Release Date: 17 July 2025
Song Count: 8
Duration: 40 minutes, 13 seconds
Rating: 7.1/10
Description:
Within the deep, lesser tapped caves of the world of music, one album I found that showed itself to be worth an exploration was Juggling Dualities, the third and most recent album of Hermione Frank, known professionally as rRoxymore, a French-born producer based in Berlin who makes ambient-adjacent music drawing in elements from many subgenres like New Age, house, drone and IDM, and adds her own tinge whilst doing so. Stating this work to be her most personal and "honest" one yet as it emerged following what was described to be a creatively and inspirationally rougher and drier time of hers, it is abundantly clear when listening with the right ear that the artist's soul and internal thoughts were practically poured into it and converted into a heavily digital-sounding musical format.
Consisting of "only" 8 tracks in total, this album brings its listener along on a new adventure, experience or sensation with every track, wildly switching up the groove and general sound regularly so that it matches not only the track titles, but also the general energy of what has preceded it so it leads to a more organic-feeling segway, even without providing outright transitions or sonical similarities between the songs. From natural sounds and reverbed pianos to heavily distorted digital tunes echoing along, Juggling Dualities provides an extremely varied palette that suits the given track and moment, and this versatility is only amplified by the percussions and beats alternating between following an EDM-inspired path and being entirely absent to let the slower, more ambient segments truly sink in. In spite of this ordering sounding like it would be overly disjointed, especially since it all plays out over only around 40 minutes in total, the way everything is set up within the album makes it work out cohesively enough to not be overly confusing or disorientating at all.
A strange and unconventional yet simultaneously pleasant and creative record, Juggling Dualities is far from afraid to be adventurous in its nature and structure, and though some tracks outshine others with their particular qualities and directions, the overall package comes out as one that is surprisingly easy to digest for such an experimental album and also one that consistently retains one's interest in where it will go next. Overall, this was a record that was positively surprising for my listening experience, and has an abundance of tracks and elements to look forward to, even if genre-wise, there is only a certain level in which I can outright connect to it directly.