Johannes Brecht - Love & Peace III

Three pieces, one coherent thought. “Nada de Novo” opens the EP with a straight, unambiguous tech house floor piece — its title is its own punchline. The voice belongs to João “Ju” Caiola dos Santos, founding MC of Stuttgart hip-hop institution Massive Töne, now living in Lisbon, rapping in Portuguese, his ancestral language. His lyrics circle a quiet stoicism — the world is crazy, nothing new, time is short — before landing on their only logical conclusion: “com alma e corpo”, with soul and body.

“Corpo” is where the weight drops in. At its rhythmic core sits a hybrid percussion framework: live acoustic drums and hand percussion, recorded raw and interlocked with meticulously programmed drum sequences — polyrhythmic, precisely off, never quantized into submission. The prepared piano is fully embedded in this rhythmic architecture, its modified strings and dampened resonances functioning as percussive texture rather than harmonic statement. A Sub Minimoog provides the low-frequency mass underneath. Heavily processed vocals move through the mix as spectral residue — pitch-shifted and granularly resynthesized until only the formant remains.

“Formant” closes the EP by dissolving the rhythmic weight established before it. It starts with the e-rm Polygogo — a geometric oscillator whose rotating polygon waveforms are immediately dissolved by Mutable Instruments Beads into suspended granular texture. Structure and scatter in dialogue, before the groove has fully arrived. The track leaves the EP suspended between form and dissolution, closing the arc that began with the directness of “Nada de Novo”.