Midweek Mantra Mix 007: Liquid Stranger takes listeners on an intergalactic journey in Infinity Mix

Wednesday is humpday, which not only marks the halfway point between the work week and the coveted weekend, but also Conscious Electronic’s Midweek Mantra Mix (M3). We’ve been scouring the web’s most enlightening bass music mixes that align with our vision, to provide “a conscious way to consume dance music.” M3 spotlights both veteran and up-and-coming bass music artists whose music seeks to raise the vibrations of their collective listener base.

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For the M3 weekly transmissions, we’ve developed the tendency to oscillate between rising artists and established artists. Liquid Stranger falls into the latter category. The Swedish producer, left-field bass pioneer, and Wakaan founder, born Martin Stääf, has definitely been around the block in his two-decades-long career. Since the 2007 release of his debut album, The Invisible Conquest, he’s been around the world too with his transnational brand of dubstep, which pulls its influence from everything Eastern elements to Asian and Latin flavors to Jamaican dancehall.

Stääf has also released music under a few lesser known aliases, which includes his breakbeat moniker, Rhoca, along with his IDM moniker, Bloatsucker, and his Gao trance moniker, Slugger. He’s also released six short-form EPs as countless remixes as Liquid Stranger, along with eight full-length studio albums, culminating in his 30-track Infinity LP. Given how Stääf has been using the last few years to cultivate his Wakaan label, nearly four years has elapsed since Liquid Stranger released a full-length effort. Just as fans were beginning to grow anxious for new material, he slapped them with the colossal album chocked full of collaborations with Chee, CloZee, Dion Timmer, and many more. The album explores themes of multi-dimensional travel, intergalactic exploration, and transcending new sonic dimensions.

As an accompaniment to the album, Liquid Stranger released his Infinity Mix in the days leading up his high-anticipated LP release on Wakaan—it is also the centerpiece of this week’s seventh M3 installment. The mix, which spans almost two hours, is essentially a collection of tracks from his recent Infinity LP for fans to enjoy the album as one continuous streaming experience.

After a vocal lead-in welcoming listeners to their “own altered reality,” giving them a “new and enhanced life experience,” the Infinity mix feels a lot like a meditative learning adventure. Characterized by spacey synths, far-out sampling, and undulating left-field elements, Liquid Stranger strikes the perfect balance between soothing and seismic bass. What makes the mix so fitting for our mantra mix series is Stääf’s ability to invite listeners into the reflective, psychedelic spaces of the mind—without words, without dialogue—and drops them off in full-on meditation mode.