LTO – No Pasa Nada EP

Injazero

A member of both Khing Kang King and Old Apparatus, No Pasa Nada is LTO‘s second solo outing of haunted dubscape electronica. The EP shifts slowly and recursively across four tracks of gritty textures washed languidly in a bath of tape-hiss, echo and reverb, feedback and all (with the occasional environmental recording of rustling clothing or running water dropped into the mix for good measure).

Operating somewhere in the vicinity of the dubbier end of minimalist dubstep without ever falling squarely into the genre — or any other for that matter — though LTO’s sensibilities are definitely of a kind related more to the feeling that dubstep had when it first emerged rather than in the recent ravetastic commercial bastardisations of the form. So LTO leans on the clap and the clatter more than the kick and the bass throb, favouring the mechanical-sounding over the smoothly programmed. Neither is there a wobble bass to be heard, though a dread mood is still somehow present throughout, much how Shackelton has drifted further out while becoming more melodic and even acoustic in recent years.

So much for what the music is not; No Pasa Nada oozes the same disjointed cut’n’paste energy that Autechre and Aphex Twin brought to electronica, though again, the similarities are more sensed that direct, the glitches playing their part on “Contar”, for example, among trumpet drones and snatches of post-Underworld semi-spoken, loping vocals. LTO is as happy to bring up a gentle melody as to construct an intricately uncoiling rhythm that can contentedly blend the most obvious of handclap sounds with real-world samples (is that a desk drawer, or perhaps a cupboard door?), metallic brushes, displaced electronic tones and squiggles – so it’s not quite retro-futurist electro either, though perhaps it could be.

All of which difficulty encountered when attempting to pin down No Pasa Nada by simple references to what has come before demonstrates that either LTO is a shameless plunderer and cross-fertiliser of genres (and who isn’t doing that, at least sometimes, on some levels, these days?) or a restless innovator at the cutting edge of electronic music. Maybe both. Whatever the case, perhaps the only real fault with No Pasa Nada is that it’s far too short.

-Freq1C-