Category: Techno/House/Trance

Artist:
Lucy

Title:
Churches Schools and Guns

Label:
Stroboscopic Artefacts

Cat#:
SALP002 | SACD005

Release Date:
17th February 2014

Format:
vinyl, CD & digital

Tracklist:
01)
The Horror

02)
Leave Us Alone

03)
The Self As Another

04)
Human Triage

05)
Laws And Habits

06)
Follow The Leader

07)
Catch Twenty Two

08)
The Illusion Of Choice

09)
We Live As We Dream

10)
All That Noise

11)
The Best Selling Show

12)
Falling
[feat. Emme]

Press Info:
Churches Schools and Guns. A provocative name for a provocative album of techno from one of the genre’s most consistently intriguing producers, Lucy. This, his second solo album, pushes forward from his debut full-length, 2011’s Wordplay for Working Bees, and firmly establishes him in a league of his own. Over the past few years Lucy’s label, Stroboscopic Artefacts, has became a watchword for techno’s vanguard – providing a platform for new artists pushing at the genre’s boundaries and a harbor for some of the most experimental work from names you already recognize. Lucy’s progress as a producer has followed that same trajectory, moving from relatively straightforward dancefloor-driven material to deeper, murkier places. Churches Schools and Guns continues on, a collection of 12 tracks that sound – more than anything else – like the act of searching.

Because, despite its title, Churches Schools and Guns asks more questions than it answers. Indeed, the song titles are often red herrings: a disembodied voice asks someone to “Leave Us Alone.” But who is it asking? And who does it speak for? Why do bells sweetly twinkle in the background, adding light to the lumbering beat that pulls everything to the ground over and over again? What elemental force flies around “The Self As Another,” soaring above, below and between the beats?

With track names like “Human Triage” and “Laws and Habits,” you might mistake Churches Schools and Guns for a brutal industrial techno record, designed for destruction. The songs here unsettle, surely, but they do so with misdirection and unpredictability. “Human Triage” slithers and slides in a similar manner to Zeitgeber, Lucy’s recent collaboration with Speedy J. “Follow the Leader” presents overtone singing in a techno framework, finding the similarities in both as hypnotic and ritual forms.

What’s perhaps most ear-catching about Churches Schools and Guns, though, is Lucy’s sense of space. The album is by no means a dub techno record, but the intent is the same. How do twist recognizable sounds into new ones that have little or no relation to their origin? And, yet, for all its alien wonder, there’s rarely a moment where you feel cut off from something human. Even when the beat gets heavy, you can’t help but feel that you’re in the room with it. Every time things feel digital, there’s always something natural that complicates things.

As the record goes along, it continues to pull away from reality – and the Lucy you once knew. “We Live As We Dream,” “All That Noise” and “The Best Selling Show” all propose possible futures: Elegiac, dystopian and somewhere in between. And then comes “Falling,” which sounds like nothing you’ve heard from Lucy before. But that’s to be expected. Contradictions. The search for an answer being the answer itself. Catch-22’s. The illusion of choice. These are the important things to take away from Churches Schools and Guns, Lucy’s masterful second album. After all, we live in a world where everything is not as it seems. Or do we?

Words: Todd L. Burns

Listen:

Special:
RA Podcast 255

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Booking:
Triangle Agency

Websites:
Lucy
Stroboscopic Artefacts

Artist:
Sawlin & Subjected

Title:
Foreign Awake Part 2

Label:
Electric Deluxe

Cat#:
EDLX035

Release Date:
27th February 2014

Format:
12″ & digital

Tracklist:
01)
Texture 1.1

02)
Texture 1.2

03)
Texture 5

Info:
‘Foreign Awake Pt.1’ set the tone with a series of strung out, spacy vistas. Three chillingly subtle and pensive pieces, far removed from the pair’s usual brew of anxious, distortion-heavy techno productions that can be found on their co-run Vault Series outlet. Using EDLX to step away from the dancefloor a little, ‘Foreign Awake Pt.1’ saw the Berlin-based duo tap into headier climes using loops and tingling atmospheres with the faintest of heartbeats. ‘Foreign Awake Pt.2’ picks up the pace, however, with three more “Textures” halfway between ‘Pt.1’’s ethereal wanderings and the pair’s deeper Vault Series offerings.

