Panutup

Hailing from the small town of Svelvik, located just southwest of Oslo, Norway -- an unlikely but proven city to breed and export influential electro artists -- Joachim Dyrdahl, otherwise known as diskJokke, makes acid house beats perfect for moving dancefloors and lays down chilled cinematic pop ideal for lounging. After going to school to study mathematics in a Trondheim university, he relocated to Oslo and started combining his classical and electro-disco backgrounds as a producer. He met up with Prins Thomas, who released two of diskJokke's tracks as 12" singles on his Full Pupp label.

Sagara was commissioned by Norway's Øya festival, which provided Dyrdahl the resources to travel to a place of his choosing and study music. After sampling musicians in Bali and Java, Dyrdahl abandoned the idea of a dance album and instead focused on incorporating the tones and modalities of Gamelan music into pillow-soft mood pieces.
The album travels in a slow build towards my favorite track, Panutup, the most transcendent song which lifts the tonal haze, meandering into Vangelis-esque synthesizer pop and then, unexpectedly, into a few blissful minutes of full-on 4/4 beat that feels, on arrival, like the aural equivalent of a tropical sunrise. Dyrdahl spins this sudden percussion into an uplifting Balearic anthem before fading it out again. Which is not to suggest that the rest of the album feels like it's missing anything, or is in any way inferior to Diskjokke's dance-oriented output.

Treat your ears to Panutup here!


Buy a copy of DiskJokke Sagura here.