album // E Luxo So
Around the time of Labradford releasing
E Luxo So's predecessor (Mi Media Naranja) on
Blast First in 1997, I went to see the band play at Colchester Arts
Centre, supported by Stars Of The Lid and a local band called Navigator.
I wrote a review at the time for my first website, but sadly deleted
it when I left university, leaving me with only a vague memory of
the concert. However, if I remember correctly, one thing that was
apparent was that the concert seemed to get quieter as it went on:
Navigator whacked massive chains on the Arts Centre stage making
an almighty Neubauten-at-The-ICA industrial cacophony,
Stars Of The Lid constructed huge ominous drones, while Labradford
(Mark Nelson, Carter Brown and
Robert Donne) seemed to be really quiet, almost
meditatively so, conjuring sounds from (I think) guitars and a massive
bank of modular synths. It was a brilliant gig and I just wish I
could remember more beyond that hazy recollection. I also bought
a brilliant t-shirt that night, the front of which consisted of
Mi Media Naranja's track titles (a grand total of eight
characters). Sadly I've lost that too.
An echo of the atmosphere of that concert dominates
Labradford's fifth album E Luxo So (which is Portuguese
for 'The Only Luxury') but it is just that, an echo. There is barely
anything here at all, just brief curlicues of guitar, febrile glitchy
beats that sound like Yasunao Tone's skipping CDs, washes and washes
of gentle echo and some mournful piano. Quiet dulcimer passages
from Peter Neff augment the (filmic?) mood and somehow bring to
mind Ennio Morricone, though I'm not sure any of his soundtracks
feature dulcimers. Silence permeates all six of the tracks, consciously
giving the spaces as much emphasis as the quiet instrumentation.
Chris Johnston, Craig Markva, Jamie Evans and Jonathan Morken's
strings subtly permeate the mood.
This is what they used to call post-rock or avant-rock,
and it's hard to draw any parallel with what we understand of 'rock'
music at all. There are no trace elements here, unless you draw
a shaky line from the tentative, beautiful guitar and piano elements
of E Luxo So; this is ambient music in the organic vein of Tom Middleton
and Mark Pritchard's Global Communication, only warmer, more absorbing,
more reflective somehow; less cold.
E Luxo So consists of six quiet tracks,
which, in keeping with the 'absences' here do not have titles (note
that because of the layout of the sleeve, Discogs.com, Brainwashed
and other sites list out the recording details of the tracks as
the tracklist, which I don't believe is correct). While none of
these depart too much from this soft, gossamer-like mood, one track
- let's call it '5' - does sound comparatively maximalist, having
echoes of a particularly mysterious track from Angelo Badalamenti's
wonky, subversive soundtrack to the first series of Twin Peaks,
with organ, piano, distant beats, strained violin and tremelo guitar.
(By weird coincidence, Stars Of The Lid proposed two alternative
scores for episode 30 of Twin Peaks on their album The Ballasted
Orchestra, which I bought from the band on the night of that
gig.)
Given the paucity of instrumentation, there's not
a lot else to say about E Luxo So. It's among the quieter
releases on the otherwise-noisy Blast First label
and one of its most absorbing. I have probably listened to this
a dozen times in the preparation of this long-overdue review, and
still all I am left with is the vaguest impression of its fragile
mood.
lp/cd:
Untitled tracks 1 - 6
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