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PREORDER
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ARTIST
TITLE
Lux
FORMAT
LP
LABEL
CATALOG #
ODA 005LP
ODA 005LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
3/21/2025
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Written, recorded and produced by Kirk Barley in Yorkshire in early 2024, Lux picks up where 2023 LP Marionette leaves off, conjuring a mystical, reflective space between formal minimalism and sonic imaginaries of northern landscapes. And yet, where Marionette relied at times on more recognizable field recordings, Lux leans into Barley's skill as an instrumentalist and sound designer, working from a palette of short samples and utilizing a variety of alternate tuning systems to build, layer and coax his compositions into being. Most evident on tracks "Vita," "Sprite" and "Descendent," these tunings create an otherworldly harmonic language that is easier to perceive than describe. Alongside more familiar instruments of guitar, bass, drums, organ and clarinet, here Barley draws on plastic saxophones and bells, and recordings of glass, wood and metal sound objects to provide the organic matter. Rather than directly representative of the natural world, Lux enters into a dialogue with it which, like the grasses and flowers of the album's cover, exists somewhere between reality and artifice. On album opener "Cache," Barley constructs his own sense of time from a recording of an umbrella crank, a sparse and spectral piece which hints at memories embedded in the track's title. Introspection blossoms into new life on "Vita," crumpling again into the percussive ambience of "Verre." A track that takes its harmonic lead from the clinks of glass, it features Barley's long-time collaborator Matt Davies on drums, whose nuanced, tonally sensitive playing gives "Verre" a fizzing, ice-like quality. There are several moments where Lux picks up on themes Barley explored under electronic moniker Church Andrews on recent works with Davies, stretching and distorting temporalities most explicitly on "Descendent," whose ritualistic air unfurls around a pattern in exponential decline. Embracing the surrealism Barley absorbed over years watching classic film noir and the works of David Lynch and Federico Fellini, Lux wends its way through the enchanted sound worlds of "Sprite" and "Balanced" before arriving at the album's title track. An expression of his recent experiments in live, prepared guitar, "Lux" brings the album back to earth, returning us to the room where the rain has stopped, the clouds have parted, and the soft warmth of the spring sun is pouring in through the open window.
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