John Lemke

from 'People Do' [CD|LP|DIGITAL]
available on all formats at www.denovali.com/johnlemke

Denovali Records is proud to announce the release of John Lemke's debut album in July 2013. As an appetizer we offer the 'Walizka' EP as a digital only release, it contains only tracks not available on the album. We also offer the song 'Traveller', which is also not contained on the album, and a remix by Emperor Echo as a free download.

PEOPLE DO [CD|LP|DIGITAL]

John Lemke is a Glasgow based composer & sound designer, originally from Berlin. Working across a great variety of media he explores music and all things sonic through collaborations, live performance, film sound design and especially his work as a documentary composer for the BBC and Channel 4.

Motivated by fusing elements of his more emotive film composition approach with rhythm and space, John creates a distinctive sound blend on his debut solo album, where percussive, prepared piano collides with abstracted guitar landscapes & disembodied vocal textures to form a danceable, electro-acoustic whole. 

Inside the creaking hollows of an attic treasure begins the uncompromising journey of People Do. Eager to devise a more dance oriented sound on his first full length release with Denovali, and contrasting his more ambient, often orchestral film work, John first found inspiration in the idiosyncratic sound world of his grandmother's piano. With a shimmering past in the silent film era of 1920's Berlin, its very fabric was full of anecdotes. But sampling every string and surface, preparing it with kitchen utensils, let alone playing the instrument itself was only the starting point of the intricately woven narrative of People Do.

With a process including techniques of musique concrète, sound design concepts such as worldising (playing back and re-recording sound through a room) and the use of homemade field recordings from all around Europe, the album is filled with depth and a true sense of voyage. This is also reflected in the various locations the record was conceived and recorded in, ranging from Berlin to Bristol, Helsinki to rural Spain and Glasgow, with guest contributions on viola from Kim Moore (Ex-Zoey Van Goey) and Felipe Sumina (saxophone), only for it to be mastered at Durton Studio by Nils Frahm.

John's dedication to ignoring genre boundaries makes for an album impossible yet needless to categorise, echoing its wide ranging influences, but ultimately existing entirely on its own terms.

For fans of Four Tet, Boards Of Canada, The Notwist, Hauschka, Pole, Aphex Twin, Lali Puna

People Do

John Lemke - Illuminations

from 'Walizka' [CD|LP|DIGITAL]
Denovali Records · den201
available on all formats at [http://denovali.com/johnlemke]

Working across a variety of media John Lemke explores all things sonic through live performance, sound design and his work as a documentary film composer. The Walizka EP is his latest solo release on Denovali Records.

Three items in a suitcase, a clarinet, a looper and a microphone - is how it all started. 

A free improvisation with friend & collaborator Łukasz Bernacki (on clarinet) sparked John’s desire to bring his compositional and production approach back down to the most basic elements. Creating simple, yet distinctive rhythms only through tapping contact microphones run into noisy guitar amps became the base for the EP’s three tracks, consequently inspiring its live, lo-fi feel. Written and recorded between John’s native Berlin and his adopted home of Glasgow, Walizka (Polish for ‘suitcase’) somehow absorbs the defining atmospheres of both cities in its core.

Previously released digitally as a teaser for John’s debut album, the Walizka EP actually presents newer material, progressing the electro-acoustic nature of ‘People Do’ towards more dub drenched territories. Refining John’s blend of prepared piano and field recordings with hand crafted beats and swampy bass lines, this deeply moody and danceable release bends genres with refreshing ease.

The EP is furthermore enhanced by a second half of remixes by fellow Denovali artists Piano Interrupted, SaffronKeira and Petrels and the ever elusive Everyday Dust. Far from conventional remixes, these pieces fall more in the category of re-imaginations, complementing the EP’s first, more rhythm anchored half with a coherent ambient counterpart.

Written, performed, recorded & produced by John Lemke in 2013
Mastered by Alex Gámez at Störung Studio
Artwork by Łukasz Bernacki

Walizka

John Lemke - Walizka (Piano Interrupted Remix)

Remix I did for Everyday Dust's "Combinatio Nova". Out now on Sparkwood Records. 

Get it here: https://sparkwoodrecords.bandcamp.com/album/combinatio-nova

Everyday Dust - Bound in a Nutshell (The Elephant Frame Remix)

from 'Nomad Frequencies' [CD|2xLP|DIGITAL]
Denovali Records · den237
available in September on all formats at [http://denovali.com/johnlemke]

An ardent moulder of sound, John Lemke began carving out a very unique music blend on his debut album 'People Do' (2013) and its follow up EP 'Walizka' (2014). Informed by his work as a sound designer & composer for documentary films and his natural inclination towards fusing rhythm with rich textures and emotive melodies, he set out on a musical path that had been long in the making and is ever evolving.

The quest for unusual, inspiring sound sources has always been at the heart of John's process, however the genesis of his second album 'Nomad Frequencies' was rooted in much more inadvertent circumstances. In the summer of 2014, forced to indefinitely evacuate his Glasgow flat and studio due to structural damage from one hour to the next, with nothing more than a laptop and a bag of clothes, John embarked on a six month odyssey of soul searching, couch surfing and spending an extended period of time in his old hometown of Berlin for the first time in years - it was to be an odyssey that would help ferment and distill the ideas of his second album on which work had just begun. 

A year of particular global turmoil and upheaval, combined with John's personal, albeit very minor, 'displacement', caused a lot of questioning, frustration and anger, which somehow found its way onto the new material: a more confrontational, at times aggressive sound, paired on the other hand with a yearning for harmony, balance and space. Other influences came less from the world of music, but rather in visual form, through the densely textural art of Anselm Kiefer and the political, yet poetic musings of film maker Adam Curtis.

