Melodic, mellow & delightfully melancholic
rRoxymore is a French electronic music producer based in Berlin who is especially known for her unconventional approaches to creating synthesized club and dance music as well as mellow experimental music. She just released her latest album Perpetual Now on November 4, 2022. rRoxymore has spent the last decade expanding the club music genre, pushing the boundaries and reinterpreting sound while diving into the more experimental aspect of her music.
Perpetual Now is an album consisting of just four songs, however, each of these completely instrumental pieces is long in duration and has a lot to offer for listeners. The opening track is called “At the Crest,” and it starts out with quiet, mysterious, electronic percussion. This pianissimo percussion gently welcomes its listeners to a world of mystery, experimentation, and melancholy. Later in this piece one can start to hear mellow electric piano with simple flat keyed chords, simultaneously contrasting complex electronic drums. These two musical elements continue to build and become grungier as the time passes on.
In fact, the grungiest song on the album would definitely have to be “Fragmented Dreams” with its distorted drum machines, dissonant bells and synthesizers, and heavy yet simplistic bass line. As the song progresses, the notes within the piece become more and more audibly stimulating and unpredictable. rRoxymore manages to create sounds that are dissonant with accidental everywhere, and yet the pieces are still quite melodic in some areas.
The next four pieces follow a very similar pattern. Every piece starts out quiet, mysterious, and perhaps even simplistic with either syncopated synthesizer patterns, or a quiet percussion pattern. It is highly possible that these nuanced instrumental characteristics and patterns reflect the quiet atmosphere in which rRoxymore created her sophomore album. She spends each winter isolated in her studio working on her music and includes experimentation as well as innovation and improvisation. Furthermore, all of her songs, especially her longest track “Water Stains,” contain some type of repetition in the drums or in the synthesizers, or both. However, she manages to keep things interesting by adding a level of dissonance, grunge, and by making gradual adjustments with the dynamics throughout each and every piece.
Through her second album, rRoxymore has once again showed the world that she has truly created her own definition of electronic music. This album is ideal for background listening or immersive listening. Because of her musicianship, there is so much to analyze in rRoxymore’s artistic and expressive musical intentions.
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