Lugano Fell — Slice Repair
It’s a nicely packaged album in a deluxe digipack and underneath where the CD sits you get a list of all the instruments and equipment that have been used in the making of the album. From Mum’s piano to a table to Ableton live. There are a lot of things listed. But I think with this genre of music it’s not about how many bits of equipment you’ve used it’s more about getting the most/getting something different from it.
I believe this album is compiled from 2 CDr releases. I’ve not heard them but I imagine I would like one and dislike the other. Half this album is great and half of it is purely average. The better tracks are those where there is an element of acoustic sounding instrumentation. For example there are a couple of pieces that have a vague similarity to Zoviet France. They have a mixture of some instrumentation that sounds vaguely ethnic in origin along with some sounds that are electronic based . There are also two pieces on here that could be best described as glitch pieces. The longest of these is the last track on the album. It’s based around an acoustic guitar motif and sounds not unlike something you might have found on an album by either Steve Reich or Philip Glass in the early part of their careers. These are the pieces that work best and I’d have happily listened to a twice as long version of the last track. However there are also a few tracks that almost sound like they’re built up from pre-sets on synths and then have other intermittent sounds layered on top. These, for my ears, just don’t work. They don’t have anything particularly exciting about them, nothing that makes you want carry on exploring the work of Lugano Fell.
I’d say it’s a shaky start but if the last track on the album is a pointer to the future of Lugano Fell then it could a rosy one.