L A N D first surfaced in 2012 with the spectral post-jazz experiments captured on Night Within, a record that straddled the border between dark ambient meditation and noir drama. Legible piano performances shared space with abstracted industrial scrapes and low-end synth swells, and any given composition could split open at a moment’s notice with the onset of a squalling sax lead or a driving motorik beat. Distinctions between genres collapsed under the weight of L A N D’s pursuit of atmosphere — resulting in a cinematic song cycle whose disparate parts felt like logical pieces of a coherent whole.
On October 30, L A N D return to Important Records with the release of Anoxia. The album finds founding member Daniel Lea going solo, sculpting a new set of omnivorous compositions that flit between various instrumentations, moods, and performance strategies within compressed song structures. Lea’s recordings reach us at a level of remarkable clarity through the collaborative filter of a production dream team: Ben Frost on the mix and Rashad Becker on the master. “Labyrinithitis” lays out a wide physical space in the stereo spread and pushes us to explore the corners, the dead ends, the endless corridors. Hard-panned percussion bursts sound out over a series of electronic moans positioned back in the depths of the spread. Just when we’ve come to accept our fate wandering through the maze, the walls burst open with the intrusion of a hi-fi noise grind, which sends the track spiraling off into nothingness.
The video for “Labyrinithitis” recontextualizes visuals from avant-garde filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky’s Outer Space, a hallucinatory experiment in film decay, damaging editing practices, and strobe abuse. Flashes of recognizable human forms or interior locations occasionally escape from the chaos, tethering us to some twisted vision of domesticity, but the face really hits the mirror, as they say, at the halfway mark, as a strobed-out climax decimates any semblance of order.
• Important Records: http://www.importantrecords.com