Lurists – Volume One: Red & Blue

Dekorder

The trio of Luke Fowler, Richard Youngs and Steven Warwick of Heatsick have made some very strange electronic music here. Red & Blue is one of those on the spot collaborations which sounds like a huge amount of fun was had by all while plugging away in the studio. A liberated sense of playfulness is especially apparent, and it’s pretty much an electronic jam session which, if it had been played with other sorts of instruments might have come out in more free improv style; but here the machines keep time of a sort, and the trio hold their own within the restrictions and freedoms electronic music gives to the participants.

“Red Tree With Intent” opens with a coruscating and confusing whorl of folkish if not especially folksy electronica. Bleeps bloop and the low end wanders like a stray bovine lowing in frustration at its confinement, penned by a repeating loop which clodhops easily from foot to foot, seemingly endlessly. A parade of autotuned warblings of a kind which surely won’t be getting Lurists into the pop charts any time soon (delightful as that image might be) shuffle past, oddly lifting the mood along the way.

The bleepy energy continues into “Big Yellow Bell,” noises and rhythms thrown hither thither and especially yon in an eccentric take on the idea of dance music morphing into repeating hypnosis; while the off-beat beats of “Green Fish Perishing” tap-dance over a twitching corpus of heaving and writhing foot-moving sounds devolved into something way more abstract and blissfully unsettling. It’s the sort of tune which Lovecraftian deities might pipe out for their crazed acolytes to undulate and writhe glazed-eyed to in a bleak woodland grove equipped with a portable eldritch sound system. Aieee! The bass! The bass! It’s in the trees….

-Linus Tossio-