Sunday, 26 October 2014

LOUMAR – GROUND

I stumbled across this the other day and was literally like wtf where has this been hiding. It is an EP called AVRIL by Parisian musicmaker, Loumar. Bass-heavy, experimental and all-encompassing, it is a captivating collection of sounds. To give you an idea of what that is like, I've selected 'GROUND' (or 'Ground'? whatever) – surprisingly the least popular track on the EP, but by far the most… unique.

Beginning with, and punctuated throughout by, samples from the 2012 Wes Anderson film Moonrise Kingdom, it feels like an ode to dreams – not sleepy dreams, but waking, real-life, what-do-you-want-to-do-when-you're-older dreams; the kind of dreams that you forget and remember years later having done nothing about them. In 'GROUND', Loumar presents a personality that will support your dreams, the booming submarine kicks of the beat playing beneath the repeated words: "I don't let you hit the ground, no."

But this head-in-the-clouds mentality is underpinned by a miasmic soup of sounds, a confused swirling of clap clusters, ambient whale-song synth, disco-conjuring cowbells alongside ticking shakers – suggesting that this is the ground, i.e. real life, somewhat doom-laden, deep, and difficult to comprehend at the best of times. Even the refrain itself is spookily pitch-shifted, effusing this feel of dangerous delusion; you would think that the sample at the end – "I wanna go on adventures, I think. Not get stuck in one place" – would cancel this out, carve out a warmer feeling, but even this is cold.

On the whole, it feels like inverted dance music, narcotic and nauseating, dysphoric, warped beyond recognition, leaning almost towards witch-house in genre (if you excuse my saying so), having extended its tendrillar feelers into the deeper burrows of Loumar's mind. But it's brilliant.



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