Utopia Music with Teplice

10 Minute Read

Music

A selection of tracks designed to reflect the theme of Utopia following the release of her new record on Hot Concept.

Teplice is producer come vocalist with an ethereal vision. Her music is reminiscent of the shoegaze era yet transcends the premonitions and sensibilities of the genre – weaving electronica and abstract ambient principles across her tapestry of sound.

Earlier this month saw her release a new record on Hot Concept – a collection of songs offered up beneath the guise of “Feel Your Way”.

The record itself is described by Teplice as having “inevitably captured the emotional turbulence of the past few years”. It is at times haunting and bleak yet there is beauty to be found within the struggle.

Some have felt the experience of the pandemic to be strange, existential and alien. Far from the imagined realities and dreams we held for ourselves, our friends and our communities. At times music has become a solace for our Utopian visions in the midst of the ongoing disarray and confusion. It can act as an outlet to reimagine our circumstances and between the sounds we can find a place we’d like to call home.

This is a sentiment shared by Teplice, who has tried to capture and narrate this experience. Picking tracks, she reflects on this theme and discusses the concept further.

Topics

Hot Concept Playlist Teplice

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Björk – Come to Me

Welcome to my music utopia. The selection begins with the enticing ‘Come to Me’ from Björk’s 1993 album, Debut. Conjuring a soothing fantasy of complete care and devotion, the track’s playful lyrics – the sensual invocation not to “burst the bubble” – capture the contingency of such heavenly affections.

Side note: my mum once rescued Björk from a locked toilet. Backstage at Dublin’s Electric Picnic festival in 2007, my mum (who was there playing accordion with none other than Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll) discovered and managed to free the star just in time for her set.

Björk – Come to Me

Welcome to my music utopia. The selection begins with the enticing ‘Come to Me’ from Björk’s 1993 album, Debut. Conjuring a soothing fantasy of complete care and devotion, the track’s playful lyrics – the sensual invocation not to “burst the bubble” – capture the contingency of such heavenly affections.

Side note: my mum once rescued Björk from a locked toilet. Backstage at Dublin’s Electric Picnic festival in 2007, my mum (who was there playing accordion with none other than Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll) discovered and managed to free the star just in time for her set.
Deep Blue – Deep Blue (The Inner Part of Me)

My choice of the utopia theme was inspired by a compilation on which this Deep Blue track is featured. Welcome To Paradise 89-93 (Vol. 3) from Safe Trip Records guides its listener into a world of dreamy Italian house, providing energising sonics of happiness from a definitive era of dance music.
Anna Wise – Balance in All

Anna Wise’s two concept albums, The Feminine: Act I & II, ignite in me with a special ambivalence: on one hand, these records are an integral source of motivation, influence, and inspiration; at the same time, my admiration for them is so intense that the effect sometimes veers into toxic apathy – ie. my tunes will never be this good, so what’s the point in trying. Needless to say, I am in awe. Wise wrote ‘Balance in All’ in just a few hours: her crisp production and ethereal vocals ooze energy and emotion, a heavenly equilibrium.
Pet Shop Boys – Violence

Although no utopia has room for violence, this classic from the 1986 album Please combines groovy synths with heartrending melody to expose the grim reality of unchanneled machismo. Shedding the tender light of vulnerability upon the excesses of toxic masculinity, Neil Tennant’s lyrics present a tragic anti-paradise of frustration, misunderstanding, “guns and dreaming”, with the meek hope of something different “far away from here”.
Bea1991 – My Own Heaven

Alongside its 2019 single release, ‘My Own Heaven’ is also the conceptual starting point for an experimental short film by Bea1991 (and dir. Jona Honer), which critiques the tourist industry’s construction and commodification of ‘paradise’ as revolving around the indulgent whims of individual consumers. In addition to these filmic provocations, Bea1991’s musical corpus has been hugely influential to me production-wise, particularly in terms of lyric composition, haphazard insertions of speech and disorienting use of vocal overlay: like the absurd paradise of ‘My Own Heaven’, the effect is a mesmerising paradox of nonsensical unity.
Eris Drew – Trans Love Vibration (Eris Goes to Church)

Richly percussive, grounded in soulful incantations and an organ’s calming timbre, Eris Drew delivers a hymn for collective ceremony and individual liberation. This spirit of electronic dance music as an invaluable form of emancipatory communion is typified by the work of Eris Drew and her partner Maya (Octa Octa), who, despite producing from the rural backwaters of New Hampshire, do not neglect to pay homage to the inner-city (predominantly black, brown, and queer) communities from which the genres originated.
Lucious Jackson – Naked Eye

More emancipation from Lucious Jackson here with the nudist proclamation that “wearing nothing is divine”. This poppy gem from 1996 serves succulent reverb and nourishing harmonies alongside playful lyrics that give thanks to the elements of water, the moon and stars before culminating with a repetitive, joyful and frankly convincing insistence that the naked state of mind “feels alright”.
Brian Eno – Deep Blue Day

Harking back to Welcome to Paradise with more ‘deep blue’, we plunge into the meditative melodics of Brian Eno from the 1983 album, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. Whenever I feel anxious, ‘Deep Blue Day’ brings me back from the netherworld of panic to a place of serene stability. Times have been hard for a while now and this song is ~by far~ my most played.
“Blue” Gene Tyranny – Leading a Double Life

Newly remastered for a posthumous release on Unseen Worlds, “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s album Out of the Blue merges hypnotic, stream-of-consciousness vocals with avant-garde instrumentation to create an aural world of epic beauty. This third track, ‘Leading a Double Life’ summons the no-place etymology of utopia with lyric impressions that convey the thrill of chasing something – just out of reach – or the bliss of “a dream come true”.
CHIC - At Last I am Free

The late cultural theorist Mark Fisher included this tune in the playlist cited among his reading list for the module ‘Postcapitalist Desire’ (co-taught with Kodwo Eshun) shortly before his tragic and untimely death. Hearing the lyrics as pure exhalation, I suspect that Fisher’s choosing of this track was rooted in the sense that it captures some sort of divine release: an arrival into a world beyond strife, suffering and scarcity, a utopic terminus, the end station ‘Freedom’. Robert Wyatt’s version also bangs.