Occupied Head

Looking Through Closed Eyes

Label: In Fact Recordings

Genre: Electronica / Ambient / Experimental

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LP €26.99

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"Dieter Mauson is the man behind the name Occupied Head. To older readers, maybe best known as one half of Nostalgie Eternelle with Stefan Heinze or Delta-Sleep-Inducing Peptide, his duo with Siegmar Fricke. While these are in the past, he’s still active with various collaborations, of which 7697 Miles is the one I reviewed most of; it’s a long-distance project with Cristobal Rawlins from Chile. Occupied Head is a solo project he started in 2011 and a name he also uses when collaborating with others, such as Melophobia. I don’t know when he decides to use a new project name or the divider ‘&’. On his latest LP, he offers seven pieces of electronic music. True story: right before I started this LP, I heard some Cabaret Voltaire from the early 1990s, then I started ‘Looking Through Closed Eyes’, sat down, and suddenly thought: hey, Cabaret Voltaire is still on. That’s not to say Occupied Head’s new LP is a strict copy of the early 1990s Cabs sound, but it owes to that sound world. A bit bleepy on some of the electronics, lots of beats, but still with the idea of dancing to it. And sometimes that seems a bit difficult, such as in ‘Tingly All Over’, or with the abrupt fading of ‘New Colonialism’ and ‘Loslassen’, which makes it sound like an excerpt of a bigger thing (although ‘Loslassen’ means let go, so maybe that works). That aside, the pieces are well-made, with sonic depth, with variation, some of it aimed at the dancefloor and some not so much, but that’s what makes this a record that is very well suited for home listening—file under toe-tapping and head-nodding."