Arp shares video ahead of new album on Mexican Summer
Arp unveils new video for ‘Fluorescences’
Defined by inventive production that draws inspiration from an intersection of 80s Japanese avant pop, Compass Point synth funk and Brazilian rainforest textures, ‘Fluorescences’ is the first single from forthcoming album ‘ZEBRA’ by Arp, AKA Alexis Georgopoulos.
Shot on Super8 film by cinematographer Shawn Brackbill, art directed by Georgopoulos and edited by the video’s star Monica Hofstadter, it was shot on location in New York, where the album was also made.
“The song itself is quite playful, really. As it took shape, it kind of felt as if it started glowing. So, I started joking around that it was a love song about fluorescent tubes! Which is it is, in part”, explains Georgopoulos. “I’d always loved the idea of Kraftwerk writing this incredible, romantic song about the lights of the city at night (‘Neon Lights’), which really is one of their great tracks. And I sort of went with that kind of idea, and ‘Fluoresences’ became — while stylistically something altogether very different — an analog of sorts. A love song to light. To this very modern, sort of alien phenomenon. But, a kind of springtime glow, a strange oxymoron.”
“Originally, we’d wanted to shoot it on VHS, but it didn’t materialize easily so we went with Super 8, which, strangely, can share certain qualities with VHS, in terms of how light saturates the film”, he adds. “We’d been watching that Wim Wenders documentary ‘Notebooks on Cities and Clothes’ and Elizabeth Lennard’s ‘Tokyo Melody’, and there were qualities we were after that we’d loved about those documentaries.”
Arp’s new album ‘ZEBRA’ released 22nd June, via Mexican Summer
A master of abstract impressionism, NY-based artist/producer/DJ Alexis Georgopoulos (aka Arp) is no newcomer to the scene. As a matter of course, in his 15+ years making work, he has sounded radically different with each album and project, pursuing new concepts and occupying diverse mindsets, reaching into typically segregated corners, offering a strikingly varied array of forms — presenting a fresh approach that defies convention, in the process releasing music with the labels RVNG, Beats In Space, Smalltown Supersound, Type, Emotional Rescue and Mexican Summer.
An experimentalist who never loses sight of the generosity of pop, with ‘ZEBRA’, the fourth Arp longplayer, Georgopoulos has boldly stepped into vastly new musical territory and reinvented the project’s paradigm – blurring lines between electronic and acoustic, between the experimental impulse and the addictive pop sensibility. And he appears to be hitting a new high.
‘ZEBRA’ is a crystallization, a post-everything symbiosis of ancient to future psychotropics. This sophisticated widescreen double-album journeys into sound; it’s a glorious beam of warm light and a ripple in natural fluorescences that hovers between Balearic, kosmische, African, jazz, modern composition, post-minimalism and leftfield club dynamics. In essence, ‘ZEBRA’ is cosmic music par excellence, which assimilates the-varied-but-essentially-linked essences of Pat Metheny, Terry Riley, Abdullah Ibrahim, Raymond Scott, Don Cherry and Herbie Hancock — until they acquiesce into one multifaceted yet perfectly logical euphony.
“Going into it, the goal was to not be so… restrictive. Limitation has always been a really useful tool for me; even here there was a choice to work with a distinct instrumental palette. But in terms of what I would do, it felt really good to unrestrict myself. My fear was always that collapsing my divergent interests into a discreet body of work would result in something really… unruly. But it feels like this is a map for me, a vocabulary that gives me room to move”, explains Alexis.
‘ZEBRA’ emphasizes points of connectivity between far-flung traditions, disrupting established boundaries between musical traditions and hierarchies, in in a time when reactive and fractious isolationism threaten to emphasize division. Reaching across genres — colliding modern composition with post-pop structures, dub techniques and three-dimensional geometries — Georgopoulos creates a delirious mélange of sound that’s spellbinding in its range.
Using forward-looking production techniques and an idiosyncratic instrumental palette — analog synthesizers, double bass, Fender Rhodes, electronic and acoustic drums, flute, harmonizers and tape delay — Georgopoulos paints a topography of sound, hinting at an astonishing range of styles and smiles, from 4th World tremors, cosmic jazz, forward-looking 80s Japanese production, to floating kosmische drum atmospherics. Like transmissions through a medium wave receiver, it moves, liquid like, in flow motion. A mutant offspring of diverse stylings, unlikely convergences and unfixed constellations stretching into new mutations. All that’s solid melts to air, all that’s air crystallizes into rhythm, Shifting through multiple atmospheres, telling a complicated story that compels repeat listens.
Full biography and other information here
Previous praise for Arp:
“Wonderful” Pitchfork
“Exquisite” Uncut
“Ethereal, expansive, extroverted and quixotic” Village Voice
“A subtly mindblowing trip” 20 Jazz Funk Greats
“A beaut of kosmische flow motion, his groove has luminescence” Mojo
“Classically rendered and refined“ Resident Advisor
“Fans of the more pensive, organic end of kosmische music will find much to admire here” FACT