audio lotion

With Your Sonic Beauty Case, Audio Lotion took the original idea and stretched it — sometimes quite literally.

The tracks became longer, the forms more adventurous and the music moved further away from anything resembling a mainstream format. There was more ambient space, more orchestral colour, and traces of classical and impressionist music began to slip into the electronic world. If Advanced Skin Care had established the treatment, these were simply longer sessions at the spa.

By then, René and Alex already knew instinctively what Audio Lotion was supposed to sound and feel like. That didn’t mean playing safe. Quite the opposite: Your Sonic Beauty Case became a place to try things out, follow ideas for eight or nine minutes if necessary, and allow tracks such as Voodoo Velvet, The Diet Plan, Aquitaine, Aloe Vera and Alabaster to develop at their own pace.

The title also became something tangible. The bag on the cover was a specially adapted version of Zurich’s d-bag, at the time a genuinely hip design object — part fashion accessory, part local icon, and a rather perfect container for a sonic beauty case.

Travel had always been part of the Audio Lotion imagination. Not so much tourism as the feeling of being elsewhere: movement, unfamiliar places, temporary states, cities passing by. The project was made in Switzerland, but René and Alex never felt particularly interested in sounding Swiss.

The album also brought voices more clearly into the picture. Noreen entered the story almost by accident: she came to look at Alex’s apartment as a prospective tenant, and somewhere along the way it emerged that she could sing beautifully — including Brazilian music. Old friend and early collaborator Th. Isaac also contributed vocals. Working with actual songs rather than purely instrumental tracks complicated matters considerably, which was precisely why it was worth doing.

The result is a slightly cooler, more expansive and perhaps more serious Audio Lotion — although never serious enough to stop calling a track The Diet Plan.

The Finer Essence wasn’t really a nostalgic exercise. Audio Lotion had only been around for seven years, and Metrosensual had appeared just the year before.

The idea for a double album came from the record company: gather a substantial part of the catalogue in one place and give Audio Lotion another push into the wider world. René and Alex supplied the title — as usual — and, as far as memory serves, were also involved in choosing the music. Some details have become slightly hazy, which after twenty years seems reasonable enough.

What remains very clear is the pleasure of seeing the music collected in a beautifully made double-CD digipak. By then there was enough material for the compilation to reveal something that had perhaps been less obvious album by album: despite all the changes in mood, geography and style, there really was a recognisable Audio Lotion world.

And there were a few reasons to buy the collection even if you already owned the records. One of them was the 04 Rework of Moon Water — a particularly beautiful version of a track that had already been around for a while.

So The Finer Essence was less a look backwards than a well-dressed introduction: this is what we’ve been doing. Have a listen.

After four years without new Audio Lotion material, Speedboats & Submarines was a way of quietly reappearing on the radar.

There had been no dramatic breakup. René and Alex had simply become rather busy with their other lives and jobs, and there wasn’t yet enough new music for a proper album. What they did have, however, was the beginning of a new idea.

The cinema of the 2000s had provided plenty of inspiration: Ocean’s Eleven, The Transporter, the Bourne films, the newer James Bonds — with Michael Mann’s Heat still lurking somewhere in the background. Stylish people in good clothes doing dangerous things with remarkable composure. Fashionable heroes, basically, and the intriguing question of what their world might sound like with an Audio Lotion soundtrack.

So the project began playing with the language of the spy movie: speedboats, submarines, expensive machinery, mysterious encounters and people who probably shouldn’t be trusted. It wasn’t an attempt to write an actual film score so much as an affectionate send-up of the genre, filtered through the Audio Lotion universe.

Speedboats & Submarines became the teaser for what would eventually turn into Bad Timing.

There was even a suitably ambitious marketing idea. René and Alex considered teaming up with a fashionable Swiss speedboat manufacturer for the release — the sort of unnecessary but rather fabulous collaboration that suddenly seems essential once you have called your record Speedboats & Submarines.

It never happened.

Whether this was due to lack of time, lack of nerve or a certain reluctance to make the phone call remains unclear. Either way, it was impressively consistent behaviour for two aspiring secret agents.

By the time Bad Timing appeared, Audio Lotion had spent quite a few years watching other people drive fast cars, wear very good suits and get themselves into beautifully photographed trouble.

The cinematic world of the 2000s had proved irresistible: Ocean’s Eleven, The Transporter, Jason Bourne, the modern James Bonds — with Heat still casting a long shadow from the decade before. Stylish heists, elaborate escapes, questionable loyalties and people who remain remarkably well dressed while everything around them goes wrong. It seemed like an obvious place for Audio Lotion to go.

The idea was essentially a collision: what would happen if that whole agent-and-heist universe wandered into Audio Lotion?

Bad Timing was the answer.

The record is more rhythmic and eventful than much of what came before it, sometimes faster, full of movement and little cinematic situations. But it isn’t really a darker Audio Lotion, nor was it intended as some grand stylistic evolution. It is simply another side of the same project — one with speedboats, gadgets, desert encounters, handovers, escapes and an unusually high probability that somebody is being followed.

Even Mr. Gamma required no invention. He was already part of the duo; it just happened to be a name that sounded suspiciously suitable for either a secret agent or the man the secret agent had been sent to find.

James Bond inevitably looms somewhere in the background. Not simply as music, but as one of those enormous pieces of pop culture with its own architecture of sound, design, clothes, locations, machinery and fantasy. For Audio Lotion, that sort of world is less something to imitate than material for the creative machinery to play with. Hence titles such as Speedboats, Death in the Dunes, The Handover, Funny Gadgets and, with very little attempt at concealment, Farewell to Vesper.

The title itself works on several levels. Bad timing is an occupational hazard for fictional agents: arrive thirty seconds too late and the suitcase has gone, the contact is dead or the speedboat has already left the harbour.

It may also have been a small joke at Audio Lotion’s own expense. Timing had not always been the duo’s strongest discipline — in music careers or in life — and five years between proper albums does give a title like Bad Timing a certain additional credibility.

What nobody intended was the long pause that followed. Life simply became crowded. Both René and Alex had demanding careers, families arrived, and the particular mixture of time, freedom and mild irresponsibility required to make an Audio Lotion record became harder to find.

Whether Bad Timing is therefore the final chapter or merely the point where somebody pressed pause is a question best left unresolved for now.

Secret agents, after all, rarely announce their return in advance.