Experimental without being inaccessible Churches, Schools and Guns inhabits an excellent netherworld of dark technoid rumblings, sound design and synth abstraction.
Not content with running Stroboscopic Artefacts, one of the finest forward thinking techno labels currently on offer, Luca Mortellaro finds time to serve up his second album and follow up to 2011’s excellent debut Wordplay for Working Bees.
Churches, Schools and Guns continues the dystopian fractured techno theme of its predecessor albeit one punctured with smudged ambient darkness. As has come to be expected of anything on Stroboscopic Artefacts, the sound design is intense with clever juxtaposition of techno against deeply evocative soundscapes and kinked dissolute explorations.
As a genre, and in quite a loose sense of the term, techno feels tricky to experiment with. The style itself being an extremely tough production call. The theory that it’s all “whomp whomp, bleep bleep and blam there’s some techno” just doesn’t float if you’ve ever tried to sit down and write the stuff. Which makes it even tougher to bend the rules and experiment successfully. However, Lucy achieves this here with aplomb whilst stylistically in keeping with the rest of Stroboscopic Artefacts output.
For the most this is an exercise in combining tension with moments of unfurling beauty—there’s also undoubtedly an underlying darkness throughout. Vocal samples culled from 1976 film Network intone “Our air is not fit to breathe,” “We know things are bad, worse than bad” and the album title alone throws up darker depths of the American dream. Yet all this suffixed with dream like synth shimmers and notes of strangely positive melancholia.
Juxtaposed soundscapes abound as tracks like “We Live as We Dream” pulse with stratospheric heart ache whilst “The Illusion of Choice” hammer out 4/4 reverberations against snaking modular lead lines. “Leave Us Alone” features a half cut shuffle underpinning a distraught Moderat / Burial framing whilst “The Best Selling Show” floats a creepy circus organ across frenetically bubbling percussion, conjuring up black and white imagery of demented Punch and Judy puppets. There’s even inclusion of Tuvan throat singing across a couple of the tracks—an extraordinary other worldly style of Siberian singing not heard, at least by these ears, within electronic music since The KLF’s 1990 classic Chill Out. I’d love to think Lucy got a real life throat singer in the studio and have imagined further of seeing a Tuvan native at a Lucy gig adding live harmonics into the mix.
Experimental without being inaccessible Churches, Schools and Guns inhabits an excellent netherworld of dark technoid rumblings, sound design and synth abstraction.
If all this isn’t enough there’s also a fine selection of remixes available including a stomping tribal yet kick free Donato Dozzy take on “The Illusion of Choice”. So much good music, so little time.
Churches, Schools and Guns is available on Stroboscopic Artefacts.
