Juggling Dualities feels like an odd title for a musician like rRoxymore. The French producer born Hermione Frank has used each 12″ and LP as a chance to switch up the formula. In the past five years alone she’s made 2-step, dreamy downtempo, and a collaborative track with DJ Plead that impressively hybridizes UK and Atlanta bass. “Water Stains,” the highlight from her 2022 album Perpetual Now, was a 15-minute epic that treated contemporary club music as a site for sparse sound design. It was a fresh tack for her, in the lineage of her electroacoustic exercises on 2016’s Where Do We Go From Here. If her discography is to be believed, rRoxymore doesn’t work in binaries.
A commitment to evolution animates Juggling Dualities, Frank’s gripping, adventurous third album. It starts with “Am I Human?,” a dazzling neo-kosmische track that’s more Steve Hauschildt than Tangerine Dream. There are airy flutes and twinkly synths, flourishes grounded by a softly cooed vocal. As an opener, it serves as a testament to Frank’s ability to craft a straight-ahead scorcher, but it also makes the weirder tracks more interesting. “Upward Spiral,” which follows, sounds like she’s turning new-age sonics on their head, each rubbery synth note bobbing in zero gravity. “Solace” has gaudy, synthesized vocal chanting and arpeggiated melodies that criss-cross and change timbres. When a beat arrives, it transforms into a wonky trip-hop head trip.
Juggling Dualities thrives in such microadjustments, mutating in ways that excavate the many shades of an individual mood. “Embracing the Unknown” feels amorphous for its first three minutes: synth pads balloon and dissipate, and its beat is little more than gurgling clatter. It’s ready made for late-night rumination, but then a more pronounced beat arrives, everything in the realm of chillout—a zone also befitting contemplation, but with more structure, to keep your thoughts collected. “Moodified,” the album’s genuine stunner, is an ambient techno shapeshifter whose rolling kicks provide, at least in the context of the album, high-speed thrills. Its soft, fluttering synths offer crucial balance, as do the passages of relative quietude, before it surges onward with waves of celestial synths.
Every track on Juggling Dualities has the semblance of a little miracle. “Nectar,” for example, begins with a collection of percussive thwacks whose dotted rhythms are met with sparkling synths. Continually shapeshifting, the song unexpectedly becomes a UK bass track with a Latin groove; by the time it’s over, it scans more as techno. “Bonded for Eternity” accomplishes the inverse: Its rhythm serves as both foundation and container for all its musical bibelots to glimmer inside; it’s less about being taken with the music than being taken inside of it. When Juggling Dualities concludes with the light, dubby ambience of “Lows and Attractions,” its sample of Buddhist monk Shunryū Suzuki proves illuminating. “Buddhists understand everything, every noise, as a sound which we make,” he explains. He’s talking about the way any sound we hear is, in some sense, an extension of who we are. Frank’s music is exciting because it makes this idea an artistic principle: Take any style and understand that it can be—and ultimately is—your own.
