With an EP and album already scheduled for 2024, Hertfordshire based experimental electronic artist Bjørn Felle kicks off the year in style with new single Dopamine.
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The music of Bjørn Felle is best described as an idiosyncratic electronic sound inspired by 80s synthpop and punk, 90s techno, house and indie grunge, the odd 16-bit video game soundtrack, and a healthy dose of psychedelia.
On Dopamine, Bjørn draws from the likes of TVAM, Holy Fuck, and The Vines for inspiration, with an undercurrent of psychedelic grunge just within earshot.
With almost surgical precision, the track picks apart our dependence on hormonal highs to get through the day, hour, or even the next few minutes. Sharp and insightful, Dopamine is incisive, illuminating, and close to home for most of us.
“Maybe we should strive for asceticism, but where's the fun in that,” questions Bjørn. “Dopamine is the real opium of the masses and getting clean ain't an option. It drives us to seek pleasure in whatever form takes our fancy. We'll snort it, infuse it, eat it, fuck it, whatever it takes to get a hit of sweet, sweet endorphins—for a while at least. Why even consider the longer-term when pleasure is to be found in the here and now? Don't fear the comedown—dopamine is always there to drive you on to your next hit!”
He adds, “Lyrically, the track draws on self-defeating themes of addiction, habituation, and overconsumption that can accompany the search for that perfect hit. It's a trip, an overdose and a comedown all rolled into one.”
The track also captures much of that rush and loss of control that can often come with a dopamine high that is the focus of the lyrics. “In terms of the arrangement, I aimed to make Dopamine a bombastic, psychedelic blow-out. The bassline is ridiculous, and it's about the only thing that really cuts through the cacophony of electronic percussion, wobbly synths and drunkenly played guitars, all run through VHS degradation and washed with reverb.”
Bjørn Felle’s upcoming album and its companion EP release are a brutalising joyride through the wasteland, followed by a glimmer of hope for a brighter future. Extreme Hazard Planet—the album—is harsher and more industrial in sound than Bjørn’s previous releases, and tells the story of a future civilisation learning about the fate of life on Earth.
Satellite EP Paradise Moon tells a more personal story from the point of view of a denizen of end-stage capitalism, bleeding lungs and all, with a more tender synthwave sound from a half-demagnetised tape found among the detritus of a poisoned landscape.
Dopamine is released via Todmorden-based label AnalogueTrash on the 12th of January 2024 in digital format to stream and download. Both Extreme Hazard Planet and Paradise Moon are set for release later in the year.
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