Kangding Ray - Hyper Opal Mantis (2017)

The tension between the natural and artificial, the body and mind, are central themes in electronic music in general, and Techno in particular, as the means of creation, focused around technology and interactions with machines, contrast with the emotional response to sound, the mystical ritual of collective dancing, and the ethos of liberation and tolerance embedded in the culture it produced.

We’re navigating a world of engineered pleasures, big data monitoring of movements and consumption habits, and falsely objective representations of reality, further blurred by a reduced attention span and several opaque layers of cultural interpretation and political manipulation.

Manichean simplifications are used to create hate and fear in order to achieve domination and impose limits on freedom, and the irrational belief in endless growth, increasingly disconnected from nature, led to massive environmental destructions and waves of unprecedented extinctions of species.

Our primal sensuous perception, vastly more abstract, emotional and sensual, make us feel the world as an ambiguous realm we are part of, but not in control of ; a complex network of interacting forces and enigmatic patterns, a matrix of overlapping desires. Rebuilding our bonds with nature, Reconnecting with our senses, and spreading love in the process becomes an essential act of resistance.

Hyper Opal Mantis is a triptych on 3 states of desire, and the first long player of Kangding Ray for Stroboscopic Artefacts.
HYPER is the primal, sensual lust, OPAL is the emotional catharsis, a blissful desire for love. MANTIS, like the insect it refers to, is the destructive, fatal attraction.