Swedish techno stalwart and innovator, Cari Lekebusch, after some deliberation, puts his own personal stamp on the Finnish techno label Motto Sono with the deep-driving and soul-searching EP “Remedies.”
What’s Cari Lekebusch been up to lately? Well, the one-time self-proclaimed gothic B-boy, praying mantis, has been trying to find his own sound more or less amidst a scene that has gone either insanely fast or looks back on the days when techno was pretty well defined by tropes like chronic ride cymbals and tribal loops.
If you have been listening to Cari’s output and his full catalog, you know he’s really done it all, from hip-hop and breaks and electro to house and tech house. He has waded through the post-2004 minimalism trends, even helping to curate a fun music app for music creation on the go, and through it all, he’s always sought to have his own personal voice that was uniquely his own.
In recent years, there’s definitely been some experimentation as to where he fits. Safe to say, with his help curating the sound of Motto Sono with Miia Magia, he’s found something that works. The answer, maybe as the title suggests, is that he’s found a remedy towards a sound that has been elusive. Or it can be simply that these four tracks are a panacea for what ails. Since they all go down very easily, and listening to them is a calming and somewhat meditative experience. There’s decades of experience distilled with these tracks, and everything is built strong and formidable from the ground up, but the creative tension is that it’s a master’s hand at work in tracks that show poise and grace. This coming from a musician who knows how far he can push the sonic envelope, from the strange to the soulful to the intensely hard, funky sounds of Drumcode 10.
Additionally, the tracks on this release are engineered for listening to on the daily. There’s no flashy, disposable nature to the tracks, and they should stand up well to the test of time.
If there’s anything really going on here with this release, it’s a desire to make something pleasing and listenable. The atmospheres chosen on the release set a vibe, and the sonically pure tones in the release really bring a gentle kindness to the music that’s welcoming and brings you in to listen deeper. That is something that can be heard on “Järvimieli,” and the track “Prophylactic,” which is a tip to Lekebusch’s humor and sex-positive stance. The track “Remedy” also includes these atmospheres and clean tones but is aimed as a fun and bouncing groove for the dance floor.
Last up on the EP is “Antidote”. Some classic Cari muscle here with the heavy, saturated, and compressed bassline, but still, it keeps things in line with the conceptual clarity of the label with clean tones and vibey atmospheres. If you’re a purist, you’ll be listening to this track in the car as much as you’ll be expecting to hear this in the set of your favorite DJs.
Is “Remedy” the answer? It might be the best possible direction for Motto Sono at present. As H-Productions is a wild playground label for the artist and the sounds of other producers that he really tends to dig. For an artist whose mind is fully open in a matter of sound and production, having a place to constrain a set of ideas for a unique purpose could be the best idea for Lekebusch and Motto Sono.
-Sean Ocean
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