A member of Berlin-based record label Happy Camper, Noraj Cue celebrates the label’s three year anniversary with new EP “What if it Breaks”, which opens the door to a transcendent, introspective journey through time and space, showing off the artist’s musical background and adaptive style.
It is a sign of artistic strength to be unafraid of injecting pure, and not always easily-executed, ecstatic emotion into a dance music scene that’s increasingly interested only in speed and efficiency. The flattening and narrowing of the music is made into little more than an amphetamine that can be insufflated through the ear in this stirring new EP.
In the title track, “What if it Breaks”, velvety swells of a warm melody foreshadow a breakbeat deployed against an archetype in a way that feels almost melancholy. But it’s a positive melancholy, like when you are happy to be sad, or the way you feel leaving a favorite city to return home, or watching the rain destroy a warm afternoon leaving you free to do nothing. Perhaps it is exactly because the instrumentation is deployed against its standard modus operandi that such a precision of conflated emotional charge can be achieved. A piano melody sounding almost like the opening credits of a creepy sci-fi TV show adds yet another welcome dimension to “What if it Breaks”.
The 4×4 retreatment of the opener that follows adds a kick drum to the fray and shows the versatility that music can have once the real basics are achieved, like the capturing of something humane and precise and nailing very well just a few fresh and neuron-tingling sounds. There doesn’t have to be much else for a track to be successful, no matter how much we may be biased towards a more maximalist sound. If anything, it shows that the kick is really almost an afterthought in an otherwise well-constructed track, which may be kind of taboo to suggest in electronic music, but there it is.
The next track, “Between The Stars And The Milkyway”, begins with a beating heart in a pink cosmic void, like a scene from ‘The Fountain’, with humans inexplicably breathing in deep space.
Crisp drums define the closer, “Isolation”, which also features smooth vocals from the artist and a lo-fi lounge jazz or R&B kind of feel as he expresses a universally-felt homesickness with the words, “Just take me back to where I belong, I promise to do no harm.”
Perhaps Happy Camper Records state it best themselves in regards to their new release, “The Happy Campers is a vision brought earthside by the artists: Unders, Noraj Cue, and Britta Arnold, who all recognize music as a universal language and perceive the community of DJs as passionate nomads that will travel through time and space to keep the world dancing.”
-Winston Mann
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