The energy quotient is expanding and then vaporizing, always modulating and soothing, with some wonderful creepy shadows too. Here we dive into Contours of Stillness and celebrate Sascha Lemon’s 30 years of LPF12.
An atmosphere of electronic terraforming
Contours of Stillness is a double-album (the time: 1:52:31), 7 tracks of calm, melancholic, playful creepy cold cellar ambient music, celebrating 30 years of LPF12, a solo-project by German artist Sascha Lemon. The moniker LPF12 means Low Pass Filter 12 dB. Do you know the easy way to figure out such codes? Sometimes just ask. I started listening and working on this musical speculation project by exchanging email with Sascha Lemon, who graciously provided some interesting ideas from those 30 years of experience. I feel like my part in this exchange may have taken too much time, on the other hand, so much of this music tends to expand to fit any open form as time takes us along that course. Can we use music to travel in time? The fundamentals… how to begin?
At the start of the project, the 90s-tapes represent the old and harsh LPF12-sound. “My sound nowadays is totally different and shows a grown up-version of my project. I feel very comfortable in the ambient genre and I never get tired of finding the right sound for a melancholic or dark soundscape. I became a lover of harmonies and melody over the past years.”
For those who are about to make music, “Write the music only for yourself firstly. When you feel safe with your style: Don’t get distracted by the expectations your listeners might have. Surprise yourself by trying out new influences and don’t repeat yourself if possible. Write music from your heart and soul.
“I think writing music is happening in part on a subconscious level. That includes the influence of dreams and memories and experiences from the past. I am usually not writing music for a pre-defined theme – composing for me is a spontaneous act, but I must admit that I prefer the minor scales, which is kind of a scheme I am emotionally obliged to…
“I started writing music when I was 16, experimenting with the electro/industrial genre. In 1995 I decided to take a break, which lasted 15 years. In 2010 I came back, using modern technology and experimenting with ambient and IDM—and I still do. Music is the second best distraction from this crazy reality. Listening is letting go.”
The feeling of this music is ambient, calm relaxing music, dark ambient cinematic melancholic electronica soundscapes, calming music and calm music, I call it industrial strength ambient lpf12. IDM? Intelligent Dance Music. “Music is the second best distraction from this crazy reality.” LPF12 is a solo-project by German artist Sascha Lemon, creating cinematic electronica. Continuing in his own write, “In the long hiatus I discovered ambient, film scoring and IDM, which still have a huge impact on my sound. Recently I started exploring melodic techno and also a few singer/songwriters. Technically speaking, some of my most important musical or artistic discoveries is VST-technology in combination with old fashioned hardware. That really made my comeback in 2010 possible. As a musician nowadays you have endless possibilities to create your sounds and your signature style.”
Emerging and coming into form, ominous and gigantic ::
On Contours of Stillness, I hear an atmosphere of electronic terraforming, the sound of elemental transit. The scale is immense, including oceans of galactic forms floating and flowing as harmonic particles gather in sort of a rainbow fog, consistent with the conditions of human thought. The energy quotient is expanding and then vaporizing, always modulating and soothing, with some wonderful creepy shadows too. The human mind has been deriving its knowledge of Truth from the observation of nature, and cannot evade the task of determining at every step how Truth is consistent with itself. This necessarily involves listeners in vertiginous, thorny, and impossible metaphysics, perhaps this simply cannot be helped. It works, the cinematic landscape ripples with dream force.
Electronic music that projects layers of elevated darkness and speculative atmospheres. I don’t know how else to describe what I am hearing. The first track is “ascending infinite horizon” (9:18). The veil gradually descends and envelopes, the landscape is bleak and goes on forever. Time is not a notion obtained by passive experience. Each step tends to the final result, traveling along with the thoughts. We continue among the phenomena of “nothing never seen before” (8:37). Deep in the ocean the giant stirs and considers the situation, gradually becoming aware of being in a state of awakening. The light from the surface gives the view a tentative focus, sometimes almost flickering. An abrupt hill starts out of the plain; a beautiful figure has a gliding outline.
A breeze? The sound of a hidden waterfall? The electronics move the focus into a clearing. The hiss is gone and the chamber is very big. Things are happening. Track three is “polite thinking” (6:49), offering shadowy expanses; those are not birds, but verbs of motion. It appears certain that there must be such a measure, and that by means of it all the scales are different. Darkness where all bodies radiate heat to one another, or did it develop later?
It appears to me that the utmost ingenuity will be at a loss to devise an explanation of that power, a bond of connexion among the impressions of sense, derived from a peculiar activity of the mind, and forming a foundation both of our experience and of our speculative knowledge wandering about simply by being present on this occasion. Behold, “contours of stillness” (8:48). Something is going to happen, something is starting to happen right now.
The ceremony before the contest conveys to us a knowledge of the forms and places which we thus successively survey. However that may be, the presence of a slow-motion electronic phantom flute-player would seem to indicate that it probably began upon the tenth day of Elaphebolion, continuing something from long ago and out of recent memory.
Emerging and coming into form, ominous and gigantic, a place rarely visited, feeling and hearing, trying to enable us to perceive the arrival from space of new dimensions, “the warning pt. 1” (19:09) reveals hints of large objects and extensive spaces. And as our attention is transferred from point to point, with “the warning pt. 2” (18:19), the sense of danger gradually increases. The listening perspective implies that this is not a spot of definite size and form, for it appears that proceeding from a certain point all that portion of our perceptions of space in which we use the senses while we are out here, a new rhythm or song form almost emerges, slowly starting to take us somewhere different, and that fades. The choreutae are caprine in appearance. Such, then, is the penultimate stage for this wordless poetry.
“the warning pt. 3” (41:28) — Did you catch the time here? This is not a typo. The final track is over forty minutes long. It was all released on September 17, 2022, and is some music and visual manipulation by s. lemon, also produced, recorded, mixed and mastered @ LPF12 studio in 2022.
The physical part of the story: emerging in 1993, creating electronica, LPF12 released various albums on Ionium Records, Abstrakt Reflections, Crime League, 7MNS Music and Raumklang Music as well as a number (over 40) of Bandcamp-only releases.
During the finale of this musical speculation project, I asked Sascha what his most cherished accomplishment is, and he responded, “My two sons.” And what could be next? He notes that “I’d love to meet my musical Idol James Newton Howard and have a look at his studio, maybe writing a cue for a film with him. :) Setting up my new studio and hopefully writing more new albums soon. In closing, something he would like to try that he’s not tried yet, “Learning how to be a better piano-player.”
Contours of Stillness is available on Bandcamp.
