The career of Marko Pelaic, aka Longhair, is long and extensive. Croatian, based in Berlin for some years now, his first musical works as a drummer was in the birth of the 21st century. Therefore, although this Hotel Solaris is his debut album as Longhair, Marko has a big experience as a DJ and producer.
As Marko himself has rightly explained, after many twists, turns, ups and downs, many releases under various aliases, he feels accomplished to have completed and be about to release this debut album.
Almost every time an artist talks about his work, we love to hear it and pass it on to our readers. But on this occasion, Marko’s words are so beautiful that it was impossible not to show them:
“The Covid Pandemic hit Germany in March 2020 and by the 15th of March all of the public life was shut down. It was the same day where my son Rio was born.
For me, this early stage of the pandemic had something very intimate and private, since I was forced to stay at home with my young family for weeks. In Mai 2020 I started to leave the house, for other occasions then just going to the shop or taking a walk and that was the time I started working on Hotel Solaris. It was an intense creative rush: in 8 weeks the album was written, performed and produced in one flow. I had two days every week, where I could go to the studio for 4 hours and that time the album was done. It had a corpus in a sense that I knew I wanted a faster or a slower track at points, but the whole hotel idea came when I saw photos of the old Hotel Arkada on the Croatian island Hvar, that my extremely talented friend Marcella Zanki shot on her holidays.
They show a well preserved socialist-brutalist hotel architecture in the middle of the beautiful Adriatic and for me it was like looking at pictures from a timeless place, without knowing where and when it exactly was, totally surreal.
I liked that idea of a hote that stands as an escape symbol from the real world, which was something everyone needed when the pandemic was building stronger and stronger. I decided to call it Hotel Solaris, inspired by the novel from Stanislav Lem, where Solaris is a planet covered by an ocean which triggers our subconscious mind to become reality. It all fit at the end and Hotel Solaris was done.”
Hotel Solaris is a rounded album, where colour and light overflow in each track as a common thread, although the flavours distilled by its themes have varied nuances. The album opens with the cosmic or submarine optimism of Sponge Bob, an infectious rhythm with beautiful analogue pads, organic sounds that are the norm in the album. It is followed by Pixie Crop which begins as an accelerated homage to the Kraftwerk of Computer World that quickly transforms with a rhythmic base of Disco Funk drums and bass again focused on the dancefloor. Then we enter a more relaxed rhythmic cadence, but with a strong bass line with Planets & Orbits, which has been the first advance single of the album, followed by the tropical Telemark. Feathered Flip is one of the most powerful tracks of the album, halfway between Cosmic House and classic Techno, reminiscent of the rave sounds of those Shamen of the early nineties. Delicious.
Monday Funday takes us to warm latitudes in a virtuoso exercise of Caribbean percussions and pads, to give way to Techno Power, again in the line worked in Feathered Flip. And to close comes a perfect Dub exercise called Angry Professor.
Longhair’s debut album is perfect for a label where boredom does not exist and there is always quality in its references, as is Permanent Vacation. The Munich-based label, with Benjamin Frölich and Tom Bioly at the controls, knew how to choose again an interesting artist when they released Longhair´s Space & Time EP in 2020.
Release date, April 15th, Planets & Orbits available here