Intent on refining his sound toward a more minimal, bolder style, John set out to limit his sonic palate to a handful of carefully chosen elements. At the centre of this new direction remains the muted piano already introduced on his debut, but in a much more purified and raw form. This organic base is adorned by the warm fuzzing and wavering of analogue synthesisers, tape echoes, meditative tuning forks, field recordings from John's 'exile' period and percussion based on his rigid approach to sampling, which started developing on 'Walizka'. The guiding principle of his orthodox style of recording and sampling is to only use home-made sounds by utilising his own field recordings, applying contact microphones or hydrophones to objects and instruments, running them through different kinds of speakers and re-recording the sounds to arrive at a 'lived in' quality, often misunderstood as plainly 'lo-fi'. Touches of viola and woodwinds parts (Kim Moore of WOLF and Andrew Baker respectively) provide melody fragments and subtle details throughout the journey.

With John's healthy disregard for genre boundaries, the array of influences on 'Nomad Frequencies' is vast, but never over-powering. From the meditative tuning fork that starts proceedings on 'Of Elsewhere', the dub echoes to the hints of minimalism, free jazz explosions to the Lynchian atmospherics, all elements serve nothing more than the album's narrative journey between friction and harmony, best appreciated in its entirety. A rhythmic backbone collides with rich ambience and melody, often infectious and jarring at the same time, forging a soulful whole which most likely only reveals its true self after multiple spins.

Nomad Frequencies

John Lemke - The Unwinding

from 'Nomad Frequencies' [CD|2xLP|DIGITAL]
Denovali Records · den237
available on all formats at [http://denovali.com/johnlemke]

An ardent moulder of sound, John Lemke began carving out a very unique music blend on his debut album 'People Do' (2013) and its follow up EP 'Walizka' (2014). Informed by his work as a sound designer & composer for documentary films and his natural inclination towards fusing rhythm with rich textures and emotive melodies, he set out on a musical path that had been long in the making and is ever evolving.

The quest for unusual, inspiring sound sources has always been at the heart of John's process, however the genesis of his second album 'Nomad Frequencies' was rooted in much more inadvertent circumstances. In the summer of 2014, forced to indefinitely evacuate his Glasgow flat and studio due to structural damage from one hour to the next, with nothing more than a laptop and a bag of clothes, John embarked on a six month odyssey of soul searching, couch surfing and spending an extended period of time in his old hometown of Berlin for the first time in years - it was to be an odyssey that would help ferment and distill the ideas of his second album on which work had just begun. 

A year of particular global turmoil and upheaval, combined with John's personal, albeit very minor, 'displacement', caused a lot of questioning, frustration and anger, which somehow found its way onto the new material: a more confrontational, at times aggressive sound, paired on the other hand with a yearning for harmony, balance and space. Other influences came less from the world of music, but rather in visual form, through the densely textural art of Anselm Kiefer and the political, yet poetic musings of film maker Adam Curtis.

Intent on refining his sound toward a more minimal, bolder style, John set out to limit his sonic palate to a handful of carefully chosen elements. At the centre of this new direction remains the muted piano already introduced on his debut, but in a much more purified and raw form. This organic base is adorned by the warm fuzzing and wavering of analogue synthesisers, tape echoes, meditative tuning forks, field recordings from John's 'exile' period and percussion based on his rigid approach to sampling, which started developing on 'Walizka'. The guiding principle of his orthodox style of recording and sampling is to only use home-made sounds by utilising his own field recordings, applying contact microphones or hydrophones to objects and instruments, running them through different kinds of speakers and re-recording the sounds to arrive at a 'lived in' quality, often misunderstood as plainly 'lo-fi'. Touches of viola and woodwinds parts (Kim Moore of WOLF and Andrew Baker respectively) provide melody fragments and subtle details throughout the journey.

With John's healthy disregard for genre boundaries, the array of influences on 'Nomad Frequencies' is vast, but never over-powering. From the meditative tuning fork that starts proceedings on 'Of Elsewhere', the dub echoes to the hints of minimalism, free jazz explosions to the Lynchian atmospherics, all elements serve nothing more than the album's narrative journey between friction and harmony, best appreciated in its entirety. A rhythmic backbone collides with rich ambience and melody, often infectious and jarring at the same time, forging a soulful whole which most likely only reveals its true self after multiple spins.

John Lemke - Vessel

Denovali Records is proud to announce the release of John Lemke's debut album in July 2013. As an appetizer we offer the song "Traveller" and a remix by Emperor Echo as a free download at [www.denovali.com/mp3shop]
        

01 Traveller
02 Traveller (Emperor Echo's Dub Europe Express Mix)

Track 1 written, recorded & produced by John Lemke (2013)
Track 2 mixed and dubbed by Emperor Echo

Artwork by Lukasz Bernacki
Frequencies lifted by LXC at WATTA SOUND

---

John Lemke is a Glasgow based artist, originally from Berlin.

Working across a great variety of media he has spent the last years exploring music and all things sonic through collaborations, live performance, film sound design and especially his work as a documentary film composer.

Motivated by fusing elements of his more emotive film composition approach with rhythm and space, John has created a distinctive sound world on his forthcoming debut solo album, where abstracted guitar landscapes collide with percussive, prepared piano and disembodied vocal textures to form a danceable, electro-acoustic whole.

Traveller

John Lemke - Traveller

...traversing aimlessly in dark fields of joyfull reminiscing.