Techno can become an experience to connect with oneself. And it’s not necessary for it to be 5 am to listen. Renassense breaks with the stereotype of this genre and shows that there’s much more than just a party in its sounds. The producer and DJ based in San Francisco has released her first EP, Human Experience, a journey towards the most introspective aspects of ourselves.
The desire to turn experiences into art propelled her headfirst into the world of music. With authenticity as her personal trademark, she aims to be a tool through which people feel and reflect with honesty. The musical influence of the '80s and '90s electronic scene is present, and her artistic name is not a coincidence: ‘Renassense’ is a play on words with renaissance. And that's what her music is, a journey to the past with the underground sounds of the moment, always from a contemporary perspective, and her touch of blending the emotional with the euphoric.
The EP explores five states of being: Empathy, Lust, Creativity, Music, and Pain, respectively, the titles of the songs. Each of them makes us feel alive, and although it may not seem like they can fit into the same category, they all help us understand what makes us human.
Empathy is a melodic techno track that begins with certain violins but quickly breaks into the rhythm of the phrase “Fear, or rage, or tenderness, or confusion, or whatever that he or she is experiencing…”. The artist confesses that Carl Rogers, a humanistic psychologist, had a significant impact on her as a creator. The way she talks about empathy resonates within her; that’s why the aforementioned verse is a snippet from one of his conferences in 1974. Lust is a primitive experience. Attraction, not only physical, moves us, elevating us to the most stimulating sensation of the senses. It is the most intimate and daring song of all, as percussion and melody combine with cries of orgasms and phrases like "I like your mind / I like your body."
Creativity is the one that contains more electronic details. As the title suggests, it is the riskiest musically. Possibilities and sounds are explored, from melancholy to high energy in the same theme: "There's beauty in creating something that wasn't there before." We arrive at Music, which, although it may not seem intrinsic to our being, deserves to be classified as such. In 1965, Delia Derbyshire spoke about the fundamentals of sound design at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and Renassense has sampled it to celebrate the roots of electronic music. It ends with Pain, almost ironically, after this, there is always something, and it is never the end of nothing. Around this idea, pain is learning, growth, an essential aspect of the human experience. For the lyrics, the artist has used a quote from Jim Morrison: “Pain is something to carry like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain,” an interlude of the trance anthem that she gifts us afterward.
