“Our soul is like a home and when we remember rooms and houses it teaches us to live within ourselves.”
(Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space)
With Placid House, techno duo Psycho & Plastic deliver an album of ambient music made in and for these unprecedented times. Its eight instrumental tracks artistically reflect our radically altered reality. In the calm surroundings of their homes and with plenty of time on their hands, the duo turned inward making Placid House. Forced to collaborate remotely, yet listening closely to one another and to their inner voices, they developed a gentle, poetic, and beatless musical expression. The resulting album captures the essence of our trying times and transforms it into sonic relief.
Psycho & Plastic recorded and produced Placid House in a mere three weeks. When lockdown regulations took hold in their home Berlin, inspiration struck and music started pouring out of Thomas Tichai and Alexandre Decoupigny. Both immediately felt that their rambunctious live sets and tripped out house/techno productions did not provide an appropriate isolation soundtrack.
Instead, they chose to translate into music the range of subtle, sometimes conflicting emotions stirred up by separation from each other, from dance floors, clubs, and the outside world in general. Confined to their individual home studios, they started to chart the architecture of the home that is our soul. In the process, emotional doors, rooms, and crawl spaces unlocked that had previously been out of reach.
Every track is a visit to a different room in this house and to a specific mental and emotional state. Correspondingly, the tracks “Presence Of Absence” and “Ice-O-Lation” explore themes of separation and solitude. Others, such as “Intergalactic Radio Day” and “Telepathic Embrace”, emphasize the importance of staying connected across distances. Throughout the rooms of Placid House, Psycho & Plastic diffuse a coherent palette of sonic fragrances. Balmy synth textures, digitally treated pianos, and melancholic guitars refresh the respective interiors. Echoes sparkle within the eight ambient pieces, like traces of memories emerging from the past. Placid House transforms the paranoia and ubiquitous dread of the current crisis and offers listeners a chance to infuse their quarantine burdened interiors with a fresh breeze of ambient sounds. The album creates a sonic safe space for contemplation, relaxation, or daydreaming.
Placid House is out digitally on May 8th 2020.
A special release event with a visual mixtape by video artist/VJ A-li-ce (Robot Koch, Scope Sessions, VJ Open Lab)
and DJ YBA will stream live on Psycho & Plastic’s Facebook Page and YouTube on May 8th, 4pm CET.
Album Tracklisting:
1. Brimming With Anticipation
2. Ice-O-Lation
3. Slowly Shifting Paradigms
4. Intergalactic Radio Day
5. Self-Oscillation (From A Safe Distance)
6. Telepathic Embrace
7. Out Of The Woodwork
8. Presence Of Absence
Previous Praise:
“Loving High Priests Version” – Andrew Weatherall
„The gravitational pull of the Black Hole is very strong” – Andrew Weatherall
“Deliciously avant-garde and tunefully funky (..) a wonderful sonic journey into the minds of two underrated live performers” – Data Transmission
“Psycho & Plastic’s interstellar travels flow in a cyber boogie motion, gazing as they do into the wonders of a funky techno and pop disco vision of space.” – Monolith Cocktail
“Psycho & Plastic clearly have broad sonic ambitions” – Stuart Bruce/Chain DLK
