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From the industrial heartland of the Ukraine, Yuri Lugovskoy is a genuinely mysterious and enigmatic figure working in the field of underground electronic composition. Internet searches reveal nothing but a blurred photograph of a bearded figure wearing a cowl and prowling the woodland. His previous album on Moteer captured the hearts of the great and good, with tastemakers Boomkat calling it "an enormously enjoyable collection of atmospheric, minimalist meditations, all very much evocative of the raw, experimental sound designs of early electronic music." This album is comprised of exquisitely deconstructed takes rooted in Berlin-based dub techno. Stripping the sound to its barest bones, Lugovskoy wrings supreme melancholy and a warm, rhythmically pastoral sound from the most basic of sound sources (some of the tracks being assembled from fragments of samples of old '70s movies and processed beyond recognition through whatever hardware/software Lugovskoy employs). His unusual loops have a hazy, dream-like quality, often recalling the low-end hum of late-night factories. The minimalist drift of Wolfgang Voigt's landmark Gas project is brought to mind, but Lugovskoy goes one further and removes most traces of beats from the work, culminating in a sound which channels BBC Radiophonic Workshop just as enthusiastically as it does Basic Channel or the more contemplative moments of the Raster-Noton canon. To complement the brittle stillness of the original compositions, Home Assembly have asked some of their favorite artists to re-think, re-work, and re-construct Yuri's music, encouraging them to add parts and play on top of the original work. The results are nothing less than stunning: Brave Timbers uses elegiac piano and layered strings to build up a gorgeous wall of Rachel's-like neo-classical bliss, William Ryan Fritch produces a stunning string concerto recalling Ryuichi Sakamoto while The Humble Bee (The Boats' Craig Tattersall) and Mugwood (Isan's Antony Ryan) both produce perfect heartfelt electronic pieces which retain the isolated feel of the original work, yet take it off in entirely new directions. Further remixes from Fjorne, Strategy, Tokyo Bloodworm, Panoptique Electrical, Insecto, and Chessie are no less impressive and represent some of the best examples of electronic music composition around today. Limited to 300 copies in a double gatefold digipak CD. For fans of Gas, Shuttle 358, Basic Channel, 12k, Moteer, BBC Radiophonic Workshop, etc.
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