Ben Lukas Boysen will return with Mirage, out May 1 with Erased Tapes.

Mirage is Boysen’s third album to be penned under his own name, following 2013’s Gravity and 2016’s Spells. As HECQ, he’s released nine albums since 2003.

Once again, Boysen has called on an array of musical guests including Anne Müller and Australian saxophonist and composer Daniel Thorne, for whom he wrote parts specifically, having heard his 2019 solo debut, Lines of Sight.

“I wanted to experiment with blending these recordings with one hundred percent artificial elements, often to points where an instrument becomes an abstraction of what it was and the musicians’ presence in the song is much more of an important DNA string in the song rather than an obvious layer,” Boysen says.

While on Spells Boysen made programmed pieces sound indistinguishable from human playing, with Mirage he set out to do the opposite and make the human touch unrecognizable, creating something of a mystery or a mirage.

“A lot of the elements and instruments you hear on the album are either not what you think they are, or exactly what you think they are but behave differently or they’re elements you definitely know but they are hidden, processed, or morphed into something else,” Boysen adds. “With Spells and Gravity, I was trying to hide the machines. On Mirage, I’m trying to hide the human.”

Since Spells, Boysen has collaborated with cellist and composer Sebastian Plano on the music for David O’Reilly’s video game “Everything.” In 2019, he contributed to the Brainwaves project alongside Michael Price and Högni Egilsson in collaboration with a team of scientists at Goldsmiths University, London, linking states of consciousness and music.

Tracklisting

01. Empyrean
02. Kenotaph
03. Medela
04. Venia
05. Clarion
06. Love

Mirage LP is out May 1 on vinyl and digitally. Meanwhile, you can pre-order here and stream “Medela” here.