Newworldaquarium
The Dead Bears

Utopia is an unrealistic ideal at the end of a rainbow. Nothing so one-dimensionally perfect could ever work, and attempts to depict it in art are largely one-dimensional affairs in turn. The imagined worlds Jochem Peteri creates, from the internal kingdom of his ambient masterpiece Strike to the outwardly projected terrain of Newworldaquarium, are places of wonder and beauty, but there are nooks and crags that cast shade across the topography. It’s a necessary quality of real music, and real life – not an airbrushed, burnished ideal but a porous, textured thing that responds to stimulus and yields surprises in return.

Peteri explicitly projects himself into this ecosystem on the title track of The Dead Bears. “Step by step, elevate your mind… It’s not just through space you move… Light… Darkness… A simple gesture…”

His barely audible mantras cling to the slow creep of his beat like an anemone, the meaning a subliminal ink to be ingested through the gills. Peteri’s Newworldaquarium draws on the profound and mundane minutiae of real-world existence, refracted through the fuzzy gauze of nostalgia, to shape his new submerged seascape. These rose-tinted memories are a rich source of inspiration for the progressive vision he imparts, but he’s no naïve idealist. Hear the squashed bass wheezing on fumes in tribute to that fantastic parable of splendour and squalor, New York City. Feel the loneliness of the quivering string that aches at the heart of NoworldbutU, or the degradation of the low-res phasing that cartwheels around Shine Eyed. These obsessive details serve to remind us that not everything can be perfect in the new world.

In the middle ground lies the blueprint for a way forward – the deployment of techno as futuristic architecture. The Tide You Can’t Feel wields remarkable, interlocking structures that break away from established norms, while Avon Sparkle intones a new kind of earthbeat as instinctive and traditionally rooted tradition as it is glimmering fresh, even so long after its creation. But predominantly, Peteri’s aquarium is a place of sweetness and pleasure. Quite how he could elicit such joy from the huffing sample hook that raises the roof off Trespassers is anyone’s guess, but it speaks to his innate understanding of life as a thing to be savoured. Even in her lament, Kirana sounds utterly full of hope and love. The Force yearns with the irrepressible heart of a swooning Philly disco burner left to ferment for 40 years, cork finally popped and fizzing as it tastes freedom once more.

It’s a little wonder that Peteri had the ability to sculpt such vivid worlds even back in 2007. By that time, he had already lived multiple lives in electronic music, reaching right back to the diggers delight of one-hit house heater Pallas with Arnoud Winkler in 1991. As Ross 154 he fed into the deep end of the burgeoning Dutch techno scene for Eevo Lute Muzique and 100% Pure, only to ditch the Ross and gift us the aforementioned Strike, created in the mid 90s and circulated on tape until it finally hit wax in 2004 on Delsin Records. But it’s the biome he created with Newworldaquarium that has held his most vivid works. It at once celebrates house music culture just as it sets adrift from it altogether – that was even apparent early on with the pumping thunk of Themefrom or the crunch of Lovin U.

The Dead Bears didn’t arrive on a mountain of prior work – Peteri’s world is an exercise in restraint that places due care on each feature as an important relation to the others. It also didn’t arrive with a mass of fanfare as much as hushed, knowing nods from ears already attuned to this more subtle form of house music. Indeed, most reviews at the time were fixated on the fact it was SLOW – perhaps the wave of blown-out, dust-caked groovers that came afterwards were all disciples of the NWAQ habitat, but it doesn’t feel so shocking to hear weighted dance music cruising at an easy pace these days.

The appreciation for The Dead Bears, and indeed recognition for Peteri’s music overall, has disseminated in an appropriately organic fashion – the ultimate cult record for house heads who solemnly cherish those which elevate the art. It was four years after its release that Peteri shared his feelings with Will Lynch about the creative process that fed into the album.

“I just think it takes a lot of time to express yourself well, and it takes a lot of time to open up…” he explained while walking from his hotel to a gig at Panorama Bar. “Basically, you're fucking naked man. With The Dead Bears, I'm stripped to the bone. I'm just standing there. You have to go beyond these limits you have and set aside shame.”

The subliminal murmurations and compressed gases that fill the atmosphere can sometimes mask the complexity of the expression within Peteri’s environment. This two-pronged delivery of surface beauty and hidden depths lies at the heart of Newworldaquarium’s majesty, so naturally encapsulated here for us to assimilate into our own biospheres.


Oli Warwick, Bristol. 2019.