Club Furies

Just a few days ago we presented the premiere of Pandrogeny, the eponymous track of the new work of the talented Mexican producer 1FM on the Spanish label M4rlow Records. Now it’s time to bring you the full review. When we got this release, we didn’t fail to instantly notice the term with which it was named: pandrogeny. What is it? If we attend to the origin, conceived by the artist, Pandrogeny was part of an EP that explored the idea of mimicry as a form of survival.

If we go back on time, Pandrogyny is the physical resemblance to another individual, which is noticed through the use of the same clothes, makeup, hairstyle, and even changing sex to achieve the perfect identity. This proposal comes from the art of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and his wife Lady Jaye, and represents one of the last projects they have developed in their career. From the love they had for each other, they thought of making a more ambitious project that would show all the love they felt for each other. Niklas Luhmann already identified love as that way of self-being and other-self-being in the Other.

For these artists, it was about breaking with individuality and one’s own attributes to be someone else. «We wanted to do away with the dualities of a society that divides everything into two: male and female, black and white,» it is said in the documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye. And it is through technology, more specifically medical technology to modify their corporeality in order to become equal. This was called pandrogeny, which embodies the feminine and masculine essence that all things have, or the total union of the genders.

Employing a technique called cut-up, they managed to reconfigure their bodies, that is, by cutting and embalming parts of both, they built a new corporeality. After surgical interventions, cosmetic procedures, and hormone treatment, the goal was one: to make their bodies the same. This transgressed the gender binary and de-essentialized identity. But this isn’t quite right. The artist was looking for asexuality, extirpating sexuality to strengthen the creative part of the human being.

If we know that art aims to present reality as fiction, or more precisely to fictionalize reality through the observation of reality with the forms of art, through the novelty/non-novelty distinction, these artists took it further: by being objects of their own artistic proposal.

Bold Signal and Dream Photon are expressions of new studies about sleep. Doctors say what actually produces the images we see in dreams are created by neural photons. And the bold signal is just the flow of brain energy that promotes sleep. So this kind of fusion the pandrogeny infuse with thes dream studies.

Bold Signal by 1FM is the track that opens this suggestive work. It is a way of translating Pandrogeny‘s performance proposal into sound, but at the same time take this energy flow to transform it in sound. Fearless and audacious is the sound, as well as the proposal that he takes up to sonify it. Fast, agile, and very refreshing, reaching an heavy hypnotism.

All elements of any artistic proposal that retakes the established to give it a variation or a novelty, which generates surprise in the audience that perceives it. And just as it was established, it also quickly vanished among enviable attitude, nuclear potential, and all the strength of 1FM‘s sound.

The second track, Holy Host, is difficult to decipher at first. Its sonic skeins are woven into powerful, almost mesmerizing densities that unfold with unique insight. Drilling to the point of delirium, it is perhaps a way of meeting the challenge faced by the pandrogeny artists: to defy imposed genre patterns and find other ways.

And the form of it must be radical. To be one in the other, down to the identity so that there is no differentiation at least physically. So it is that Holy Host is powerful, fierce, and voracious, that ends with everything as Bulldozer and Freightliner that impose themselves on the ear and on the floor. His silence at the end is a sign of it: categorical.

We arrive at the core of this artistic proposal, which is at the same time, the core of that artistic proposal. To the concept of Pandrogeny. Persistent, patient, but at the same time wild and hard, mediated by a well-cared sound design. That is to say, a well-thought proposal that is taken to its ultimate consequences.

In the case of 1FM, it is the old-school techno sound that becomes current and present today. Immersed in old devices, those that gave shape to contemporary electronica -those years of Detroit and the first years of Europe-, surrounded by modern devices and machines, Pandrogeny rises with force, vehemence, and controlled decontrol.

The photon is each of the particles that, according to quantum physics, constitute light and, in general, electromagnetic radiation. They are the elements that constitute light, we could say in other words. And a Dream Photon is the form it takes in 1FM sound. The dream quality is expressed by rhythms in a crescendo that approaches very intense and very powerful heights. Incipient sound emerges, positions itself, and flies over with brutal security and height.

1FM‘s Pandrogeny takes its place and concept with its own strength, overcoming the aufhebung that linked it to the one it took as primary influence. Now it is possible to speak of the Pandrogeny techno of 1FM, which shows nuclear potential, this time by M4rlow Records, that has signed a sonorous artistic exception.

Artist: 1FM
Album Title: Pandrogeny EP
Label: M4rlow Records
Catalogue: MR0017

Release Date: April 16th. 2024
Support & Buy on Bandcamp

Tracklist
1. 1FM – Bold Signal
2. 1FM – Holy Host
3. 1FM, Soulstize – Pandrogeny
4. 1FM – Dream Photon

1FM

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Soulstize

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M4rlow Records

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Club Furies

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