„Masquerade“ is the second CD produced by the puzzlepie Studio Crew. Like the first, it has twelve tracks and an overall length of more than fifty minutes. Its realisation involved twenty singers and musicians who used their hands and feet and vocal cords in giving creative and skilful expression to the ideas of those who composed these notes, the music, and the lyrics. 

Here, as deep and far as their ageing spines allow, the authors bow to the performers, and also to those friends and counsellors who supported the project with their encouragement and assistance.

The sound of „Masquerade“ is not oriented towards pop culture or party music with its booze-fuelled rhythms. Neither towards the expansive cascades of film music, fabricating an unreal digitised illusion that awakes emotional surrogates rather than true emotions.

The music of „Masquerade“ operates within the traditional core area of the musical art: it uses melodies, their elaborate arrangements, and their interpretations by humans for humans. What you hear is what was actually sung or played, stretching the man at the mixer desk to his limits. The eight singers move merrily and energetically across and beyond the space of the common or garden fifth, creating encounters between musical ideas and happenings that do not usually meet in the monochrome world of the car radio.

But all songs are different and nevertheless belong to one and the same music, just as all people are different and nevertheless belong to one and the same humanity, so that black and white, old and young, dumb and clever, sick and healthy can shake hands across territorial and religious borders.

We would like to guide the end user of our artistic services away from the role of a mere consumer, and encourage genuine listening as part of a cultural process in which criticism is a key element. This requires a bit of effort, and the readiness to discover flavours that do not gratify the palate quite as quickly and as predictably as the glutamate-infested music of our day and age does. But the effort is worth it, for art never moves backwards.
Music, and culture in general, wakens the soul: art generates awareness.

The standardised contents of popular music are not at the heart of what “Masquerade“ has to say. But they are quoted as the basis for the representation of a society that becomes ever more entangled in lies and ever more remote from reality. A society which forgets that humans are biological and not digital beings, and which seriously believes that the faces behind masks become irrelevant if those masks are opaque enough.

Our biological species will have to leave this planet if it does not adapt. But this adaptation should be dictated by biological reality, and not by an ideological web of lies and lobbyism. There are people who think that their children, their people, their ways of life are not finite, just because they are a bit richer than others: these people do not seem to realise that the rules of the game have been changed by the planet itself. And that new rules mean new forces, new opportunities, new ideas.

The commercial nature of “Masquerade” is a theme that enters the solar and planetary system of “puzzlepie” like a comet whizzing through and displaying its tail for contemplation. It is somehow present, but does not influence artistic creation. All of us - musicians, singers, sound and video engineers, writers - are metabolic entities and would thus be glad if our project earned enough to help us lead decent lives without too many existential worries, but this is not the motor that drives our creativity. Put it this way: the motor runs in the service of high art, but it still needs solid fuel.