A Secret Ode to a River Released Online - SAEN by !JP

After a 17 year lasting quest for intelligence and uniqueness, there’s finally the ‘SAEN – a collection’ album from avant garde musician !JP. Not only is it available in physical form, but this time the album will be supplemented by a huge Internet release deal.

The ‘SAEN’ album provides a cross-section of anything !JP is capable of. The songs are carefully selected and some of them are remixed to fit the digital era we’re in. According to the press release, “It’s like you’re making a secret boat trip over the river Saen, purely on the inside of your mind. All these mixed human emotions pass the revue.”

Your captain on this journey will be Jean Koning, the artist who channels his musical aspirations through his alter ego, !JP. A wonderful mix of sounds and words passes you by, with ‘A Singer Must Die’ as the ultimate, emotional highlight.

Jean Koning’s music can be divided into a diversity of categories. On ‘SAEN – a collection’ you get in touch with overly known punk rock songs (’Old Friend’), experimental tracks (’Suitcase’, ‘Earthquake Land’), spoken word (’Two Lovers Who Seize To Be’) but also suitable pop songs that could easily suit any top 40 (’Some Say…’, ‘Calendar Boy’, ‘Last Day’). During his collaboration with sound-artist Van Weely, all registers were pulled and album after album was released.

”I’ve always been attracted to the water, to the river. I’ve always felt connected to this river. Even when I was a child, when we went swimming in the river Saen. To a point, I think that the rhythm of the water in the river has always been a great influence on my musical work,” says Koning.

After sex and religion, real human emotions and feelings serve the music. It’s not unusual then, that there are a few tearjerkers on the album. Songs like ‘Begbie doesn’t live here’ and ‘A Singer Must Die’ will still make your heart stop and wonder what just happened to you. Even after all these years. And in their simplicity they prove that minimalism within music can be a very powerful weapon.

”Sometimes you don’t need more than one instrument to tell a story,” says Koning. “The emotional rhythm of ‘A Singer Must Die’ takes me into a trance. A mood in which I dare to put certain things, emotions into perspective. Emotions and things I normally, when it’s just us talking to each other, never speak about. The current of the song changes you as a person; it’s like a stream of feelings in the ether. Something with no form or shape, but with content. You have to pass that on to other people otherwise your stay here on this planet has been completely useless. Music can be a form of religion. You have faith in what the singer has to say. It doesn’t matter what he sings, as long as you believe it. Have faith in it. Just like the little kid in the pretty dress two rows in front of you in church on Sunday. It doesn’t matter how many things in the bible are wrong and misplaced. As long as the preacher is a man you are willing to trust. It makes a lot of this stuff, you know, well.”

‘Easter Jesus’ is obviously a song made for the dance floor. “I love clubs. The first time I heard ‘Easter Jesus’ pass by in a club in New York, and I saw people move over to the dance floor to get freaky on the song, I got very excited. It was an honor to witness them freak out on the song, because there are so many better dance-musicians in the world than me. It was an experiment. In retrospective it turned out to be a successful experiment.”

“I’m not a compilation-aficionado. Especially in my music. Every album serves a different story, seen from a variety of perspectives. It is dangerous to steal the songs away from their safe environment and place them on one album with each other. When you start listening to tracks as if they were just tracks, you miss the heart of the music, the soul, which is weaved through so many other songs. The selection that made it all the way to ‘SEAN’ has been carefully picked. As is the sequence. It builds itself into a complete new story.

It’s a story that has been build upon fragments of other stories. It’s like you’re sitting on a bus en hear a few lines from your fellow passengers and than make up a story around that. Or better yet; it’s like you enter a world like I love to see in David Lynch films. Dark terrains. Crowded by people who don’t seem to have anything to do with each other, but when you get to know them you see that they do share a bond. That is ‘SAEN’. My secret ode to a communion around the river Saen. They have nothing in common, but in the end they are weaved into each other. And deeper than they ever realized.”