Jupiter Jax

Jupiter Jax

Summer Grey

100% Silk

A little over a decade ago, Maltese mastermind Rudi Agius debuted as Jupiter Jax with City Life ‘88, a 6-track suite shading Chicago and Italo into a hypno-melancholic fusion tailor made for the House of SILK. Two LPs, three tapes, and two EPs later, the saga concludes. Crafted across the last few years in pockets between other pursuits, Summer Grey slinks, flexes, and lifts on swells of collective memory and pleasures past. Rhythms and melodies cruise and crisscross, brooding and blissed along Mediterranean shores. It’s music of lost hours and fleeting farewells, dusted with the glow of endless sunsets. Balearica inverted by resignation and renewal, ecstasy and acceptance, tracing the beauty of vanishing points. Every summer fades from gold to grey.

Jupiter Jax

No Such Thing

100% Silk

The music of Maltese producer Rudi Agius aka Jupiter Jax has always felt as much defined by mood as movement, guided by the “specific melancholy” of specific melodies. His latest long-player skews even more cinematic, conjuring twilit gardens and crooked city streets, windswept and warped by memory: No Such Thing. Inspired by notions of escape and the unknown, and threaded with dexterous live instrumentation, the album treads vibrant hybrids of moonrise electronica, downtempo dream house, and Balearic breakbeat, brooding but breezy, a Mediterranean midnight of the mind.  Agius speaks of his songs in terms of intuition and inevitability, how and where they transport the listener. These twelve tracks slip between senses and spheres, interplanetary but placeless, noir glimpses of ghostly coastlines and reflective reveries. Flutes, trumpets, voices, and percussion contour his club designs with a tactile fluidity, jazz accents reflecting off rain-slicked marble harbors, the wakening dawn still worlds away.

Jupiter Jax

Dee-life Mix

100% Silk

Maltese falcon Rudi Agius aka Jupiter Jax’s latest collection is stoned, cold, classic, and conceptual: a 40-minute ode to and odyssey of smoky basement jack and melancholic warehouse anthems crafted from the psychic crates of short-lived, lost-to-time house imprint Dee-Life Records.  Credited to a cast of forgotten label staples – LifeLess, Hush Hush, Brad K, and beyond – the tracks weave from magic hour to midnight, Chicago moods and Detroit mirages, heady and hypnotized. Deep cuts dug from a dusty DJ bag found behind fog machines in a long-shuttered club, the disco sleeves shredded, the vinyl thrashed, peeling center labels scrawled with BPMs. Dee-Life Mix serves as both portal and party, parallel universe vintage club gems transported to the here and now. All tracks produced by Jupiter Jax.

Jupiter Jax

Visions

100% Silk

Two years ago Maltese musician Rudi Agius aka Jupiter Jax was in London, finishing a PHD in computational biology, awake late and usually alone, when Visions emerged: “My life was literally getting back from the lab, and spending the night (usually till 4-5 AM) making some music… the gloom is something that I love.” Many nights bled into dawn while designing presets for his synths – “sounds that give me feeling” – from which bass lines, beats, and the exploration of “further territory” flowed forth: quartz-clouded, questing house (“Armed For Peace,” “Soul Searching”), foggy breakbeat (“The Deepest”), tranced technoid (“Beyond The Walls”), plus glimmering, ghosted-vocal guest spots by Merwyn Virgo Four, Xosar, and Mykle Anthony. Across eight hazed vistas, Visions never wanes: “Jupiter Jax is about ethereal music.” Deep planetary Italo disco moods dissolved through overcast city voids, haunted by the heartbeat of melancholic early Chicago jack. See beyond the walls. Grid-mapped cloudscape cover art by the artist. Mastered by Alex Nagle.

Jupiter Jax

Visitors

100% Silk

Companion collection of eight songs sourced from the Visions sessions, offering a parallel cutaway of Jupiter Jax’s crucial, vaporous house. Soft-edged synth-lines sink through thick snakes of bass, freejacked by ice-dusted drum machinations. As elsewhere, a mood of mirage hangs heavy in these pieces – beats lead in circles, acid spirals, shapes waver. Melodies mediate between cloaked glare (“Knowing You,” “Sequential”) and neuromancer strut (“Basic Rhythms,” “That’s The Way,”), the dance blueprints grainy but glowing. The 4 AM context is clear; the tide of life ebbs back and things reveal themselves. “Until I Can Feel Again” closes this chapter of the Jax reliquary, echoing the promise through corridor-reverbed rhythm, a vanishing point bassline, and chorused chemtrails of keys, stripping the ring around his planet to its starkest silhouette. Wave one last time through the hatch window. Mastered by Alex Nagle.

Jupiter Jax

City Life '88

100% Silk

“City Life ‘88” is the hypnotic, melancholic dip-trip, synth-fantasia of Maltese-born producer Rudi Agius aka Jupiter Jax, a daytime computational biologist and nighttime sensational keyboardologist, coding and de-coding his way through London, UK. As a teenager, the studio stud began throwing underground parties in Malta, flying over artists from Crème/Bunker/Clone and reliving the mezmer-magic of early Chicago house and obscure Italo-Disco. Simulations are what he’s best at in the lab and on the board; using different sound styles, the omni-influence, to conjure a nocturnal neon city. Elevated and “out there,” reminiscent of a rawness, slipping into sleekness, hoppin’ around the Hague, analog n’ lost.