I grew up around rock, country, and gospel, so listening to a record made without traditional instrumentation confused me. And even as I began exploring dance music in the early ‘00s through traditional gatekeepers like Paul Oakenfold and John Digweed, the experimental sides of the genre held limited interest – mostly because they eschewed pop sensibilities. It wasn’t until I started ingesting the content offered by folks like Resident Advisor, FACT, and XLR8R in the late ‘00s could I finally grasp what I’d been missing all those years. I finally had a place where my college music theory classes could help make sense of all the random beats living in my headspace.
Thus, I really connected with an album like Tundra from Lakker because the left and right sides of my brain get to work together in ways that they don’t with other music. Released by the indie dance label R&S Records, this ten-song project initially wraps you up in the sheen of high-end “intelligent dance music” (IDM) before embracing key strains of the entire electronic music spectrum. Chunks of gurgling Detroit house interact with bumping German electro-clash before conversing intently with the sort of deconstructed pop created by the likes of Aphex Twin.
This Dublin, Ireland-based duo paints deft pictures with sound collages like “Mountain Divide,” “Halite,” “Tundra,” and “Pylon.” Ian Mc Donnell and Dara Smith imagine a world that is at once chaotic in its industrial futurism, while providing space for inner peace through pulsing, trance-like drone passages. Spectral beats influenced by post-dubstep, contemporary bass, and classic minimalism create elegiac grooves layered with dense textures atop a strong bass presence that’s never reduced to a clichéd “four-on-the-floor” thump.
Lakker amps up its appeal by engaging with all manner of vocal playfulness. The concept of “voice as instrument” is pushed into the stratosphere through the work of vocalists like Eileen Carpio and the injection of field recordings from highways, churches, choirs, and Inuit singers. The lilting voices and vocal treatments dance about with little regard for the tempo and rhythms of the root beat. It can be a disorienting and alienating sensation on a track-by-track basis, but when taken as coherent whole, the effect is meditative and intoxicating.
With Tundra, Lakker has developed a superlative ebb and flow that keeps my head and soul fully and equally engaged. While the left half of my brain dissects time signatures, meter, timbre, production techniques, and other compositional intricacies, the right half dances, bounces, and oscillates to the glorious cadences at play. Tundra simply makes sublime sense – and I’m glad I eventually made room in my musical tastes for boundary-pushing creativity of this nature.
Rating: 4/5