Review
Genre and Mood
Jan Blomqvist makes deep house and electronic music around his own voice, and Dark Noise is one of the long tracks of his first album. Armada’s release notes speak of his melancholic vocals and soul-stirring atmospheres; we hear the track as melancholic, hypnotic and dark, a reading the title supports, though no review we found describes this track on its own.
Song Summary
Dark Noise is track five of Remote Control, released by Armada Music on 26 February 2016. It is credited to Jan Freter, Blomqvist’s real name, and Ryan Mathiesen, with whom he writes his lyrics. At 8:27 it gives a song the length of a club record, one of four tracks on the album past eight minutes, according to its MusicBrainz tracklist. The album as a whole, Beatportal reported, took two years to make and deals with the barrage of media his generation faces every day.
Musical Breakdown
No source we found walks through Dark Noise section by section, so we name only what the credits and the album’s own description support, and leave the rest to your ears.
Intro
The track’s long running time leaves space for a slow opening; how that space is filled is not documented.
Main Section
Blomqvist is the credited singer; in his music, German Wikipedia says, he sings over beats, analog synthesisers, piano and bass.
Outro
The ending, too, is undescribed by our sources; listen to how it hands over to Drift, the next track.
Concepts in Focus
Blomqvist’s sound is built on the synthesizer, analog ones in particular, combined with piano and bass. He said of Remote Control that he wanted all tracks to follow a certain special sound design but never sound the same: a shared palette of synthesised sound, used differently each time.
He is best known as a live act, and a live recording of Dark Noise exists: on Live in Munich, released in 2020, it runs 6:15, more than two minutes shorter than the studio version. Blomqvist told Beatportal that he was one of the few electronic artists in Berlin to bring a drum kit and a piano into clubs; Christian Dammann plays drums in his band and Felix Lehmann keyboards.
The album was also remixed: Remote Control Remixed followed in 2017, including a remix of Dark Noise by Fears for Tears, released on 19 May 2017.
Artistic Context
Jan Freter was born in 1982 in Ahnsbeck, Lower Saxony, played guitar in a punk band as a teenager and moved to Berlin at 19, studying aerospace engineering and then mathematics before leaving for music; his first show was at Tresor in 2008. Before Remote Control came singles such as Jan Blomqvist – Big Jet Plane and Jan Blomqvist – Time Again.
Impact and Reception
Remote Control launched a world tour with his band, and Dark Noise soundtracks his official recap video of that 2016 tour. Since then Blomqvist has played Burning Man, Coachella and Tomorrowland. Dark Noise is here for the patience it asks of a listener. Give it the full eight minutes.
