Premiere: Frankey & Sandrino – XRain [Mule Musiq]

Frankey & Sandrino’s musical evolution spans one decade, two cities, and multiple genres. Following an of years of touring the globe with their incendiary live sets, the German, Essen, and Berlin-based artists and founders of the record label Sum Over Histories return to Mule Musiq to release their Boson EP, a sublime and eery production inspired by the freneticism of physics.

Frankey says: “The name Boson is a reference to the Higgs boson particle, produced when millions of subatomic particles collide.” Sandrino continues: “When I hear this weird synth coming in, I imagine those particles in their frenetic dance.”

Boson, track one of the new EP, is a chugging and rhythmic house release. The track starts light and builds into an orchestral tsunami with siren-like synths, fat percussion lines, and frantic snares. But despite its dark edges, the track exudes a sense of play and optimism, projecting to the listener a bright future, both for the dance music community and the artists themselves.

Track two, XRain, is a back-to-basics return to minimalism. At times melancholic, at times euphoric, analogue chimes add a freneticism to the track while subtle bass grounds it, building up over nine minutes to create an electronica crescendo. The gradual trajectory and eery synths make it an ideal closing track, the perfect backdrop to a cheering crowd, silhouetted by smoke and lit up by lasers.

Tokyo-based founder of Mule Musiq, Toshiya Kawasaki, has an intuition for dark disco, with releases spanning every corner of the globe, all with a common cosmic thread. The result is a unique wave of house productions seemingly created specifically for the label, as though Mule Musiq pulled each release up from the ground whole.

The cover artwork of the Boson EP is designed by German-born illustrator Stefan Marx, famous for his refreshingly mischievous and uninhibited drawings. The aesthetic reflects the playfully subversive nature of the EP; an acid-inspired colouring-in session which offers as a reminder that this music is best approached in the way a child with a fistful of crayons standing in front of a large white wall might do.