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CD
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OSTGUT 049CD
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Giving form to a broad personal project of continuous inquiry and existential expression, A World Of Service marks the Ostgut Ton debut of Spanish producer, DJ, and artist JASSS, aka Silvia Jiménez Alvarez. The evolution of A World Of Service has curved around genre collapsing and unexpected metamorphoses. Formerly the name of the monthly radio show JASSS hosted in Berlin, and soon to be the title of her expansive multi-sensory touring concept in collaboration with Ben Kreukniet, here A World Of Service is powerfully concentrated in sonic form. Throughout the album, JASSS muses on the especially current human and technological barriers to interconnectivity; both lyrically and musically she deconstructs the self, unmasks anxieties and interrogates the insufficiencies of language as applied to gender, identity, and interpersonal relationships. Forming her own fluid, nuanced lexicon in response, JASSS seeks a deeper understanding of her multiple selves, emerging through unbridled adolescent rage and the wisdom of maturation, traversing liminality with abstract electronics, and baroque industrial pop. Visually this is underscored by Matt Lambert's uncanny floral cover portraiture, as well as the record's distinct scent of wet earth, flower and woods developed for the album by Meri Bonastre and applied to the vinyl inner sleeve. Following the imaginative nostalgia of Weightless, her 2017 debut album for iDEAL Recordings (IDEAL 160LP), as well as her series of blistering dancefloor 12"s for Whities/AD 93, A World Of Service folds personal and societal concepts in on themselves, not seeking answers but rather luxuriating in the unique friction that questions create. JASSS is intensely focused yet musically unbridled; this is reflected in tonal shifts of A World Of Service. Through the computerized yearning and bruising of a heartbreak on "Luis", to the jagged and wordless tundra of "Vapor Dentro"; the intriguing juxtaposition of warm, alluring Spanish vocals against rigid pillars of industrial heft and bass grind ("Camelo"), and the soaring maximalist industrial pop of the album's closer, "Wish". As intensity rises through the pandemic-era trip hop of the album's title track "A World Of Service", JASSS sings: "Pleasure/ Is nowhere to be found inside this world of service/ I call to be my life". Pleasure may remain elusive to her, but in the determination to make peace with her various identities in this technological age, JASSS offers a compelling glimpse into an essential type of artistic voice.
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LP
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OSTGUT 035LP
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LP version. Giving form to a broad personal project of continuous inquiry and existential expression, A World Of Service marks the Ostgut Ton debut of Spanish producer, DJ, and artist JASSS, aka Silvia Jiménez Alvarez. The evolution of A World Of Service has curved around genre collapsing and unexpected metamorphoses. Formerly the name of the monthly radio show JASSS hosted in Berlin, and soon to be the title of her expansive multi-sensory touring concept in collaboration with Ben Kreukniet, here A World Of Service is powerfully concentrated in sonic form. Throughout the album, JASSS muses on the especially current human and technological barriers to interconnectivity; both lyrically and musically she deconstructs the self, unmasks anxieties and interrogates the insufficiencies of language as applied to gender, identity, and interpersonal relationships. Forming her own fluid, nuanced lexicon in response, JASSS seeks a deeper understanding of her multiple selves, emerging through unbridled adolescent rage and the wisdom of maturation, traversing liminality with abstract electronics, and baroque industrial pop. Visually this is underscored by Matt Lambert's uncanny floral cover portraiture, as well as the record's distinct scent of wet earth, flower and woods developed for the album by Meri Bonastre and applied to the vinyl inner sleeve. Following the imaginative nostalgia of Weightless, her 2017 debut album for iDEAL Recordings (IDEAL 160LP), as well as her series of blistering dancefloor 12"s for Whities/AD 93, A World Of Service folds personal and societal concepts in on themselves, not seeking answers but rather luxuriating in the unique friction that questions create. JASSS is intensely focused yet musically unbridled; this is reflected in tonal shifts of A World Of Service. Through the computerized yearning and bruising of a heartbreak on "Luis", to the jagged and wordless tundra of "Vapor Dentro"; the intriguing juxtaposition of warm, alluring Spanish vocals against rigid pillars of industrial heft and bass grind ("Camelo"), and the soaring maximalist industrial pop of the album's closer, "Wish". As intensity rises through the pandemic-era trip hop of the album's title track "A World Of Service", JASSS sings: "Pleasure/ Is nowhere to be found inside this world of service/ I call to be my life". Pleasure may remain elusive to her, but in the determination to make peace with her various identities in this technological age, JASSS offers a compelling glimpse into an essential type of artistic voice.
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2LP
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IDEAL 160LP
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2018 repress. Jasss makes her head and body-turning album debut with Weightless, an absorbingly stark and spiky set of industro-dub concerns, riddled with heavy inspiration from African rhythms, jazz and concrète electronics. After a trio of acclaimed 12"s for Berlin's Mannequin and Amir Alexander's Annunaki Cartel since 2016, iDEAL Recordings now give Jasss room to consolidate and expand her grizzled dancefloor structures to a full-length episode that brutally dovetails with Joachim Nordwall's unforgiving but compelling take on contemporary noise and industrial musics. Very much an antecedent of Spanish industrialists, such as Diseño Corbusier, Xeerox/Krishna Goineau, or Mecanica Popular/Randomize, Jasss firmly builds on that heritage with a uniquely pensive balance of percussive suss, synthetic bite, and reverberating spatial dynamics that makes her music heavy-as-sin and deliciously deft with it, patently forgoing industrial music's angry guy glare in favor of far more feminine and Latinate pressure systems. She does so with an aching, puckered patience in the opener, "Every Single Fish In The Pond", escalating from a lone cymbal motif and location recordings to a pulsating darkroom boldness by the end of an incendiary scene-setter, before really getting her fangs in with the clenched but driving EBM torque of "Oral Couture", recalling a spiked Toresch or CTI hovering at the darkroom's entrance. From here on in a dream sequence of events take place, morphing from febrile, hash-induced triplet pirouettes in "Danza" through the martial free jazz/industrial cut-up of "Cotton For Lunch", to a definitive apex of sprung, stepping cyber-goth in "Weightless", with a pause for Alberich-like reflection on "Theo Goes Away", but the voodoo rises once again with the druggy swagger of "Instantaneous Transmission Of Information", and her stoic, blunt-edged mauler, "To Eat With Dirty Hands". It's rare to hear industrial music done with such variation and individual distinction as "Weightless", making it shine in a field so often associated with greyscale and monotone signatures. RIYL: Christoph De Babalon, Klinik, Toresch, Mecanica Popular, CTI. Artwork by Pan Daijing. Master and cut by Matt Colton. Comes in a gatefold jacket; Edition of 600.
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