Spapop

Spapop is music made from a consistently up-to-date construction kit. It is produced by mixing snippets of highly popular songs as well as nature recordings and their artificial copies. Billboard chart hits are being altered and re-collaged whereby the reference to the “original” is kept audible through voice, melody or lyrics. The recycling of Pop music is crucial. Turned into Spapop the faux intimacy used in corporate pop formulas takes on new personalities while staying linked to their primary source. The cut-ups, carrying emotional triggers are abstracted and pushed into a state of self-awareness by isolating or extensively repeating parts of the lyrics. They receive a life of their own - new narrations evolve. The remaining familiarity functions as a handle for accessing the new soundscape. The tracks are - similar to Elevator tunes and mall music - aimed at enabling a mindset or mode of activity to embrace an experience at hand. They are to be played in loops like a mantra and could replace a room, stage or platform. Users are free to adjust the duration of the loop to its specific situational use The aim of Spapop is to recompose fragments of a daily realm into a crooked place of fiction which offers safety handles from a familiar environment. It is suggesting a travel through unsettling instabilities but offering glimpses of comfort. The “Spa” in Spapop links to a comparison with (physical) treatment that happens by repetitively undergoing sequences of changing external conditions. In Spapop that condition is the music that cyclically changes in energy. Looped it creates a rhythm of intensity and release which never lasts long enough to make one rest completely. At the same time the process of working on moldable pop music is resembling the changing pressure of different heat and water consistencies applied to the body.