photography by AM Gordon
Musician, producer and DJ Leo Maymind alias Maymind is a real globetrotter. Born in Riga, Latvia when it was still under Soviet rule, he grew up in New Orleans, later moved to New York and now he is based in Los Angeles. What sounds like a dream on one hand can also be a bit difficult on the other. Maybe us humans are like a river, always flowing forward to feel alive. Or maybe we are like trees, that get deeply rooted into a place in order to be able to grow strong for all the challenges of life. These thoughts waft around my mind while listening to Maymind’s latest track “Left To My Own Devices”, taken from new album ‘June’, which is hard to categorize except that it is electronic. On some sequences the beats flows along ripplingly, only to then tentatively pull back again. In the end, a pleasant old-school feeling remains.
Leo tells: “There’s a story in ‘Left to My Own Devices,’ though like a lot of the best stories, I don’t think you need to understand exactly what the story is to understanding what the feeling is. In some ways it’s a love letter to both the canon of American electronic music and my younger self, giving that person a way forward, saying that all the struggles were worth it, to keep going. I think a lot of the journey of making June was trying to find this middle zone in between headphone listening and straight on club music.”
He continues: “For ‘Left to My Own Devices’, I kept on resisting the urge to take the basic idea and turn it into a full on club track, but instead this version of the track (which is essentially how the first version of it was arranged) is what I stuck with. A friend described it as ‘super articulate, hyper produced’ which I feel like is an apt description for how I make music. While it’s still essentially loop based music, there’s an extreme precision to how each track is taking its own voyage.”
Enjoy the video below:
Follow Maymind:
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twitter.com/maymindmusic
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www.maymindmusic.com
Live:
1/7 – Zebulon, Los Angeles, CA w/ Leech
1/12 – Berlin Under A, New York, NY w/ M. Geddes Gengras and Heathered Pearls
1/13 – PhilaMoca, Philadelphia, PA w/ Jeff Zeigler
1/14 – Pie Shop, Washington, DC w/ Jackson Ryland
1/15 – TBA, Baltimore
