C.A.N.V.A.S. follow aces by Olan Monk and Elvin Brandhi with Lugh O’Neill’s zinging new suite of fractiously reflective, emotive sound-scaping.
Returning from a smart debut in 2018’s ‘Hélico’, Berlin-based Irish artist Lugh sharpens and expands his vernacular with strikingly amorphous and absorbing results comparable in the modern field to everyone from Zoë McPherson and J. Colleran to Arca. He draws on the chaos and rush of emotions that have fractured the world with a fine articulation of synthetic voices that speak to his “rediscovery of lived sensibility on a relational scale”, and with results approaching
something like a simulacra of brain fog - multiple emotions, observations, and speculations all vying for attention at once.
The gnawing, queasy tones, aggy chants and lush dread of ‘Americans’ articulates how we feel watching news on YouTube, and the scything metallic swarms of ‘Braises’ sounds like The Sprawl
and TCF conducting a swarm of drones, but there’s a more surreal levity to the grief-stricken gravity of the album in the devilishly detailed aqua-acoustic chicanery of ‘El Rocio’ making use of underwater recordings by Zuzana Pabisova, and the knackered machine blooz of ‘Music For Programmed Obsolecence’ that’s almost Arca-esque in ‘Irony Chastity Obedience’, and alchemized into nerve-biting black metal mutation on ‘Free Fall’.