Growing up across Europe, Leonard Maassen has an informed creativity that stretches from European electronic innovation to UK jazz. Delving into audio-visual installations following a spatial audio residency at IKLECTIK Art Lab, his project ‘Heart of a Glacier’ was selected as a Finalist for the MUSE Digital Art Award 2023, as well as for the international LOM+you programme.
Lauded by the likes of BBC Introducing and Voices Radio, alongside a range of live performances, Maassen is teeing up 2024 to be the most pivotal in his career so far.
The first track to tease his debut album ‘Inside Cycles,’ ‘Colours’ is a vibrant flurry of gorgeous electronic arrangements. Tension builds within the glowing atmosphere with unpredictable rhythms and timbres, opening up an intricate soundscape filled with impressive electronic design. Above the water-like synths arrive heavily processed vocals, speaking and singing in the same breath, arriving as distinctly human and yet inherently robotic. These vocals are shared with Erin Snape, balancing two perspectives within the Odyssey.
Maassen shares, “Colours expresses the feeling of having to let go of somebody who you love in order for both of you to grow. It’s about meeting them again one day far in the future, when both of you are older and wiser, able to experience the beauty of the past with less attachment. I wanted to explore deep nostalgia mixed with gratitude and hope for yourself and the other person.
I wanted the duet part of the track to feel like a conversation between two deities, much bigger than humans and made up of the beauty and sorrow of life, woven into intricate and surreal textures. I was thinking of the way that Hindu gods are portrayed with multiple limbs and animal features, expressing their characters and their divinity. If you mix that idea with the way AI can make humans look like they’re made of plants, that’s how I imagine the two voices in Colours.”
‘Colours’ is out now on streaming platforms…
