YOGTZE | VINYL RECORD (LP)

Running Back Incantations present Yogtze! A joint venture of musician/producer Daniel Helmer (Mantra Mantra, Gudrun von Laxenburg) and filmmaker from Vienna Daniel Meuzard (Feater, Skymax, Vallay). The duo offers a headstrong trip deep into the tune-in-turn-on-drop-out-mentality of European minds outside of their natural environment. Helmer and Meuzard met around 2005 in Peru where they both participated in an ayahuasca ceremony. After this experience they decided to travel and discover South America together for some weeks. During that journey, the idea of a musical project (Yogtze) was born. Two years and many miles later, Helmer and Meuzard saw Alejandro Jodorowsky's Montana Sacra (The Holy Mountain, 1973) at a small film festival in Paris. The movie inspired them to create a musical composition that reflects it's spirit and atmosphere. In order to do so, they decided to travel Morocco and record music on a small 8-track tape machine at a friend's home studio in Essaouira. "The artistic process felt very natural. All we had to do was to open up to the cosmos and let the music flow through our bodies," said Meuzard. Neither Meuzard nor Helmers intended to release those recordings, since the sessions were more of a personal nature and meant to create a musical experience for themselves. A decade later, their Moroccan friend, who stumbled upon the tapes while cleaning his storage, urged them to release their recordings so everyone could experience the same musical journey as they had back in 2007. "It would be a grand act of selfishness not to share this work of art with others," he told them. Luckily for the world, Helmer and Meuzard decided to finally edit, mix and master the rest of the material in 2018/2019 and named their project Yogtze. Expect a record full of wondrous soundscapes, haunting melodies, and captivating themes that would fit in many categories or definitions and none at the same time. Music from and for memories, tangerine dreams, and chessboards.