Delayed with Valentin Ginies
Close your eyes & imagine a scene unfolding in front of you - the air is cold & crisp, your breath barely visible in the darkness as you exhale, the warm air in your lungs condensing into clouds of fog as it leaves your body. Everything is quiet & the trees sit still around you, all of the sounds gently muffled, other than a faint warm rumble of sub frequencies, somewhere in the distance. You can’t quite pinpoint it but you follow the sound as your feet softly crunch down on frozen earth. As you get closer, you suddenly notice a mysteriously intriguing concrete structure start to appear in the forest. Lights glowing from windows partly shrouded in freshly fallen snow, resembling an abandoned bunker, eerie but peaceful. The music invites you towards it, so you open the door & step in. Immediately you’re enveloped by warm, humid air & hit with a full spectrum of sound, as if the opening of the door was the opening of a low pass filter.
For this week’s Delayed with edition, we welcome Berlin-based artist Valentin Ginies with a special recording from this bunker in the woods. You may be familiar with Valentin already, as the man behind 11001 Records, or through the festival he organizes outside of Berlin, Third Eye Festival. Last December, he was lucky enough to play an all night long set at this mysterious venue, after the first big snowstorm of the year, with 1 meter of snow on the ground. Aptly named Concrete, the venue is as discreet as it gets, an intimate, minimalist space with no signage on the outside, tucked away in the mountains of a small village in the Japanese Alps called Hakuba, just outside the city of Nagano in Japan. The recording consists of the first 2 hours of his set, where he slowly & steadily drew people into the space, setting the tone for what was to come.
