Space Discovery: Lump200
Welcome to our new Space Discovery!
This time you’re in for an aural experiment, gracefully crafted and perfectly put together despite its main feature being the deconstruction of all sounds. Lump200 is a project by Berlin-based René Desalmand, who studied jazz and worked on radio plays and transmedial features in his long career. The name itself clearly indicates an amalgamation of different tastes and ideas, and I’m The Elephant In The Room is their last piece of great work. The album in which this single is included is an experiment made on a social audio app, which everyone can contribute to. Lump200, indeed, is a collective who creates through improvisation, co-creation and fluidity.
I’m The Elephant In The Room is an avant-garde electronic track which combines digital and organic sounds and instruments, positioning them in a way that can both entice and unsettle the listener. I was enraptured straight away.
The melody seems to be out of tune exactly as an elephant would be inside a room, sweeping over and dragging in everything and everyone, as the track itself does.
But the clash of sounds is just wonderfully rendered, and the instruments playing are a perfect match. The rhythm is atypical, but there definitely is one, or better, many, in a surrealistically engaging polyrhythm.
The deep sound of a tuba accompanies the percussive drum beat and the sparkly synths, while the vocals, almost in a parlato and very colloquial tone, invite the listener to find a new way to love and pray, and listen to sounds, I would say.
This song IS the elephant in the room, and it enacts its own title. The lyrics themselves are a great example of how Lump200 plays with everything aural. First, it gives a sense of surrealism as if you were stuck in a dream listening to mysterious voices throwing brief yet meaningful thoughts at you, and then it brings in the repeated onomatopoeia “boom”, which represents both the overall sound of the track, the noise of an elephant moving around a room and the metaphorical sound made when the elephant in the room gets addressed.
The tuba underlying the lyrics, in addition, is the perfect instrument to reproduce what an elephant in the room sounds like, both metaphorically and physically.
This track can result in both alienation of the listener or complete absorption into it. You can end up refusing to see the elephant in the room or finally addressing it if you let yourself get sucked into the melody.
Lump200 amazingly succeeded at giving a structure to madness, or madness where there’s supposed to be structure. Either way, the result is a great and enjoyable piece of innovative play with aurality, which turns sound into noise and noise into sound.
Welcome to Space, LUMP200!
Congratulations on your new release! Briefly present yourself to our Space Travellers!
Thanks! Lump200 underlines the zigzag that has accompanied my entire artistic career. With partly changing teams we have been (re)searching sound, performance and interaction between electronic tracks, modular improvisations and the longer the more models of participation. The name Lump200 implies that we are one among many and yet unique.
What’s the story behind your latest release?
I am the Elephant in the Room is the 2nd single from the coming album Isles of You. The single track questions the dominance of causality, it plays around with suggestions, I guess. What is representative for the album, too. Isles of You is kind of a hybrid release, there is an accompanying social audio app that invites to participate in audio projects and to initiate audio interaction in the www. As in the web app various versions of one project coexist, the form or concept of the „album“ is opened up, projects become fluid, processual and potentially indefinite.
What are your plans for the future?
I will continue with the development of the app as well as of formats and collabs connected to it. And as soon as I find the time I will think about shows again, too.
If you had a time machine, in which era would you travel and which kind of music would you bring with you in the past?
I would not like to travel in past eras but in future ones or parallel present ones. And I would probably have Ravel’s Bolero with me, Miles’ Bitches Brew and some tracks of Flying Lotus, Little Simz, Frank Ocean and Idjah Hadidjah e.g..
