The Lo Recordings Lowdown (2023)
Looking back on some recent releases from Jon Tye's Lo Recordings
Selected Works is a regular newsletter by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) based freelance music journalist, broadcaster, copywriter, and sometimes DJ Martyn Pepperell. Yes, that’s me. Most weeks, Selected Works consists of a recap of what I’ve been doing lately and some of what I’ve been listening to and reading, paired with film photographs I’ve taken + some bonuses. All of that said, sometimes it takes completely different forms.
If you’re familiar with modern ambient, leftfield electronica and brain dance music, chances are you’ve spent some time listening to music released by Lo Recordings. After all, since the label was founded by Jon Tye in 1995, they’ve given us an embarrassment of riches from legends like the late great Susumu Yokota, Red Snapper, Rothko, Luke Vibert, Black Devil Disco Club, The Chap and numerous others.
Despite being in a position where they could arguably coast along on reissues and new releases from legacy artists within their world, Lo Recordings are still proactive about creating release opportunities for smaller profile musicians and new acts who fit within the label’s vibe zones. This year, they’ve given us a series of beautiful releases from The Chap, Aus, Lecu, Coral Sea and Million Square, and I’m sure they’ve got plenty more at the ready to share with us before 2023 is done and dusted.
For this week’s edition of Selected Works, I decided to spend some time with the aforementioned artists’ new albums and EPs, write up some notes on the experiences and share them. Further on down the newsletter, you’ll also find some non-Lo Recordngs listening, watching and reading recommendations.
The Chap is a British experimental pop band who have been navigating the slipstreams between electronica, rock, krautrock and pop music for labels like Lo Recordings and Ghostly International for over two decades.
With the Burger Sauce, they pick up where their seventh album Digital Technology left off, using peak-pandemic era zoom/file-sharing internet collaboration to processes to craft an open-eared set of tracks that revolve around dance tempo grooves, field recordings, spoken word and original film soundtrack style string abstractions. In counterpoint to previous releases, Burger Sauce is more of an instrumental-oriented affair, giving this now-veteran group the space and grace to keep trying out new ideas.
Ostensibly locatable within the Japanese kankyō ongaku, environmental and ambient-based music traditions, Tokyo-born composer and producer Yasuhiko Fukuzono started recording and releasing music as Aus in the early 2000s. Since then, he’s delivered a steady stream of discs for boutique labels such as U-Cover CDr Limited, Preco, Someone Good, flau and Lo Recordings.
As a composer/producer, Fukuzono-san’s Aus work often blends everyday field recordings with emotional string sections, glistening electronics and attentive production that reveals the beauty inherent in the finer details of nearly all things. Everis, his ninth album as Aus, feels like a love letter to a lifetime spent living and working in Tokyo, expressed through a loud-and-quiet dynamic that takes me straight back to afternoons spent wandering through the Japanese megacity while daydreaming about the past, present and future.
In a similar (well, maybe a step or two adjacent) mode to Fukuzono-san, the Plymouth-based British electronic music composer Leo Cunningham aka Lecu, knows how to weave outdoor nature recordings, delicate electronics and modular synthesis into dreamscapes, daydreams and the aural equivalent of time-lapsed video footage of nature’s cycles. Across the eight evocatively titled tracks that make up Leck (the follow-up to 2020’s In Balance collection), day turns to night, night turns to day, and the seasons gently shift while a world of endless cycles of change rotates around a few seemingly endless absolutes.
As with all of the artists who make the cut for Lo Recordings, you can really feel Cunningham has done his listening. There’s a felt fluency with the rich traditions of avant-garde, minimalist and experimental electronic composers sitting at the heart of this lovely album. Fittingly, it allows him to reach back into the hallowed decades of the mid to late 20th century while dragging ideas drawn from the greats into the future through his own present-day cipher.
