Melbourne electronic auteur Jeremy Dower’s 2004 second album available digitally for the first time
JEREMY DOWER’S 2004 SECOND ALBUM MADE AVAILABLE DIGITALLY FOR THE FIRST TIME
“Dower uses MIDI to create uneasy pseudo-mechanical versions of clapped-out bargain bin smoove jazz, twisting the edges just enough to keep us listening. You’d be surprised at how well it works.” – Boomkat
Music for the Young and the Restless, the second album by Melbourne, Australia electronic artist Jeremy Dower, was originally released in 2004 by Japanese label Bit Of Heaven. It is now made available digitally for the first time by Chapter Music, with new cover art by Jeremy.
After his landmark double LP debut Sentimental Dance Music For Couples, released by Los Angeles label Plug Research in 2000 and recently re-released digitally by Chapter, Jeremy released a mini album Music For Retirement Villages, Circa 2050 as a 12″ and CD for Chapter in 2002.
He then relocated to Japan, teaching and working in Tokyo for the next few years, and eventually releasing his second full album Music for the Young and the Restless in 2004 via Tokyo imprint Bit Of Heaven, a label which only ever had three releases.
Difficult to find outside Japan, Music for the Young and the Restless has undeservedly languished for the last 21 years as one of Jeremy’s most obscure releases.
The album was recorded in Melbourne and Jeremy’s hometown of Bendigo, Victoria between 2000 and 2003. It continues Jeremy’s exploration of the digital as a simulacrum of the organic, this time incorporating faux-acoustic guitar tones and evoking folky vistas with titles such as Morning Frost Over Paddocks With Live Stock and Music For Log Fires.
With the benefit of hindsight it stands out as one of Jeremy’s most beautiful works, pastoral, elegant and enchanting.
Jeremy began recording in Melbourne in the late 90s, at first using the unpronounceable name Tetrphnm. Initially inspired by austere German techno such as Monolake and Mouse on Mars, Jeremy’s sound world grew to take in influences as various as The Sea and Cake, Joao Gilberto, Jaki Liebezeit and Alain Goraguer. But Jeremy worked through these touchstones all alone on the other side of the world, improvising systems of “subtractive composition” via cheap 90s sound cards, 12 bit samplers and banked noise gates.
His music evolved in a parallel but separate world to genres like IDM or Microhouse, but really it sounds like nothing but Jeremy Dower – magically inventive, touching and personal.
Over the last 25 years Jeremy has worked as a designer for computer games, written a PhD thesis on Music As Virtual Aesthetic Environment, had an exhibition of dog art shown in Melbourne and New York, designed live visuals for Gotye and had an 8bit version of the Simpsons Theme go viral (among other projects).
