Those who are familiar with Lerosa know that he has quite an intuitive approach to mixing. The 26th FIBER podcast however, gave him the chance to show a different facet of his musical tastes, Lerosa explains: “The mix I gave you is quite intense. I traced some sort of movement from darkness and depression to hope and resolution, an interesting journey that certainly is more focused on human feelings, and how they translate to music, as opposed to just a dance selection.”
Lerosa, a.k.a. Leopold Rosa, always blends disparate styles into a more or less organic continuum. His productions are as wide-ranging as his sets. His releases on labels such as Further, Uzuri, Apartment, Quintessentials and Photic Fields always explore the boundaries of house, acid, techno and everything in between. So, which artists shaped his taste in music?
“As a DJ/record buyer for most of my life I tend to have a vast number of artists that influence me from Herbie Hancock to Kassem Mosse to the Orb and back to Boogie Down Productions. I am certainly not someone who operates in a vacuum, I love all sorts of music and draw from all of it in one way or another.”
In relation to visual art Rosa has a strong affinity for the silver age American illustrators like Jack Kirby, Dave Cockrum, John Burne. “I love Steve Rude Nexus for harking back those artists. I also love video games from the 8-bit era onwards, the Intellivision system, the Commodore 64 and so on.” But does visual art have any influence on his music?
“Music does not have strong visual connotations to me, it’s something you “see” with your inner eye, so choosing a visual element is not easy.” His view is however slightly changing under the influence of his girlfriend Sibyl Montague, who is a visual artist. Collaborating together on different works led to the recently released EP titled ‘Woman Flew Home’. This cross-over between audio, visual and working together made him aware of the connected nature of contemporary visual art. Therefore, the accompanying image for this podcast is a still from Montague’s graduation piece; “Northern Fruit is a video installation with moving sculptures and lights which to me resembled very much my organised chaos of writing dance music or the mixing of it.”