Exhibitions: 2002 > Totem & Mole Listening Pearls Present The Listening Room

TOTEM & MOLE LISTENING PEARLS PRESENTS THE LISTENING ROOM VOLUME ONE

Totem Design – America’s foremost design driven, education enhanced multi-media forum for good design is pleased to announce a music CD collaboration with renowned German eclectic music label Mole Listening Pearls.

Mole Listening Pearls is an exquisite, eclectic, electronic music record label, known throughout the world for sophisticated, genre-bending music from talented international producers. Started in 1997 by Alex Hendorf of Germany’s Under Cover Music Group, Mole has a discography of over 40 albums and compilations featuring such artists as De-Phazz, Yonderboi, Tosca, Baby Mammoth, & Lemongrass, (to name a few) that has, for the most part, remained a secret of Europe…until now.

Mole Listening Pearls embraces music that cannot be tacked to a stereotype or forced into a pre-determined category. “Listening Pearls” means valuable titles with special qualities, taken from the progressive listening culture of the past, present, & the future. Its sound is not confined to one specific genre…it ranges over and blends house, trip hop, rock, ambient, drum n’ bass, jazz, broken-beat, & down-tempo. Mole oscillates between the poles of abstraction, home-listening, and club suitability and in doing so creates its own unique category. It is a very versatile sound. It is music that gets you up to groove as well as sets the mood for chilling, relaxing, & introspective thought. In this way Mole is more than just a record label…it has substance and creates atmosphere. Simply refer to the album artwork, which is central to this concept, uniquely designed and conceptualized by Germany’s uc graphic & Katsunori Sasaki of Totem.

THE LISTENING ROOM @ TOTEM DESIGN NYC is a new MOLE/Totem product line specifically designed for the interplay between music & design, audio & visual. It is in the form of a new dj mix series compiled & mixed by Mole’s own Ben Butler, weekly resident DJ @ New York’s downtown bastion of lounge music – the Soho Grand Hotel’s Grand Bar & Lounge. The series concept is based on the lifestyle personality that Mole has established for itself within the U.S. through its exclusive relationship with Totem. Since June ’01, Totem Gallery has featured Mole as its exclusive in-store soundtrack, an all Mole listening station, Mole album cover artwork on display, and mole CD’s for sale. As a result this relationship goes far beyond that of a simple co-branded product. Instead these two unique companies, an audio and a visual, have come together to create a unique multimedia experience: The Listening Room.

The Listening Room Volume 1 will be released May 2002. It is an active DJ mix, with only the utmost attention paid to musicality & composition. As an in-direct response to the overwhelming swarm of the “chill-out” trend, The Listening Room walks a more upbeat path. Starting out with the Eastern European trip hop moodiness of Mole’s own Yonderboi, Telle’s Ralph Myerz & the Jack Herren Band, & Mole’s Nor Elle (aka Plastic City tech house master Terry Lee Brown Jr.) the mix moves into more of a jazz-influenced feel with Yonderboi’s remix of fellow Hungarian Mole artist Gabor Deutsch, Dublex Inc.’s “Sorrover” from their 12” release on Mole last year, and the retro magic of ESL Music’s Thunderball. Naomi then hits us with hauntingly beautiful female vocals in “Go” from their upcoming mole full-length album “Everybody Loves You”. The mix then moves into the upbeat, soulful mid-tempo stylings of Klein’s UKO, & the influential breakbeat track of the year “Life in the Rain”, from tru-thoughts’ Quantic. Walkner Moestl then injects the introspective Vienna dub flavor with their remix of Tosca’s masterpiece “Busenfreund”, from G-Stone. Mole’s veteran artist Lemongrass, with 3 past artist albums on the label, then lifts us up into the clouds with his “Time Tunnel” mix of “Journey to a Star”. Next up is De-Phazz’s dub-tinged remix of Hungary’s Anima Soundsystem classic “’68” with its chorus of Hungarian singers chanting away into space. As if that wasn’t enough, The Listening Room then offers up as an added exclusive, a Brothers’ Brothers remix of superstar Totem designer Karim Rashid’s “Plob”, an original installation soundtrack. Rashid’s style – a unique mix of art, design, pop, & lifestyle functionality – fits perfectly with Mole’s versatility in sound. He frequently lectures at design meccas around the world, and his work has been published in periodicals such as New York Times, GQ, Metropolis, ID, Graphis, Nylon, and many more.