TAL 30 / KOPY / HEART FRESH

TAL 30
KOPY
HEART FRESH

LP (black vinyl) plus free DL

Release: 29. March 2024

Worldwide distribution:
MORR
Forced Exposure
Bommkat

Night Sarkas [3:39]
New Walk [4:47]
Cross Beam [2:41]
Hole Hole [3:09]
Cave [1:33]

TIR TONE [2:46]
Blows [3:55]
Saloon [2:36]
Small Garden [2:06]
Midnight Pool [2:18]

All Music by Kopy.
Recorded by Nobuki Nishiyama at Ochiai Soup,Tokyo, June 23
Mixed by Stefan Schneider at TAL, Düsseldorf
Mastering by Detlef Funder at Paraschall, Düsseldorf
Vinyl Cut by Anne Taggert at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin
Artwork by Takashi Makabe, Osaka

Yuko Kureyama returns to TAL with the album HEART FRESH, her first ever full length release
under her KOPY moniker. All tracks of the album were recorded in Tokyo in June 2023 at the
famous live house Ochiai Soup. For the recordings of the ten tracks, Ochiai Soup was swiftly
converted into a recording studio as the intimate atmosphere of the club and its perfect room
acoustics gave KOPY the chance to record her music like in a live situation.
Amazingly KOPY‘s instrumentation on HEART FRESH consists only of a Jomox x Base 09
rhythm machine and an Elektron Digitakt mini sampler. In the hands of KOPY this fairly basic and
common gear creates an unmistakably intuitive and original approach to drum programming, which
is recognisably her very own.

Due to extensive live playing in the past two years, KOPY has garnered a lot of admiration for her
consistently unpredictable and fearless club performances and has easily become one of the most
exciting and inventive live acts from the ever vibrating electronic music scene in Japan.
However, HEART FRESH seems even more focused, urgent and ambitious than its predecessors,
the Paredo EP (TAL12 including a remix by LENA WILLIKENS), the Eternal EP (TAL 24 featuring
a remix by ELENA COLOMBI) and the split album SUPER MILD (TAL15).
Nothing on HEART FRESH is subdued. The entire production is resonating with its peculiar
frequencies, it is wonderfully evocative, open hearted, full of life and intelligence.
The album opens with Night Sarkas with quirky snare rolls played against slashing, nervy chunks
of melody. Samples of organ and chimes evoke an rollercoaster spinning out of tune and synch.
The album’s final track Moonlight Pool is the perfect closer for an album of taut, free wheeling
figurations of meter and tone, a nod to classical ambient music as well as to contemporary more
experimental digressions.

The album’s most startling and unexpected moments come when KOPY follows her futuristic
inclinations and matches them with dissonant excoriations that shuttle the mind into a completely
different place where all kinds of different activities seem to follow their own individual compasses.
Imagine to walk down the noisy streets in Tokyo and you hear all kinds of different sounds
infiltrating your ears independently from different sources and directions. In that sense HEART
FRESH is the most appropriate soundtrack we can imagine for the contemporary era.