Orson Hentschel - Antigravity (2019)

Orson Hentschel is a German composer and visual artist based in Berlin. He composes experimental electronic music, with influences ranging from classical minimalism to triphop and drone.

For his third studio album Orson Hentschel travels back to the past and into the future, combining both old and new sounds, merging analogue drum machines from the 60’s with modern synthesizer environments. Hentschel largely forgoes melodies in order to create space for drone alike and sustained tones within the lower bass frequencies as well as noisy electronics. Sometimes a beat is coming straight out of the box, like in „Steady State“ or „Ghost Echos“. Constant rhythms alternate with fragmented, overlapped or reversed ones, like on „Antigravity“ or „Walki Talki“.
For the rhythmical sound editing, Hentschel used the Watkins Copicat, an old tape echo, which was very popular back in the days and which amplifies the scratchy sounding characteristic of his rhythm machines. His overall vision is to create a futuristic vintage sound, which does not fit in any ordinary mould.

Since his latest album „Electric Stutter“ (2017), Hentschel’s musical exploration lasted almost two years and is closely linked with his real-world journey, moving from Düsseldorf to Berlin. After a musical lean period in Düsseldorf it was time to get new inspiration and to create a new working environment. Berlin turned out to be this new place to absorb positive energy and to regain a creative workflow. „Antigravity“ is the symbol for this creation period. It reflects his temporarily disconnected relation to music and his (old) environment.