Labradford
E Luxo So

LA RECENSIONE

Year 1999. Labradford, after albums that were scandalously intense and nocturnal, reach their masterpiece. And as usual, they progress in their own way: subtracting elements from their sound instead of adding them.

In this work, the voice disappears altogether, the music slows down and frays, each note and each space of silence assume a significance of their own, leaving you suspended in a sonic paradise of disarming simplicity but at the same time, genius. The word that comes to mind as you listen and listen again to this godsend is hypnosis. Exactly. "E luxo so" renders you incapable of reacting to external inputs, it "governs" you with delicate and crepuscular melodies, it makes you literally lose track of time. In short, impressionistic and minimalist music, a few notes (perhaps even in loops) but each one hits the target. The Richmond trio (which gets its name from an obscure basketball player, one Seth Labradford) has also abandoned song titles here, which are ironically the credits of the album. Six tracks that have almost nothing to do with their beginnings but are the culmination of their continuous experimentation. I don't even want to dream of talking about one song compared to another. In this record, it makes no sense. It's just a single sound carpet with a linear design, without frills, let's say, that enchants with its raw simplicity. It leaves you there hypnotized, induces narcolepsy, melancholy (the good kind!) and in the end, you gladly remain a slave to it. That's how it happened to me, and I hope it will (or has) happened to you too.

Delicate and dreamy acoustic outlines are usually sketched by the guitar or piano and are blended with sensual and discreet static electricity sizzles. Few elements are added each time with extraordinary attention to detail. The whole is placed within extremely expanded rhythmic-sonic spaces where the bass feels as if it opens a cavity, an existential void that attracts the rest of the instruments to float within. A daring journey between minimal symphonies and spectral rarefactions, melancholy that becomes yearning and eventually languor, the sweetest languor, to savor and keep the flavor in your mouth. It's a "distant" and fragile album, it's an extraordinary effigy of imploded sound. The typical Labradford sound here has further evolved into an ode to slowness, managing with blurred musical images to elevate it into a sort of personal and characteristic ambient/post-rock. As if a December night were reflected in a frozen lake.

We would stay watching it with the terror that a small noise could destroy the delicate magic... after that, there is only the silence of a solitary country lane.