“Awash with crackling, fuzzy low-end and decayed beats…glowering bass, moody, masculine piano textures and percussion like a tour round a blacksmith’s forge.”
Drowned in Sound
“…Detached, forlorn beauty…scrambling emotion set inside malfunctioning computer music…A four track EP that emotionally wrings the listener more than most albums.”
Resident Advisor
“An adventurous blend of hues grey and dark…Staggeringly rich.”
FACT Magazine
A solo electronic producer based in Bristol, LTO first garnered attention and praise in 2011 as part of the Old Apparatus collective with their abstract experimental bass-driven music, submerged in swirls and fragments of otherworldly static and interference.
Now working on solo music as well as with the collective, LTO’s first release under his own name is February’s rich, characteristically mysterious No Pasa Nada EP, a heady cloud of greyscale sound design, ghostly timbres and deep sonics. It is at once challenging and mesmerising, crafted in part from found sound and field recordings, treated and disguised beyond their origins. The result is a production neither fully organic nor mechanic, reminiscent of the fertile UK grime and dubstep scenes (delays, claps, 808 sounds are all present here) but with a nocturnal miasma and a fierce intellect. The influence of post-rock and modern classical music can also be heard throughout the record in its harmonic progressions, compositional structures and in its division between artist and output.
The No Pasa Nada name and track titles – common Spanish verbs – are informed by LTO’s backpacking travels through South America, as much a field recording excursion as a cultural tour.
credits
released March 30, 2015
Artwork by David Packe.
(p) 2015 LTO under exclusive license to Injazero Records
(c) 2015 Injazero Records
I love listening to this striking collection of compositions and imagining what sort of films they were meant to accompany. It's hard for me to believe, however, that any visual component would be much more than a distraction from the singular emotive power of the music. Gyakkun
Blacklight Chameleon voyages to the dark side of electronic music, writing songs full of tension and grim intensity. Bandcamp New & Notable Feb 12, 2021