Jumpel - Onion (DOC6) [Electronic Music]

Jumpel is the solo project of Cologne-based, Joachim Dürbeck aka Jumpel, a composer, producer and sound designer, with a long history of musical endeavour - mostly collaborative, including pan-European live shows, working behind the scenes of TV and films - that if you're German you could probably name, and also as a designer of virtual instruments to help out his fellow musicians, it's safe to say that he has put the time in and paid his dues. And now, wrapped in the Jumpel moniker, after all these years, it's time to go solo.

After the end of any decades-long partnership - personal or production, there's going to be some mirror staring and doubts amongst the hopes and dreams, but it seems like denial is not an option for Dürbeck; he's asking all the right questions, and finding the answers too. One of those questions also shaped a good-looking, fun, philosophical and easy-to-use audio manipulation website/field for sound culture (delete as applicable), called Toneveld :

- "the truth is out there if you look hard enough."

And if only I had more time, I'd happily lost myself playing around with it for a few days - just like the good old days when the internet was young and exciting, rather than manipulated and manipulative.

But on to the music. The rather disingenuously entitled "Onion" is his, after a bit of hand holding two years back with Adi Goldstein, Jumpel solo debut, and it's a deceptively simple, seriously effective slice of atmospheric electronic music. One of the benefits of musical experience, if you're wise, is knowing what to leave out, and when to stop - a surprisingly rare skill, and it sounds like Dürbeck has also given this some thought.

To call this loop-based music would do it an injustice, but there's looping and then there's this sort of looping. The sounds are beautifully crafted, worth repeating and melted into each other, obscuring any joins. The drums are a resting, beating heart rather than a call to dance. String aping synths add some class and style to the after the after party rhythm. The low-end frequencies rumble - pleasingly distorting to mildly moody effect, as higher frequencies zip about the soundscape - machine made fire flies in the welcome gloom that obscures the news cycle horrors to comforting effect, rather than accentuates your fears. Sometimes less is more, and that's just fine with me.

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Playlist Companion

Find Jumpel in the Slowtronic Playlist.