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/album/a-world-of-service/1587326314
Derer: https://www.deezer.com/playlist/9615082122
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/5R76uc259XhrHUYGDcalQh
YouTube: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mOqu3yBiTOGor8eQrL9Kyrmbi6jVKDKiY

Watch the music video for “A World Of Service”, directed by Sander Houtkruijer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZzRP2p7Lek

The evolution of ‘A World Of Service’ has curved around genre collapsing and unexpected metamorphoses. Formerly the name of the monthly radio show JASSS hosted in Berlin, and soon to be the title of her expansive multi-sensory touring concept in collaboration with Ben Kreukniet, here ‘A World Of Service’ is powerfully concentrated in sonic form. Throughout the album JASSS muses on the especially current human and technological barriers to interconnectivity; both lyrically and musically she deconstructs the self, unmasks anxieties and interrogates the insufficiencies of language as applied to gender, identity and interpersonal relationships. Forming her own fluid, nuanced lexicon in response, JASSS seeks a deeper understanding of her multiple selves, emerging through unbridled adolescent rage and the wisdom of maturation, traversing liminality with abstract electronics and baroque industrial pop. Visually this is underscored by Matt Lambert’s uncanny floral cover portraiture, as well as the record’s distinct scent of wet earth, flower and woods developed for the album by Meri Bonastre and applied to the vinyl innersleeve.

Following the imaginative nostalgia of ‘Weightless’, her 2017 debut album for iDEAL Recordings, as well as her blistering dancefloor 12” for Whities / AD 93, ‘A World Of Service’ folds personal and societal concepts in on themselves, not seeking answers but rather luxuriating in the unique friction that questions create. JASSS is intensely focused yet musically unbridled; this is reflected in tonal shifts of ‘A World Of Service’. Through the computerised yearning and bruising of a heartbreak on “Luis”, to the jagged and wordless tundra of “Vapor Dentro”; the intriguing juxtaposition of warm, alluring Spanish vocals against rigid pillars of industrial heft and bass grind (“Camelo”), and the soaring maximalist industrial pop of the album’s closer, “Wish.”

As intensity rises through the pandemic-era trip hop of the album’s title track “A World Of Service”, JASSS sings:

“Pleasure /
Is nowhere to be found inside this world of service /
I call to be my life.”

Pleasure may remain elusive to her, but in the determination to make peace with her various identities in this technological age, JASSS offers a compelling glimpse into an essential type of artistic voice.

— Text: Christine Kakaire

Cover and artwork photography: Matt Lambert | Layout: Yusuf Etiman
Florals: Anatomie Fleur
Make-up: Christian Fritzenwanker and Mario Mendez
Scent: Fum de Kyphi

Buy Album

JASSS | A World Of Service

kiCK iiiii

Fireprayer

The third release on my label De Vlieger.
Dreamy blissed-out breaks by Eversines, plus a special Eris Drew remix.

Out now on Bandcamp:
https://devlieger.bandcamp.com/album/achterna

1. Eversines - Uitzicht
2. Eversines - Achterna
3. Eversines - Eens
4. Eversines - Achterna (Eris Drew Remix)
5. Eversines - Canvas (Bandcamp Exclusive)

All songs written and produced by Eversines.
Except for Achterna (Eris Drew Remix).
Additional keys, samples, programming and scratches by Eris Drew. Recorded and mixed in Studio B, Bellamy Way Studios, New Hampshire, USA, 2021.
Mastered by Wouter Brandenburg
Manufactured at R.A.N.D. Muzik
Distributed by Rush Hour
Photography by Lucas van der Rhee
Design by Colorblind

De Vlieger 3 | Eversines - Achterna (Incl. Eris Drew Remix) Snippets

Job Jobse