It is time for a new series and labels (summer?). Starting a new series is Kevin Richard Martin, who operates under the moniker The Bug. Martin operates his own label, Pressure, and his new series is Ladybug, where he is paired with a different female singer/performer. The first title simply goes as Ladybug 1 and pairs Martin with Berlin-based producer and performer Dis Fig (Felicia Chen).
And while the series and the first album title may sound solidly simple, there’s nothing that simple going on with the music here. Martin and Chen already have a previous collaboration titled ‘In Blue’ where that blue refers to the mood side of that colour, and creating a specific mood is what this 5-song EP is all about Ladybug 1 too.
So how can you create a different tonality with a deep cinematic mood without really altering the original idea and concept of a single theme/song? Martin and Chen try to answer that question with ‘Vanishing’ as the main theme here, with varying degrees of expansiveness and dub variations.
The idea is to just add a few different tonal variations without introducing any radical changes, with the danger being that you can fall into sameishness, but like good painters and applying the techniques of minimal modern classical composers, the duo are able to make those seemingly minute changes in the main theme create a change that works.
