LP version in combination offset/screenprinted jacket. Edition of 500. The second L A N D album, Anoxia, sees Daniel Lea return alone with an outing that marks a shift from the industrial-inflected jazz-noir of 2012's Night Within into distinctly new terrain. Mixed by Ben Frost at Greenhouse Studios, Reykjavik; mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin. Anoxia means total absence of oxygen, and in Lea's hands the term heralds aural environments that are full of the dreams of humanity yet may well be devoid of it's living presence. The Anthropocene era in which we live has seen the rise of many human-made monuments that add up to a total presence that humanity will leave behind; Lea's labyrinthine arrangements are a soundtrack to such a world, one without humanity that is nevertheless fully marked and constructed by humans. From the very first moments of the pummeling djun djun skins and the growing bowed rototoms of Labyrinthitis, the direction is one of a more radical constructivist sound rooted in modernist architecture. Lea has elevated his practice to the point at which he cleaves space sonically, and Frost is the perfect person to mix such spaces. The results are visions of a brutalist world slowly decaying, but with the mellifluous harmonics of vegetation and fluid matter entwining through the ruination. Other tracks rise up like towers in a city, growing from the metallic chimes and structured percussion; one sees visions of the Balfron Tower or the Genex Tower, but such associations do not tether this work to geographical real-world locations. Anoxia may well be in a time outside of time. On Anoxia, cello harmonics swing their head and screech like prancing komodo dragons, marking the entry to the final track, the End Zone, with which Lea carries out his own initiation ritual, a dance between those edifices left beneath the growing millennial weeds and forests. Monuments that will long outlast their creators. Daniel Lea: sound design, field recordings, processing, electronics, composition, production. With Rupert Clervaux: drums, percussion, aluphone, crotales, copper pipes; Jamie McCarthy: cello on Metamorphosis, Equinox, Transition, and Anoxia and bowed percussion and copper pipes on Equinox and Anoxia; Clive Bell: shakuhachi on Drop City, Equinox, and Anoxia; Leo Abrahams: processed guitars on Neutra, Transition, and End Zone; Mark Wastell: tamtam on Neutra, Equinox, Transition, Anoxia, and End Zone; and Dom Garwood: clarinets on Labyrinithitis. Labyrinthitis, Neutra, Drop City, Metamorphosis, Seconds, Equinox, Transition, Anoxia, End Zone
