Rapidly rising as an exciting artistic voice within his London base, Leonard Maassen’s musical talent has seen him take on spatial audio-visual installation, film scoring and enthralling live performances. A finalist spot for the MUSE Digital Art Award 2023, as well as for the international LOM+you programme, and features at the likes of Festival de Cannes Court Métrage, Firenze FilmCorti and Montecatini International Film Festival, have built anticipation around Leonard’s ability.
Currently, Leonard Maassen is looking ahead to his debut album ‘Inside Cycles’, set for release in April of this year. The project is said to explore his subjectivity in the digital worlds of the 2020s integrating vocals into his transcendental style.
The audience’s first insight into the ‘Inside Cycles’ project is the new single ‘Colours’. Emotional electronica is the key to the music, capturing rich, expansive vocal harmonies inside sparkling sounds and warm synth plucks. The constant flow of the music guides the listener through a heartfelt narrative, returning to melodies, darting away from them, all in the pursuit of a faraway oasis. Leonard’s vocals are joined by Erin Snape on the track, creating a movement from voice to voice as the instrumentation continues to whirl around them.
Leonard explains, “Colours expresses the feeling of having to let go of somebody who you love in order for both of you to grow. It’s about meeting them again one day far in the future, when both of you are older and wiser, able to experience the beauty of the past with less attachment. I wanted to explore deep nostalgia mixed with gratitude and hope for yourself and the other person.
I wanted the duet part of the track to feel like a conversation between two deities, much bigger than humans and made up of the beauty and sorrow of life, woven into intricate and surreal textures. I was thinking of the way that Hindu gods are portrayed with multiple limbs and animal features, expressing their characters and their divinity. If you mix that idea with the way AI can make humans look like they’re made of plants, that’s how I imagine the two voices in Colours.”
