Last month, Max Graef returned to Tartelet Records with his third solo album under his own name. Like the two that have come before it—2018’s Lo Siento Mucho Pero No Hablo Tu Idioma and 2014’s Rivers Of The Red Planet—Natural Element is filled with psychedelic, starry-eyed jams. Amongst these releases, Graef—a resident of Berlin, Germany, who first became known for his hip-hop and jazz-inspired take on house music—has kept himself busy with Tax Free Records, his own label where he releases electronic, dancehall, modern jazz, and synth punk, and an assortment of offbeat collaborations and projects, including Employee, his group 2morph, Running Out Of Time, and Iris for his psyched out guitar experiments. (Check out the new Iris album here.)

Natural Element began as a mixtape concept to gather up recent ideas but it soon evolved as he got deeper into MPC sketches and reconnected with the approach he had when he was in his late teens. “After the sketches I worked a lot with the computer again, which I haven’t done in years,” Graef reveals. Recorded on the fly, in support of the album, Graef’s podcast hones in on a new sonic universe—reggae and dub, which he’s been listening to recently in the Germany countryside—plus some other treasures. He’s filled it with vinyl rips, some edited stuff, loops, old sketches, and some of his all time favorite tracks.

01. What have you been up to recently?
I put out a guitar album as Iris on Tax Free Records towards the end of last year and worked on a live set together with my girlfriend as Profit. I’m working on new material with Funkycan as Running Out of Time and I released my first album under my real name in a long time just last month on Tartelet Records.

02. What have you been listening to?
Mostly Moroccan and Algerian music lately. Plus some reggae, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and Sun Ra. In between some Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Eric Dolphy.

03. Let’s talk about Natural Element, your new solo album. Tell us more about it.
The album marks 10 years since my debut album and I feel happy to have an album now that represents and combines the different styles and atmospheres of my musical cosmos in recent years. It started out as a mixtape idea, to celebrate the anniversary, but it ended up almost entirely new music in much more of a classic album story style. It’s psychedelic with a lot of heavy bass, loads of nature sounds, some synthetic some real. I’m very happy with it.

04. Where and when did you record this mix, and what setup did you use?
I am working in the countryside at the moment so I have limited options here. I put it together on my computer; no records this time except for a couple of my own vinyl rips, some edited stuff, loops, old sketches, some of my all time favorites, and music I would like to enjoy on a nice sound system right now. The first draft was to focus on more steppers side of reggae tunes but it’s not exclusively that, because found some fun treasures along the way.

05. What’s next on your horizon?
New music coming out on Tax Free Records! Watch out for new a zine as well! Free Palestine!

XLR8R Subscribers can download the podcast below. If you’re not an XLR8R subscriber, you can read more about it and subscribe here.

No tracklisting was provided for this mix.