Club Furies

Julio Muñoz, better known as Yulio, is a Chilean producer and artist based in Croatia. After surviving many years in Barcelona he has been dedicated to electronic music for more than 20 years and now to more experimental sounds. When he emigrated to Barcelona in 2003, he absorbed and acquired all the wisdom of the city, which helped him to create in 2006 Kraftoptical, the label he has been running for many years.

Now, he presents his sixth studio album entitled Symphonies from the Retrofuture, in which he represents the internal struggle of humanity with the new ways of using new technologies. It is a way of visualizing our present and near future, hence the term retrofuturism. A never-ending story that is once again present in our daily lives. Maybe it is an illusion or we really have to think about what will happen in this universe, that is the dilemma.

Retrofuturism or present futures, that is the starting point. Sounded in the form of a symphony, that is to say, in a set of voices, instruments, or both, that sound chords at the same time. Immediately in the introduction of this album, we are presented with the song of the same name, which opens the universe of sounds that Yulio proposes for his sixth album. Cybernetic, futuristic, nostalgic, tangled, taciturn, robotic. All this is concentrated in past, present, and future times in a very special sonic and temporal complexity.

Diesel 1940 marks a temporal and technological rupture in terms of what Koselleck and Hartmut Rosa call acceleration since it was the year in which diesel completely replaced steam as a form of fuel for various means of transportation. Its sounds are fine, but tense, as well as immersed in times that were and dreams passed. Something that connects and deepens the next track, Cibona Tower.

This tower is one of the tallest buildings in Croatia, located in Zagreb, its capital, Yulio‘s home. Perhaps a reminder of where he is, where he has been, and where he wants to be. Or perhaps a sample of what technique can do, if we look at it together with The Iron Giant, the track that follows it, and that together form a mini-unit or transition from the beginning to what follows.

Unicorn Kid in sound and semantics alludes directly to that mythological creature of European folklore, that is, the white horse with antelope legs, goat eyes and hair, and a horn on its forehead. Dissolved in stardust, which was and will be, and nostalgia that projects into the future, this track leaves us floating in nothingness and the ethereal. Perhaps a reminder of what time can be. While ShadowRun is the name made of facts of what time can be: a shadow that runs, and as it does so disappears, not before leaving other shadows that do the same. In such facts, sound is reticent, elusive, and mysterious, entangled in infinite times.

Reise Hotel raises expectation and excitement wrapped in sounds somewhat threatening and incipient that modulate to obtain enveloping and sharp atmospheres. Sound rumblings that take us to the limit to rush into silence amid unassailable mysteries and lost states of mind. Is this what time is?

Pulp picks up where the previous track has left us: in the middle of who knows where, but with stronger and more polished atmospheres, metallic, dark, perhaps outer space, whose environments are really threatening. A track of striking sound design, so much so that it imposes a lot. The crux of the album, which shows an impasse in the album: to hold on to the sound or to find a lack of grips in the sound?

In the silence Hacker 2030 becomes sound. A prospective to 2030 that begins with fear, but with security and attitude. A dystopian future is presented to us, in hacked computers and broken cybernetic cracks that lead us to perdition and delirium. In all of this, however, there are hints of utopian hope, so that a nice dystopia/utopia duality emerges in the sound, facing the proposed concept.

Lovecraft In Love is an ode to the ambient sound in the semantics of the writer of horror and mystery novels, which is also noticeable in the sound. From some deep, dark, and terrifying places, drone halos suggests to us that the metals of the past and the future merge in a present that promises no promise, sunk in the progress of the no-progress.

Sarah Connor is the mythical character of the Terminator saga, the one who is in charge of saving humanity from Skynet’s technological dystopia. The sound is therefore full of hope, beautiful nostalgia, and patience in the sound design, which modulates ambient and IDM in the form of subtle and sophisticated sound spirals. Between bubbles of times that were not and times that are, the present is still here. White Cruiser of the Clouds continues the perspective of the previous track. Closing the album, the hopelessness and lack of a future open place to its opposites in halos that again leave us floating in the ethereal, this time with other sensations and atmospheres, full of rainbows and colors to discover.

Cyborg Warning is just that: everything that this album warned of at the beginning, dissolved in its opposite, emerges in a mystical, mysterious, and subtle way. Fine sonorous strands give shape to what is behind the veil, which hinders its full expression. The cyborg vocals leave us in the quintessential place of electronica, glimpsed years ago in Detroit. A place that at the same time feels like a caress to the soul and like a warning of what is to come, or what may come. It is also the culmination of excellent work, full of unique places, diverse atmospheres, and exceptional sounds.

Artist: Yulio
Title: Symphonies from the Retrofuture
Extended: Album
Label: Kraftoptical Records
Catalog: Kraftoptical ref.92
Format: Digital
Genre: Electronic | Experimental | IDM | Space Music

Release Date: June 5th. 2024
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Tracklist
1. Symphonies from the Retrofuture
2. Diesel 1940
3. Cibona Tower
4. The Iron Giant
5. Unicorn Kid
6. ShadowRun
7. Reise Hotel
8. Pulp
9. Hacker 2030
10. Lovecraft in Love
11. Sarah Connor
12. White Cruiser of the Clouds
13. Cyborg Warning

Yulio

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Kraftoptical Records

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Club Furies

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