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2x12"
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CADENZA 060LP
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CD
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CADENZA 008CD
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This is the first full-length release on Cadenza from Canada's Frivolous (Daniel Gardner). To Frivolous, dance music is about living life to the full, about acting out all possible human emotions in the eccentric, sweaty arena of a club. Gardner's tracks engage the crowds with grooves bursting with life and startling, eerie atmospheres. Exotic samples arranged into improbable yet emotionally-charged sound-scapes create a very special Frivolous experience: the sounds of a primeval forest encounter a dignified, aristocratic piano, a beautiful Russian waltz gets twisted into an overturning house groove. Romance turning into contempt, one's home becoming alien and strange, Metereology deals with the experience of emotional extremes. Focusing strongly on the rhythmic sides of things, this album is denser than its predecessors. The grooves have an enhanced inertia. Short melodic sequences create sustainable loops superseding elaborate forms on top. Frivolous merges his seminal genre-bending qualities and jazzy intricacy into grooves that push the house sound as far into the experimental realm as physically possible. The sonic arrangements are fused into one immersive idea that engages dancers completely. With these sonic landscapes, one is never quite sure which objects exist in their immediate environment and which objects are super-imposed. The sounds become a reality of their own, creating imaginary spaces. In an experience as exciting as uncanny, everyone on the dancefloor realizes that the other, sonically-projected environment is more real than anything else. The album represents a journey with different emotional chapters: disappointment, depression, relief, excitement and exuberance for life. The eleven tracks span the spectrum of existential extremes and all the subtleties of emotional dissonance that exist between them. There is a mystical, idealistic side to Metereology, yet there is the isolated, angry, frightened side to it as well. The songs explore the whole range of experience from devoted love to detached solitude, from social commitment to radical autarchy. These contradictions separate the music from obliging escapism in order to express a significant human experience.
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12"
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CADENZA 044EP
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Frivolous has always displayed a unique gift for infusing jacking rhythms with a cocktail of big-band jazz, hypermodern jazz and plain old good humor. "C:\My Consciousness" is alive with bells and cheeky string vamps, New Years' noisemakers and high-stepping bass lines. But for all its Technicolor glow, it never lapses into cartoonishness. Reboot's remix highlights the congas and adds shimmying ride cymbals, streamlining the groove and stretching it out for 9 delicious minutes.
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12"
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MINI 013EP
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The DIY man from Vancouver is back! He's been shaking the floors for 12 years and will once again bewitch you. Now with more than 40 releases and over a dozen EPs, Frivolous has toured the globe playing an eclectic array of venues and festivals along the way. This time, two kinds of Italo-Frenchy-jazzy electronic interludes help you take your breath between two crazy, bass-y funksters. Two spicy tracks that will add pure happiness to your Minibar house cocktail.
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12"
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SCAPE 053EP
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Frivolous presents two energetic dance tracks and a gorgeous acoustic version of "Island Of Sanctity." The revolving bass lines of the two dance versions of the song keep plowing the dancefloors -- until the dancers decline in satisfaction. The interaction of Frivolous' musical sensibility with the demanding dance grooves creates a very special excitement and energy.
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CD
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SCAPE 043CD
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This is the second full-length release from Canadian transplant to Berlin, Frivolous (Daniel Gardner). Frivolous is a protagonist of the minimal house scene who has released more than ten EPs. Midnight Black Indulgence marks a watershed in Gardner's career. For the first time, influences and inspirations are clearly discernible. Moments of pure dance ecstasy are followed by string interludes or appear next to jazz ballads. The connections Frivolous makes are of a convincing, almost compelling logic, and derive from his many years in the mid-'90s, peddling the new European minimalist sound as a club DJ in Vancouver. Struggling for acceptance amongst a Canadian scene obsessed with U.S. house music, Gardner sent his demos to five renowned German labels, and three of them wanted to release his music straightaway. The advanced minimal sound he has bestowed upon electronic dance music has a new, sophisticated body and generates a feeling for song structure within the house and techno format. At the same time, his understanding of melody and voice does not stem from a threadbare and shop-worn view on '80s pop music (as so often is the case), but from jazz. In his music, jazz and "jazziness" do not work as tacky, transfigured quotations but as snapshots full of character; impressions of feelings materialized as sound. Says Daniel: "For me jazz means a looseness and a feeling that can only be created by humans. It is the anti-machine. Even if it is sampled, it is usually for the quality of a magical moment that can't be graphed with 0-127 on time-code.." And although the tracks on Midnight Black Indulgence never pompously serve as a display for his musical prowess, there is something risky and luxurious about them. The dense and emotional thread which he weaves throughout the album was developed from baroque music, and alongside techno and dance experiments, he also stunningly incorporates classic instruments and vocals into an environment built on experiments with glitchy cut-up funk and found sound.
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12"
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KARLOFF 019EP
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"The great hero of little miracles is back: Frivolous returns from another big expedition on the seven seas to present Karloff all kinds of obscure and beautiful floatsam. The Cousteau of glitch pop has descended into unimagined depths once again, to uncover real pirate treasure of at least three centuries, in the middle of singing whales and chirping jellyfish, ready to enchant visitors from Bucarest to Buxtehude. Handicraft, backbone and pure genius are the characteristics that a real adventurer needs, and this man has enough of all that to last for whole generations of oceanographers. But beware of the tentacles: once they have adhered, you'll have a hard time getting rid of them again."
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CD
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KARLOFF 001CD
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"Now the Karloff headquarters show some consideration, bringing this synthesis of the arts called Somewhere in the Suburbs to the deserved, handy CD format, plus bonus tracks. Thus there's finally an album to close the ever gaping gap between the Pulp Fiction soundtrack and the Kruder & Dorfmeister mix CD, which so often caused this perplex mimic of students looking at their flat share's CD rack. This year Frivolous provides the most beautiful music for the current barbecue season, and with his minimal-experimental singer/songwriter house, he has finally made up his very private spot on the map of electronic music. Over are the times of Isaac Hayes as the only patron for romantic snogging, or couple dance being strictly taboo on electronic dancefloors. The time is right for the next big step, and the first artist album on Karloff -- your specialists in noisy crackle rave and whisked instrumental pop. Now you're being administered a bundle of full-grown catchy tunes that seem to remain in your bloodstream forever, knowing no frontiers. Who ever wanted to know how Paolo Conto may sound through vocoder, or your prime minister on weed, now should enjoy himself and stop questioning the fact that aliens need love, too..."
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