Palmbomen II

Between moving from Berlin to Los Angeles, Hugo spent the summer of 2013 in Holland, and made an album (self titled) for his project Palmbomen II. His focus slowlyn shifted more towards early eighties house and other ‘homemade’ electronic music from that time and he decided that he wanted to have the same work ethics as the artists he was listening to. Hugo concluded that the spontaneity and roughness of these songs are a results of the nonexistence of ‘total recall’ in the way people were forced to work in those times. Make your rhythms and harmonies, arrange these and play them live, record to tape, and that’s it. This is very different from today’s production methods. When sculpting something for weeks or months, tracks often tend to get sterile, and lose their initial spontaneity. Hugo experimented with creating a new song every day. Starting in the afternoon, making a melody, harmony or rhythm, create enough material around that to have something of a song by the evening, and in the night, late, he would record a jam of this direct to tape. With no way back. He locked himself up in his mom’s attic, and produced around 30 songs in four weeks. Some were unusable because of bad mixing or other minor flaws (or just boring), some songs that made it to the album would have been changed if he could, but he can not. This is it. Influences are early Chicago records from artists like