Album Review: Lapalux – Amnioverse


Amnioverse




Stuart Howard thinks big.

As Lapalux his previous album Ruinism went far beyond electronic music’s usual outliers, fusing philosophy with richly evocative collages of sound, a spiritual pan that emphasised the depth of thought his work is now routinely comprised of.

Amnioverse sees him make no retreat from chanelling a construct rooted in hypothetical premise (he describes the term itself as ‘a sort of portmanteau of the amniotic sac and the universe”’), but whilst Ruinism sat amongst the fractures created by dissolving personalities, here the producer falls back from its organic instrumentation into a world created solely by modular synths.

Wisely, his relationship with Icelandic singer Jófríður Ákadóttir continues as her vulnerable, unorthodox tones on Thin Air’s otherwise futuristic techno root it with ghosts; on The Lux Quadrant she sounds like she’s flying in the clouds above the complex, multi-layered programming, an angel speaking in tongues.

This layering, as it turns out, is somewhat deliberate. One of the concepts that inspired Amnioverse was that of James Turrell’s Twilight Epiphany Skyspace installation in Texas, an iconic visualisation by an artist who has become synonymous with making tiny changes that alter human perception. Basing each track around a snippet of spoken word from ‘friends, lovers, and ex partners’, this kaleidoscopic premise leads to dislocation on Earth via a ripple of trance like waves, or on the title-track’s cautious and melancholy opening, one that then quickly morphs into industrial white noise, chopping and rigid.

At first confusing, each track’s tendency to run through unrelated segments, sometimes doubling back on themselves, is an intentional contour as well, with the producer trying to emphasise the ambiguity of statelessness, how we’re just souls in transit; that birth, life, death, and rebirth as a never ending continuum.

Thankfully there’s also enough invention to divert the mind from the never-ending high concepts at play: Voltaic Acid, with vocals from Lillia, is beatific and finessed post dubstep, while the singer also guests on Limb To Limb, as close as Amnioverse ever gets to the rich and prescient world of Scandinavian pop by radiating a human, lovelorn warmth in isolation. This melting pot design however also has a downside, as frequently the producer feels too hard on himself and a halt is called just as an idea seems about to fully germinate.

Where space is allowed the effect can only be stood back and admired from a distance: if the point is that these pieces are all just accompaniment to transition then Momentine at least provides some succour, a rolling, sensuous flow of lightness and drift that takes the listener from one bodily dimension to another.



Amnioverse is the embodiment of a record made with purpose, one that adds reason to what is sometimes a set of parallel notions all trying to compete with each other, occasionally with confounding results.

It’s to Stuart Howard’s credit that in the flesh it’s nowhere near as impenetrable as all that sounds, an experiential, rather than experimental, journey that revels in its humanity.

7/10

Andy Peterson


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