If you're looking for Calvin Harris, you might want to look in the dead center of a sweaty dance floor in an illegal warehouse rave. The Scottish Grammy-winning producer is deep in the club culture right now. He even spawned a new alias to release hard-hitting acid house tracks, the first of which were just premiered on Annie Mac's show via BBC Radio 1.
Love Regenerator is the new name, and it makes its psychedelic debut with a two-track EP called Love Regenerator 1. It opens with "Hypnagogic (I Can't Wait)," named for the state immediately before falling asleep. Ain't nothing tired about this big beat banger. It's soulful, nostalgic, hallucinatory and totally freaking awesome. It's followed by "CP-1," named for Chicago Pile-1, the world's first artificial nuclear reactor wherein the first human-made, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was created in 1942. With a name like that, it's got more of a dark techno vibe, minimal and stomping, but it's still acidic like a 3 on the pH scale.
"I wanted to rediscover the way I originally began producing music 22 years ago," Harris is quoted in a press release, "before I ever thought about how it might be perceived by outside forces. Just pure fun and experimentation with what sounded good to me. The records are inspired by early rave, breaks, techno and house, the music I was obsessed with growing up. In fact, I’ve done everything I can to make them sound like they’ve come from a 1991 time capsule. Every synth and sound used is from that time period."
Fans caught wind of the project yesterday (Jan. 23) when Harris changed his Twitter name to Love Regenerator. The new alias has its own Spotify page, but the oh-so-very 2000s visualizers are posted to Harris' official YouTube page. It seems the influence of Porter Robinson's Virtual Self side-project continues, and we are definitely here for it.
Love Regenerator 1 is out now on Sony Music. Watch the trippy visualizers below.