MISCHA BLANOS is a Romanian pianist and electronic producer who found himself becalmed in Bucharest when the lockdown bit and, with time on his hands as we all had, began to consider the city as a thing, and how we as humans who created them, interact and are altered by them.
With the Romanian lockdown taking the form of a purdah overnight from 9am to 9pm, he burned the midnight oil, working long into the night in his studio, creating, thinking, achieving musical catharsis – and losing himself in memory.
A dedicated tourer and thus traveller, he explored and captured the different rhythms and cultures of the cities he’s visited.
Sometimes traveling alone, Mischa Blanos was able to dissolve into the crowd – to be an outsider exploring the depths of the huge, pulsing city organism. Often he was traveling with fellow countrymen Cristi Cons and Vlad Caia, performing as one third of the influential ‘Ro-minimal’ techno outfit Amorf to the world’s most famous clubs. And he also felt the call of the piano, a need to not just use it, to play it; but to fuse with it, make it his own.
During this period of lone composition, Mischa realised that the pressure he felt in each city was not due to the mass of people, but the city itself.
“The city is an untamed creature and we are creating it, one cell at a time,” he ventures.
“We moulded soil and stone and built these dazzling places where we can live together protected from wild and unpredictable nature.
But: “If it is made by us for us, why does it feel like a crushing force on the individual?”
And that’s idea – how the city is made by us, for us, but subliminally alters us, that Mischa seeks to explore on his new album, City Jungle, which is out on InFiné come late May.
On the road to which today he’s dropped the clean urban beauty of “Innervision”, a piece for trilling piano melody and pulsing electronica, recalling euphoric nights in clubs worldwide; clubs we all wait to revisit and sweat and commune and glory in once more, soon. And “Innervision” rises and twines its piano and electronic elements together in sublimating that ecstatic charge of humans coming together with wordless, common purpose: to celebrate.
Mischa Blanos’ City Jungle will be released by InFiné digitally, on CD and on vinyl on May 21st; you can pre-order your copy from the label’s Bandcamp page, here.
Connect with Mischa Blanos on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram; and InFiné on those same socials here, here and here respectively.