On the A-side “Texture 1.1” and “Texture 1.2” wraps typical Vault tropes with acid-washed melodies and grainy distorted pads, turning two rusty, hydraulic workouts into weirder and warmer dancefloor reliefs. “Texture 5” then, on the B-side, concludes with more yin and yang experiments, pooling ‘Foreign Awake’’s gentler, dream-like sentiments together with punishing bass, splices of hats and mechanical modulations that keep the reverie in check; a must for Sawlin & Subjected fans, and anyone who likes their techno a little on the stranger side.

Sawlin & Subjected – Textures – by EDLX’s in-house designer Jan Willem van den Ban
Consistent with their music and profile, the artwork for the Sawlin & Subjected releases had to be similarly dark and enigmatic. Revealing little of what’s inside, the cover gives only the slightest hint, but just enough to trigger curiosity. Dark and underground aren’t necessarily synonymous with black, so the insides reveal a world rich of sound and colour, step by step.

Listen:

Related Release:
“Foreign Awake Part 1”

Special:
Sawlin & Subjected – Inverted Audio Mix 119

Recommendations:
“Valut Series 10.0”
Subjected’s album “Zero” on Valut Series

Buy Vinyl:
Electric Deluxe Shop
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Buy Digital:
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Websites:
Subjected
Sawlin
Electric Deluxe

Artist:
Sawlin & Subjected

Title:
Foreign Awake Part 1

Label:
Electric Deluxe

Cat#:
EDLX033

Release Date:
28th October 2013

Format:
12″ & digital

Tracklist:
01)
Texture 3

02)
Texture 4

03)
Texture 2

Info:
Forged in the pitch black recesses of underground Berlin, long-time conspirators Sawlin & Subjected have been making bold, distinct and largely faceless techno from the cloisters of their Vault Series home. Now comes the first in a two-part EP for Electric Deluxe, titled ‘Foreign Awake’, a much broodier spacy homage than we’ve yet heard from the pair.

Shying away from usual PR and biographies, Sawlin, Subjected and their third Vault Series member Mørbeck have been making names for themselves on the weight of their music alone. Raw, industrial hues, distortion and chest-caving basslines are some of the tropes that have coloured their anonymous ascension to date. While Sawlin has strayed a little from the Vault camp, Subjected has yet to release elsewhere. Until now. In April Subjected released his debut LP, ‘Zero’, which channeled his and the label’s respected tough and concept-free aesthetic into a fully functioning full length. But for Electric Deluxe they’ve served up something all together different.

Swapping their usual gung-ho floor artillery for swirling atmospheric vistas, subtle tones and cavernous empty spaces, ‘Foreign Awake pt.1’ sees Sawlin & Subjected paint chilling, post-apocalypse landscapes in three parts. Deep, dark and dangerously hypnotic, this is Sawlin & Subjected at their most compelling.

Sawlin & Subjected – Textures – by EDLX’s in-house designer Jan Willem van den Ban
Consistent with their music and profile, the artwork for the Sawlin & Subjected releases had to be similarly dark and enigmatic. Revealing little of what’s inside, the cover gives only the slightest hint, but just enough to trigger curiosity. Dark and underground aren’t necessarily synonymous with black, so the insides reveal a world rich of sound and colour, step by step.

Listen:

Related Release:
“Foreign Awake Part 2”

Special:
Subjected in the mix for Brood Audio

Recommendations:
“Valut Series 10.0”
Subjected’s album “Zero” on Valut Series

Buy Vinyl:
Electric Deluxe
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HHV
deejay.de
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Buy Digital:
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Google Play
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Beatport
iTunes
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Websites:
Subjected
Sawlin
Electric Deluxe