Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Robert A.A. Lowe - Eclipses



Thrill Jockey, 2010

Forgoing his previous fingerpicking + vocal loop psych-out style, Robert A.A. Lowe (aka Lichens) has recently approached work with analogue synthesizers. Similarly warm to his previous work, yet of an entirely different, post-organic sort. As the title of the track "Crayon Gym" would seem to state, this is music akin to the warm and fuzzy analogue backdrop of Boards Of Canada. Bruce Haack records like The Electric Lucifer, retro-created electronic educational records from the 70s. Visions of a new world, those gigantic centripetal-gravity space stations, idealistic unification of language in Esperanto. A futurist is born in the midst of recent re-modernist flailings - a new analogue minimalism separate from the kraut-aping of Emeralds/Oneohtrix Point Never as well as the irony of the hypnagogic folks. As deceptively simple as his previous work, and the work of Daniel Higgs, whom in a tangential way I consider his spiritual brother (what helps matters more is that this album is being released w/ an art book the same as Higgs' glorious Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot). Though Lowe's work to me has always strangely had the essence of yoga and meditation at its core than the (equally powerful, nonetheless) book-mad cerebral scryings of Higgs.

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