Art Noir is a solo project of German film composer Jan Weber. This year, Aenaos Records which specializes in darkwave, gothic, post-punk, synthwave and many more genres, presents his new album Poems of Extinct Species, the first one in 10 years, since his previous work Silent Green came out.
The process of making the release was quite unique and exceptional on its own. In 2015, Jan was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease called Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) (the effect of this disease is a complete inability to move), the same year he had begun to develop the framework for a new album. At that point, he was still able to move his fingers. Unfortunately, the slow and irreversible process of losing voluntary muscle activity forced him to use an assistive eye-tracking communication device on the laptop, as he needed to complete the recording over the next 5 years. Thanks to modern technologies and the support from friends and colleagues, Jan managed to finish this heroic and monumental work. The production, mixing and mastering of the album was supported by Thomas Navas and Stefan Vesper. Nadine Stelzer provided beautiful vocals with thought-provoking and symbolistic lyrics to most of the tracks, which gave an additional dimension to the depth of the album. The music itself is a strong and carefully produced post-industrial electronica with trance and atmospheric melodies and sequences, polyphonic clusters, low frequency synth lines, ritualistic rhythms and airy ambiences. The general atmosphere of the album is rather dark and even pitiful, and, at the same time, it’s difficult to stop listening to this music, as you get thoroughly enthralled and impressed by the depth and the complexity of the album, “an ode to the multidimensional and adaptive human-nature interrelationship through time and space”.
