Hannes Kretzer Returns With New ‘Species’ EP

Hannes Kretzer has shared his exploratory new ‘Species’ EP in full.

The electronic artist’s previous album landed some five years, and in that time he’s embarked on numerous periods of experimentation. Matching the minimalism of Nils Frahm, say, to the more physically-inclined work of Jon Hopkins, Hannes Kretzer combines a questing spirit with a clear penchant for melody.

New EP ‘Species’ signals his return, and it finds Hannes bringing to fruition those extended periods of open-ended experimentation. He comments…

It’s been five years since my last album. I wanted to merge the experiences I had gained before in my new material. This time approaching ‘picture music’ in a different way. Usually influenced by landscape, I was now forming creatures out of the environment. I wanted to make them very concrete and tangible, musically describing the evolving structures of living beings while maintaining the depth of sound and production.

Out now, the EP opens with the bold ‘Mountain Queen’ before moving into ‘Euphoria’ and ‘Binaural Cyclops’. Constantly seeking out new sounds, Hannes at one point brought a colossal symphonic gong into the studio, adding further texture to his work.

I had the intention to play with the perception of space, bending our sense of the room we experience the sound in. My main source of reverberation for this album is a 40″ symphonic gong which I prepared with a transducer to be able to excite it with synths. -> surreal, contrasting rooms through one single object. We usually are able to roughly determine room size/dimensions through its reverberations. With running the tracks through the gong your mind plays tricks on you. Frequencies get stuck and amplified, seemingly going on forever, while others aren’t picked up that well and convey the impression of a small cave.

Check out the full EP now.