JC Leisure - Mutations For (2020)

Warm Winters Ltd. is pleased to announce JC Leisure’s (@jcleisure) latest solo release, 'Mutations For'. The album is built from the artist's collection of mixtapes from circa 1992 onwards that distil the counterculture of rave, free parties and pirate radio broadcasts.

For the last couple of years this archive has formed the basis for JC Leisure’s hybrid DJ cassette sets, a handful of which are archived on Bandcamp. Aware of each cassette's cultural legacy, with 'Mutations For' JC Leisure sets out to give the archive a higher form of autonomy. Similar to the audio-to-midi processes he developed with his band Raft of Trash (where they use the world-building game Simcity3000 as raw material) the cassette tapes are sampled live and fed to synthesizers, software patches and samplers; allowing them to write their own melodies and rhythms. Leisure has worked with and alongside these results and offers them up on 'Mutations For' as an alternative future to a counterculture's unstable history.

These ideas are explored further in collaboration with designer Afonso de Matos on the poster that forms the physical realization of this work.