How long do you think water, be it oceans, rivers, lakes, or beyond that, the actual life aquatic below the surface, has been a concern for musicians? Me, I figure we’ve been singing about the waters and composing songs about them since the dawn of music and man. Within the confluence of experimental music, post-punk, ambient and electronic music, we’ve seen some pretty incredible homages to water (explicit or implied) over the decades, be it A.R Kane, Drexciya, Steve Hiett (well, maybe that’s more beach music, but it’s kinda the same deal for me), and of course the whole Balearic ideal.
Growing up in London, British electronic composer/producer Ed Banton aka Coral Sea, spent his formative years surrounded by water. With If Memory Serves Me, he ventures below the surface, crafting soundscapes, sound environments and instrumental sonic story pieces that feel broadcast from the beauty of the infinite blue and the depths of the life-teaming deep. His work here isn’t just abstract or conceptually thematic either. For every carefully placed noise, Banton adopts a mode of treatment that transports me straight back to hours spent freediving and snorkelling in warm ocean waters or finding peace through holding my breath while swimming across the bottom of indoor swimming pools.
Million Square is the group project of two London-based musicians, Max Luthert and Duncan Eagles. Having come up on the modern UK jazz circuit through playing with the likes of Partikel, Zara McFarlane, Shabaka Hutchings and Moses Boyd, they announced their collaborative venture in 2018 with the Between Suns EP. Since then, these future-thinking traditionalists have become known for triangulating the sounds of analogue, digital and acoustic instruments into a man/machine interzone of their own design.
Across the Fantasy Grounds EP, they reimagine maximalism and minimalism as one and the same, revelling in texture, tone, bass-boosted rhythms and the influence of Autechre, Craig Taborn and Richard Devine, Marcus Strickland, Logan Richardson and John Coltrane, while they rewire these strands of influence into a set of distinctly UK mecha-ambient-jazz-beat sculptures for the 2020s and beyond.
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING/WATCHING/LISTENING TO:
DJ Kool Herc brings the Bronx to Hau Latukefu’s house party: Raised in Queanbeyan NSW, Hau Latukefu is a world removed from hip hop’s ground zero in New York City. But like his Tongan heritage, he’s fully immersed in the culture and works hard to find his own hip hop voice. As one half of Koolism, Hau is a card-carrying pioneer in the local scene. And when Koolism is nominated for an ARIA award, Hau comes face to face with another pioneer, the legendary Bronx DJ Kool Herc. Will Hau get the nod of approval from the father of hip hop? Sam Wicks for ABC’s Days Like These.
Warmth At The Centre, Mogwaa's Genre Agnosticism Will Ignite Your Curiosity: A synth whizz with a fondness for funk, Megan Townsend talks to Mogwaa about wanting to preserve 짝(Jjak) music, putting himself in the shoes of a dancer and still being at a "sketching stage" with his art. For Mixmag, Megan Townsend.
Videotapes, a Tang Vladisavljevic story: The next morning I can’t get the dorm room door to lock, and I have a feeling in myself that wasn’t there before. I had woken up before everyone else, although nothing special was on the itinerary, and I felt like something had changed. Is that strange, or does everyone experience feelings like this? Read one of Rebecca K Reilly’s neglected short stories from 2016 here.
Pinhead Music, The Underground Delights Of Keyser, West Virginia: For most people, magic is probably not the word that comes to mind when describing the small city of Keyser, West Virginia, population of ~5000—certainly not in a musical context. But for local filmmaker Craig Smith, and the writer Vincent Albarano, who got into all things Keyser by way of Smith; the scene there was special, as revealed by a 2021 conversation between the two chronicled on a new compilation. Maria Barrios for Bandcamp Daily.
1990: The IDEA behind the DESIGN of THE WALKMAN! "The Walkman and other consumer products have roots in a very Japanese tradition.” Shortly after its 10th birthday, designer Kenji Ekuan celebrated the success of the Sony Walkman. Originally broadcast 19 June 1990.
Resident Advisor Mix Of The Day: Ayesha - A stunning club mix that gets "pretty close to the feeling of love" for the New York DJ. Listen/read more here.
FIN.