»Captain, Captain – we’re drifting.« Away from Earth. Between us and the next star, the distance grows from all those feelings that seem so large and significant in everyday life. That is exactly how Mood Programs feels, the first EP by LA MARR, the new project from house pioneer Ron Trent. Its barely 20 minutes are less an EP than a state of weightlessness: a slow floating in which sound becomes not merely music, but space.
Yet this is also precisely where the particular quality of the release lies. Ron Trent does not look back nostalgically on the influences that have shaped him since the early 1980s, but translates ambient, dub, new age and finely balanced electronics into a timeless sound drifting that feels remarkably present. The two tracks »Good Magic« and »Clear« unfold carefully, layer by layer, without ever steering towards a conventional climax. Instead, a pull emerges: a gliding through space, a gaze into the great darkness and, at the same time, deep into one’s own interior. Mood Programs feels like a distillate of decades of musical experience, and a reminder that the greatest movements sometimes take place precisely where, on the surface, nothing seems to be happening.
