John Tejada is becoming one of the artists with the most appearances in 1051 in our first year of life… and, of course, deservedly so. His professional career, his versatility and his art are more than evident reasons to be able to affirm that we are in front of one of the most important artists of the last three decades in the international electronic scene. DJ, producer, founder and head of a label, university professor…
For all this, there is no need for further introductions, and if any of our readers need them, they can be find in previous articles published in 1051 Magazine.
After a really intense year 2021 for John, in which he has released tracks with his friend Reggie Watts as Wajatta in House key or has seen a return to distant origins making drum and bass, the Austrian by birth and Angelino by adoption has returned to create another gem in the form of an album and returning to that Techno that he has spoiled so much during a large part of his career.
Also last year Tejada released on Kompakt Records another marvel in long-player format (something so usual for the Angelino producer… I don’t know if we would find an album not bad, but weak in his discography…) called Year Of The Living Dead, conceived and produced during the first part of the pandemic. But this new album will be released on his own label, Palette Recordings, on March 18th, and will be entitled (significantly) Sleepwalker. We say significant because if Year Of The Living Dead was already significant due to the circumstances, this Sleepwalker is no less so, because it is also born in difficult times for the world’s population.
It is not only the title of the album that is significant. So are many of its tracks. On the musical level, once again we find John Tejada’s personal and non-transferable stamp, music that escapes from rigid and immobile labels. Techno, yes, but organic, charged with emotions, with a lot of analogue aroma, with unmistakable Minimal moorings and with a load of deep feelings that Tejada makes compatible with the dancefloor.
When we reviewed what was for us the best EP of the past year 2021 (Avo Thal), created by a great friend and partner in crime on many occasions of Tejada, the great Robag Wruhme, the one who now writes these lines said: “Personally, I think that the handling of emotions in the world of electronic music is what separates the mediums from the masters, what separates the wheat from the chaff”.
Please apply this to John Tejada. No doubt about it.
The album opens with Shattered, perhaps the most powerful track on the entire album in terms of raw power. Again the title makes perfect sense, and a torrent of Techno marked with a thumping bass line makes its way through with a hypnotizing repetitive pattern that closes unexpectedly, breaking the line of the whole track. Precisely this will be the preview of the album, and it will be linked to a video created by Julia Vivien Volz. She became a key player in the creation of that particular song and influenced the work that was to come on the rest of the album. The idea was to collaborate fully by advancing the work a few seconds or a full minute at a time, passing it back and forth to guide their joint creative workflow. Rather than Volz simply creating images for a finished piece of music or vice versa, it was a process where both she and Tejada influenced the direction to create an audio-visual collaboration.
“Without really discussing direction at first, other than getting the words ‘frozen’ and ‘ice’ from Volz to work with, we were already thinking a lot about the same themes,” says Tejada. In Volz’s words, “this video project was created during the dark winter months, with the pandemic still very much in everyone’s lives. It shows the mood of exploring the unknown: the desire and the broken hopes”.
We’ve been lucky enough to get our hands on the album in its entirety and it really is an almost conceptual journey. Excursions follows Shattered, with a more jovial rhythmic pattern, but with a dense depth of melody, combining organic sounds with almost robotic ones. Over The Wires continues that journey, taking us even further down into a rhythmic, but somewhat more relaxing Minimal descent. Then comes one of the album’s high points, When We Dead Awaken, which enters with a broken rhythmic pattern and ethereal pads to gradually rebuild the rhythmic link with a lush beauty that, while still making you dance, is superlatively emotive. This track opens the way for Whip Hand, which opens up more luminous and colourful horizons, to continue with Unafraid and then Skull Music, the most relaxing moment of the album in terms of bpm, but not in terms of emotional intensity created by an omnipresent analogue synthesizer. The album closes with another track with a very revealing title, Isolate, and once again Tejada stirs our insides with a very direct musical message.
We look forward to seeing the video for Shattered very soon, and to seeing what Tejada will bring us on this one after such a promising start to the year.
Sleepwalker release date: March 18th on Palette Recordings, soon available on pre order on most of the musical platforms. Don´t miss it.
