Organ Mug (CH - Lausanne)

After two EPs and a debut album (“Spinneret”, 2017), Organ Mug (the project of Swiss musician Morgan Hug) uncovers his spectacular soundscapes on “Here And There”. From the minimal pop sounds of “A Somewhere Place” to the electronics and free jazz of “Caballus”, the listeners will find themselves under the spell of Organ Mug’s multi-faceted stream of music and his haunting voice.

“Here And There” starts out with a carefree ode to escape (“I have a place where I can go/ Place nobody knows (…)/ A place where your thoughts/ They have no bound”). But this beautiful dream progressively slides into a dystopian world where the industrial noises of automats, cars and computers clash with traditional oriental sounds (citar, oud, koto) and occidental instruments (harmonium, cello, saxophone). The Lausanne based musician depicts the all-surrounding ultra-liberalism he grew up in and that contaminated everything, including our memories: “what’s at the back, I’ll paint it black” (In A Passenger Seat). Throughout its divergent, poignant moods, “Here And There” tells how the best of worlds, once taken over by the “beasts of the Apocalypse”, can become hell.

Though his previous releases were shaped by his travels (the El Teide desert of Tenerife defined the lunar sounds of “Spinneret”), “Here And There” is the result of a different modus operandi, a patchwork of songs written… here and there, on a portable studio, at home or in a more conventional recording environment. Some of these songs are recent, some were started five years ago. They were all finalized and mixed in Organ Mug’s new headquarters, an old farm house in the countryside of Vaud, Switzerland.