Lay Llamas - Thuban - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Lapalux knew where and how his sound should change with a second album. As a result, Lustmore feels like a record as compulsively inspired and meticulously crafted as you're likely to hear in 2015. Lustmore is loosely based on the experience of hypnogogia, a transitional state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep. Listeners familiar with his 2011 debut, Nostalchic, will know that Stuart Howard's woozy, infectious rhythms, enveloping textures and unfamiliarly familiar melodies conjure that territory perfectly. Lapalux attracted the direct attention of Brainfeeder tag owner and electronic music icon Flying Lotus in 2010, and was quickly snapped up by the imprint. Acclaimed early EPs were followed by a number of remixes including Bonobo, Andreya Triana, Lianne La Havas amongst others, before his debut album Nostalchic arrived in 2011. On it's Mojo asserted that 'Lapalux has joined the ranks of contemporary electronica's finest, like FlyLo himself.' The album was a high watermark, and a statement of intent by a young producer who was pushing electronic music forward.

While cycling around his home-district of Peckham (in southeast London) a few years ago, Sean O'Hagan decided that not only would the new High Llamas music be driven by narratives, a collection of stories, but they would first have to be performed as theatre; reshaped theatre, if you like, blending stories, songs and soundtrack. It was essential for these performances to take place before the songs and underscores were recorded. The resultant piece, Here Come The Rattling Trees, introduces six characters, some real, some less so, whom Sean has encountered over past years in Peckham. It is also The High Llamas new LP. Here Come The Rattling Trees was first performed in the Montpelier Theatre pub in Peckham in June 2014, and in October 2014, it played for a week-long run at the Tristan Bates Theatre in Covent Garden, London. The original performance cast was Ray Newe, Richard Heap and Jennifer Scott Malden. The story centers around Amy, an unsettled 28-year-old with a desire to travel. She finds herself in Peckham Square working in temporary employment publicizing the rebranding of the local leisure centre. Peckham Leisure is to become Step Tempo and will pass from public ownership to private management. While leafleting in the square Amy encounters five characters, who, it transpires, have their own stories to tell. These stories have emerged from Peckham over the past 25 years and speak of buildings and change; of hopes, ambitions and disappointments. This is the soundtrack to those stories. With witty, artful musical strokes, Sean and The High Llamas have crafted deft musical sketches with the signature Llamas sound that has evolved over ten album releases since 1992. A colorful array of electric, acoustic, and synthetic instruments, alongside Sean O'Hagan's gentled vocals, are deployed to transport the listener to the low-key highs and lows of the British working w

This recording is a result of Alpaca Ensemble's close collaboration with two living composers. Both write music that reflects on humanity's place in a world profoundly greater than us. In the first work on the recording, Karin Rehnqvist takes the listener into outer space, while on the last track Ellen Lindquist paints us a vast landscape. In the music of Karin Rehnqvist, esoterism, mythicism and tradition are fused together with modernism's propensity for resistance and estrangement. At the same time, it's dialogue with traditional music, liturgy, rituals and folklore and adherence to vocal musical practice, allows the music to break into open forms and address the listener very directly. The music is intrinsically linked to voices, language, movement and the body. In the music of Ellen Lindquist, individual instruments and parts merge into large, sonorous landscapes. The composer often works in tandem with other art forms such as dance, poetry, performance and music theatre. In these interdisciplinary constellations, her music is allowed to insist on what is particular to instrumental music compared to other art forms, on it's abstract, permeable qualities, which those other disciplines can approach, but never really achieve.