This is part of a series, posting between 30th December 2025 and 3rd January 2026
Lynyn: Ixona (Sooper Records)
Despite all the letters of complaint, my 2025 album series continues. Only a few more entries to go, and then we can start our 2026 properly.
Lynyn’s first album Lexicon was in my 2022 end-of-year list. My review for Electronic Sound magazine called it “the brain half of braindance”. Intelligent beats and all that. And now, like a very good football team scoring two goals in the space of three years, he’s back in my end-of-year list.
It’s still brainy. Lynyn is one of those clever people. He’s a proper academic and probably has, like, all 26 letters after his name. And some Greek ones too. He’s classically-trained in composition, plays guitar in an avant-jazz band, and knows a lot about bassoons and neuroscience. No really. He knows a lot about bassoons and neuroscience.
However, this second album, released by Sooper Records based in his hometown of Chicago, is a spookier affair. Gloops of haunting ambience. Pin-point drum clicks. He gets the big guns out on Versilitude, a grizzly roller that, still, finds itself entangled in a web of intricate, cocooning electronics. It’s like Burial covering Squarepusher. Squarial.
As inspiration for Ixona, he listened to dub techno pioneers like Pole and Basic Channel. Pole was first featured on this blog in August 2007, dontcha know. An especial inspiration was the speckled static of Jan Jelinek’s 2001 masterpiece Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records. That would be a great companion listen to Ixona.
The closing piece Pad 4 U is a lovely palate cleanser. A trombone skips merrily over a beanbag-flopped dubstep rhythm. Is there anything this man’s brain can’t do?
No comments:
Post a Comment