Lucianblomkamp – Help Me Out

Jun
25
posted by tommy

I know the phrase has become fundamentally devalued through overuse but here we go again, “contender for impending record of the year”. Yes, I know we’re only one song deep but I may have snuck a listen to the full bouquet of songs and there’re multiple moments across the thing that stood out for me. Moments of genuine electronic music ingenuity and creativity like the several that are present across ‘Help Me Out’.

I’m going to start at the beginning because I’m a sequential cat but the beginning doesn’t simply mean the vocodered vocals. That means the bass drum and metallic clicks that underpin the breathy soundscapes drawing to mind misty mountains and cold fog. Disorienting and directionless and monotone in all the best ways. Then the beat sucks out all before it and the synth calls its name and the all the elements are thickened over themselves with the breathiness of those early samples now a heavy gasp. The vocoder is gone and the vocals are real and present but there’s still a surprise yet. ALL earlier sonic touchstones are dispensed of leaving us with only a wandering sax line, an elongated sub-bass floor and a few ticks and snaps. Then no beat at all, just those vocals filtered through again.

Lucian has been at this game a while now, my first exposure coming through Holly’s now defunct blog East To West (RIP) in early 2013. The songs featured on the containing self-titled EP should have seen far more internet love than they initially did (guilty.) but I suspect they were problematically ahead of their time. Even now that EP would stand up as one of the most innovated things dropped this year had it only just been turned around but it’s a new day so keep your eyes to the front.

Yes Please, always ones to know a good thing when they hear it, have signed on to get this LP into our collective iTunes and hopefully pressed onto wax at some point.




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