Al Lover shares Peaking Light remix of 'Cosmic Joke' plus new B-Side 'Static & Distance'
Los Angeles producer Al Lover is today sharing a remix of ‘Cosmic Joke’ courtesy of Amsterdam electronic duo Peaking Lights. A staple of the global psychedelic scene, Lover has spent nearly a decade fine-tuning a broken, abstracted form of electronica that pools together a tapestry of trip-hop, synthesised krautrock, dub and dark ambient.
Reworking the title-track of Lover’s newly released album, Aaron Coyes of Peaking Lights transforms ‘Cosmic Joke’ into an ethereal, tropic dub. Stream the remix and B-side, previously unreleased Al Lover track titled ‘Static & Distance’ below. You can pick Al Lover's newest LP here.
Lover says of the remix: “I’ve been a fan of Peaking Lights for years and was lucky enough to share the stage with them a couple times throughout the years. The transformation from ‘Cosmic Joke’ into a world hypnotic tropical dub was exactly what I was hoping for for this one and they knocked it out of the park!”
Utilising an arsenal of samples, drum machine, analogue synths and live instrumentation, Lover’s is a kaleidoscopic sound that’s J-Dilla, DJ Shadow and Lee Scratch Perry by way of Brian Eno, Kraftwerk and Kluster. Central to his music is a desire to explore the fringes of psychedelic music and the common threads that run through its far-reaching styles, drawing elements from the past and connecting them to the future.
Through the years he has released a number of studio albums and beat-tapes, remixed the likes of Osees and Night Beats, been resident DJ for the Levitation and Desert Daze festivals and collaborated with the likes of Goat, Anton Newcombe, Cairo Liberation Front and White Fence. Now, Lover returns with his latest studio album, ‘Cosmic Joke’ – a series of synthesised philosophical meditations on modern life, in all its tragicomic absurdity.
"'Cosmic Joke' came from observing the rising, compounded absurdity in recent years and seeing structures of normalcy dissolving. It’s my attempt to view these things as part of a higher-order process, through a metaphysical lens rather than an ideological one. It’s been an exercise in holding the paradoxical relationship of comedy and tragedy, joy and pain, growth and decay, scale and decline as part of an interlocked system that, at a deep level, is essential to how we interface with the world.”
