Marsen Jules - The Endless Change of Colour

01 The Endless Change Of Colour (47:00)

In our, boxed, on-demand world where accessibility and recallability rule we can often forget the importance of the unpredictable or the joy of true discovery. Our lives are increasingly shaped by systems and patterns; downloaded, linked, and stored, that help us live, tell us when to go outside and what we will find when we get there. The mystery of our every day slowly seeps out of our lives like photograph bled of its color by the sun. There are fewer questions and too many answers.

The Endless Change Of Colour exists somewhere between our future and the mistakes and accidents we’ve made along the way. It is a celebration of both the system and the unexpected. Marsen Jules’ latest work is a generative music piece upon a single phrase of an old jazz record split into three audio streams. These streams are transformed into loops which break the original instrumentation down into sound resembling pure waves, harmonics and overtones.These loops play to different time signatures to create phasing patterns that continuously move and dance
around each other in a constantly-evolving lattice of sound. Despite it being based on a very strict and limited set of rules the music could, in theory, be endless and ever-changing.

Here, the listener’s discovery is a quiet and engaged one. Ripples and pulses set within a field of color that sometimes feels like water, sometimes like air and sometimes like glass. Electronic tones hum with warmth and the softness of slumber. The patterns are there, familiar to our modern ears, but they’re not always what they seem. The wandering mind steers this one along more than the generative grid on which it was based and The Endless Change Of Colour becomes exactly as its title suggests.

In the field of contemporary ambient music german composer Martin Juhls is one of the outstanding and influential figures of the last decade. Whether with his electronica/ambient-dub project krill.minima or with the even more popular sound-poetics of his alter ego Marsen Jules, he always combines a classic approach to ambient music with a modern and unique sounddesign. Starting with his highly aclaimed debut on the Thinner/Autoplate netlabel in 2003 he can allready look back on ten full length albums released on labels such as City Centre Offices, Native State Records, Genesungswerk and Psychonavigation as well as his own label Oktaf Records. Beside he is a regular contributor to the annual Pop Ambient compilations on Kompakt. In 2009 he was honoured with the “Best Album” at the Qwartz Electronic Music Awards in Paris and afterwards worked for a two week residency at the legendary GRM Studios. With his interest in new technology, unusual composition techniques and his high aspiration for a unique artistic expression Juhls follows a classic tradition of 20th century music innovators such as Steve Reich,Brian Eno or Arvo Pärt while expanding it into modern territory.