Foma

We Say...

Review by Philip Sherburne

On his second album, London beatsmith Lukid doesn't significantly alter the formula the employed on his 2007 debut, Onandon. But, for once, that's good news. Great news, in fact. Both albums are meditative, head-nodding affairs featuring creaky, andante beats and swirly clouds of hiss and hue; both their pacing and their sense of dissipation often recall powdery gusts of snow meandering across a frozen road in the far north. It's easy to ask if you've been down this path before, but the contours of the landscape have subtly shifted. Skipping hemispheres, another metaphor suggests itself: both albums seem to have come from the same vines, on the same soil, but each growing season has imparted its own character to the final product — immeasurable but unmistakable.

Some commentators have called this trip-hop, or instrumental hip-hop, owing to its sample-heavy boom-bap, and it's true that Lukid's lazy, lurching cadences are indebted to the rhythms and the stoned affect of Madlib, J Dilla, Prefuse and Dabrye. But little of hip-hop's referential spirit remains in Lukid's approach: wherever his samples come from, they're smeared beyond recognition, with gauzy chords (guitars? Rhodes keyboards?) blurring into an indefinite haze punctuated by errant blips and stubby synthesizer bass lines. Much of the real action occurs on the peripheries, where loop ends fray and tangle to create counter-pulses and disjointed mini-rhythms. On songs like the title track, Lukid's fizzy drift draws as much from Jan Jelinek's loping loops as it does the more pointed impulses of his hip-hop forebears. Forever on the verge of dissolution, Lukid's sketches are abstract in the best way, teasing forms out the murk only to pulverize them back into shapelessness.