Discrepant is a label not afraid of world building. In fact quite often they delve into field recordings from imagined exotic worlds, taking the notion of a fourth world literally, offering some kind of new and exciting utopian other. It’s been fascinating hearing recontextualised field recordings as a launching pad for the imagination, realising that something so grounded in reality can actually be the impetus for a new and incredible fiction.
Lagoss (Gonçalo F. Cardoso, Mladen Kurajica and Daniel García) are a Tenerife based trio who have taken the concept one step further, perhaps into a fifth world by moving beyond geography into time – making music for the otherworldly future of the island in the Canary Archipelago. They say ‘it conveys a new story by sonically imagining future civilizations in a faux ethnographical exercise whilst exploring current ideas of technology, religion and alternative history by creating its own particular insular sound world.’ That’s a lot to unpack, but then again so is the album. It’s a really odd, a weird funky tropical electronic odyssey, where all manner of genres and approaches collide into one incredible future world.
To some extent it feels like a collage, where field recordings and sound design explode into these loose wigged out wordless percussive electronic pieces. It’s difficult to know what this is, but then it comes from the future so maybe we’re not expected to. It’s definitely its ‘own particular insular sound world’, as its brimming with so many precocious at times slightly ridiculous forward thinking amalgamations of ideas that it can almost be overwhelming, yet at the same time everything feels in service to the song – as weird as it gets. And it gets weird. Imaginary Island Music Vol.2 is so much fun.
