Club Furies

The work of ^L_ has been identified as almost frightening, while at the same time powerfully engaging; disturbing, uncomfortably pleasant, and even bizarre. Influenced by IDM giants such as Aphex Twin and Autechre, Luis Fernando also displays old-school knowledge by referencing industrial music, coldwave, darkwave, cyberpunk culture, and acid techno. In addition, the artist explores winding paths through the darkness of EBM; adding dirty breakbeats, horror movie lines, and electric laser beams. His songs usually address themes of loneliness, and nihilism, sounding sometimes perfectly chaotic, sometimes wonderfully so.

For one of his freshest releases, he presents Music for Doomers by Italian post-industrial electronica label, Brutal Forms, an intriguing new album made up of four original tracks whose sound emulates a punch in the stomach. Thoroughly constructed, inspired by a nihilistic generation that often expresses depressing feelings by understanding life as a dark downward spiral that only gets worse.

The piece begins with BDSM, an incisive fetishistic tune that would fit perfectly on Berghain’s main stage. Hammering and acrid with strong sounds and unstoppable rhythms, as well as fierce, we know we are in front of Luis Fernando‘s sound, even if it is versatile and labyrinthine. In the midst of such obscurities, the sound lurks fleetingly, only to let us know that the sledgehammers continue until delirium – and it has barely begun.

The fast pace continues with Sad People Hunting Happy People, whose piercing rhythms, sharp metallic timbres, and long reverberating dark ambient textures build a revenge scenario as a critique of positive toxicity. Delirious from beginning to end, as is the case in the first track, this one manages to be different, but at the same time it holds on to the sound of the first track.

That difference may come from the duality of sad people chasing happy people -what a title; exceptional. Everything becomes sound interferences that project futuristic worlds, those in which Skynet has taken over the world: happy people fading away.

Doomer Music has a futuristic impulse, with its avant-garde synthesizers, spicy 303 acid lines, and hard techno beats, which take the listener to a cyberpunk dystopian world that could take place in the mind of any doomer. The atmospheres created by the combination of this sound rapidly have their correlation in such semantics. The ferocity with which the rhythm advances makes the present run fast, making the future arrive as soon as the present passes.

Between times that shorten and times that expand, the sound design manages to be patient and calm. And when the present is over, the acid is in charge of sending it to the past with hard and fast sweeps. And when between the past/present/future times there are temporal gaps not occupied by any of them, the only thing that remains is the unity of the difference between sound and silence: fatalistic music.

Since the religious themes addressed by the artist are common, Satan + Jesus + Judas brings together supposedly opposing concepts in an elaborate percussive melody that travels between drill and bass, nervous IDM breakbeats, and industrial realms. It’s a synthesis of everything different into something unitary. Between unstoppable speeds that never seem to stop and ecstatic clubbers after almost half an hour of ever-increasing intensity, another of the qualities of this release is the beautiful and sophisticated game that the artist plays between silence/noise. This time it serves to dampen the intensity of this track and give the atmosphere a breather.

One of the many qualities of this release, which can be a concrete expression of a type of quality electronica, is the length of the tracks. Far from Radio Edit or minimal cuts, the four tracks last more than six minutes; three of them, more than seven. This allows the sound design to capture all its quality, forming over time the sonic structure that will be filled with the rhythmic and layered relationships that Luis Fernando proposes in his art. Brutal Forms and ^L_ is an invincible combination, in which dark electronics become one through all the complexity of rhythms, and atmospheres that all their sounds allow.

Artist: ^L_
Title: Music for Doomers
Label: Brutal Forms
Catalog:

Release Date: June 10th. 2024
Support & Buy on Bandcamp
Available on Streaming Platforms: YouTube | Spotify

Tracklist
1. BDSM 06:52
2. Sad people hunting happy people 07:21
3. Doomer Music 07:16
4. Satan + Jesus + Judas 07:51

^L_

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Brutal Form

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Club Furies

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