DDDJMX: OCEANED (biography)
On a personal level, it's a story of friendship. That, and a musical drive which is near impossible to contain: when Dirk Da Davo (aka DDD, of The Neon Judgement fame) and Jean-Marie Aerts (aka JMX, T.C. Matic's erstwhile guitar meister and producer for a.o. Luc van Acker, Urban Dance Squad and many more...) met up for a short holiday on Fuerteventura, it didn't take long before they were creating and recording music together. Initially, this led to the release of the DDDJMX EP. A taster, so it proved.
Because today, DDDJMX are back with OCEANED, a full album. And it's everything one could wish and hope for. DDD's motorik beats, pulsating riffs and mantric vocals urge songs like 'Go Ahead', 'Trail' and 'Bring It' forward, ever forward, while JMX's guitar and bass grooves, in the background and upfront, inject metallic big city soul into dance-inducing tracks like 'All Is Said' or the near-anthemic instrumental which is 'Ozz'.
But there's more.
Feeding off each other's energy, both musicians expand their sonic palettes, injecting warmth and even playfulness into the songs' structures. The western twang in 'Here's Ruby' (with its beautifully unassuming backing vocals) and the subdued 'New Normality', the sinister tongue-in-cheek refrain of 'Pray For Rain' or the funky guitars in 'All Is Said' and 'Attack Dogs Achieve'... This is the sound of two people making dark, brooding electronic soul and having fun while doing so. Some thirty years after collaborating on The Neon Judgement's Blood And Thunder, Dirk Da Davo, Jean-Marie Aerts and engineer Michel 'Shelle' Dierickx have made another corker!
