Underground Hottlanta: Lid Emba
One of my favourite things about this city is how vibrant the avant-garde/experimental scene is here. There may not be a huge audience flocking to shows, but there are a multitude of extremely talented artists doing their thing. Multi-instrumentalist Sean Moore, aka Lid Emba, is one such champion of music as art. In addition to putting forth some fine material from his own project, Moore is involved with two other great, progressive ATL outfits, Envie and Tenth To The Moon.
After dropping his spectacular Reason Isn’t Radar back in 2006, he began working on a The Postal Service-esque long distance collaboration with an equally deep-underground artist from Indiana, Bobcrane. On his myspace, Sean Moore explains the project:
As of the release of We Substitute Radiance, me and Ryan Huber of Bobcrane had yet to be in the same room. Picking each other out of a police lineup could have only been based on intuition; voice recognition might have been possible if our words were cloaked in the tinny sheen of telephone speak.
Our collaboration was catalyzed by a common association with Gavin Frederick’s Stickfigure Records and Distro. Ryan is based in Bloomington, IN, and has his own label, Inam Records, which in addition to putting out stuff by Dirac C and others, has been releasing CDRs by Ryan’s Vopat, Olekranon, and Bobcrane projects for a few years now. All of these are cool, but his work as Bobcrane particularly caught my ear back in 2007; I dug it’s economy, symmetry, and dronescape-meets-boom-box vibe. We got in touch and started working on a few tracks to see how things went. Things sounded good, we were intrigued by the weird feeling of working together without being together, and the project gradually morphed into the collection it became.
To say it wasn’t easy would be an understatement. It was kinda primitive, actually. We’d e-mail mp3s back and forth as shit developed, then snailmail completed wav files for the other to augment and accessorize. Despite having different hardware/software setups and being separated by over 500 miles, we somehow managed to construct the six tracks that became Radiance.
I’ve been jamming We Substitute Radiance really hard as of late. It is what I like to call “A blunt and headphones record”. The album envelopes you in a bizzaro world aesthetic that somehow manages to be dark and disturbing yet reassuring at the same time. The opening track, “Toxic Utopia”, takes you through a slowly building crescendo that could be a march for some evil, alien army. One of my favourite things about this album is how much imagery the completely instrumental songs lend themselves to. It feels like there is so much detail to the emotions they are expressing, but it never seems too complex to comprehend. We Substitute Radiance‘s greatest triumph is that a project so experimental on every level is able to communicate each of the duo’s visions to the listener so vividly.
The two pieces following the first track take you down to a chiller, more laid back, yet far from comfortable weirdness. It’s hard for me to think of songs so ambient with so much rhythm. I think I would categorize a lot of this stuff as “dance drone”. Midway through, “Braille Phantom Braille” breaks down the dub-type groove with an electronic anthem before giving way to an even deeper dive into the abyss. Things go from strange to WTF, just the way I like it. The atmospheric jazz section finally builds to a short reprise of the opening melody.
The momentum returns in the trip-hoppy “Stampeder” as their command of beats remains dazzling. Even the sound-cutout parts at the end of the track have such a tribal velocity to them. The epic 9+ minutes closer, “Flying Undead Overhead”, is a truly gorgeous opus that exemplifies everything We Substitute Radiance is about; masterfully expressing the most natural and pure emotions with the most synthetic palette possible.
The more I listen to We Substitute Radiance, the more it becomes one of my favourite albums to come out this year. Here’s the first two tracks to wet your appetite:
Lid Emba & Bobcrane : We Substitute Radiance : Toxic Utopia
Lid Emba & Bobcrane : We Substitute Radiance : Bird Brain
As a bonus, here’s a video of a live performance from Lid Emba last month:
Buy We Substitute Radiance here
- Posted by Davy Minor on May 28, 2008 at 4:08 am
