Decay is, in its most primitive form, a destructive element; but eroding away clean edges and oxidizing major surfaces adds a wanton kind of texture to sound. It’s a characteristic that, given the nature of ‘in-the-box,’ or software heavy production, is often lost or never even considered. What decay does, or can do, for an artist’s depth of field is open up an endless well of possibility. For us, producers that utilize this method are a welcome thing, there’s something about grainy sound quality and slow, time-shifted samples that exposes new sounds or inflections that weren’t necessarily audible in the first place.

Lapalux is probably one of the finest producers out there at the moment that epitomizes this approach. On an early EP, Forest, he explored the realms of savaging cassette tape and splicing, willfully experimenting with speeds, fibres and techniques; making beats out of anything and everything. It’s a process that has always enamored and stupefied us in equal measure, and on his latest release, Many Faces Out Of Focus, for the Pictures Music label, he seems to have fully captured the wide eyed innocence of his early enterprises, teaming it with a learned and brave palette of samples and stuttering, low end heavy drum patterns.

Six songs deep the Many Faces… EP focuses around its two bookending tracks, ‘Time Spike Jamz’ and ‘Time, Patience, Everything,’ with the rest of the EP playing out like the kind of 2 minute long beat sketches that you wish you had the talent to commit to tape (pun intended). The opener is overtly spacious – strong sine wave sinews provide the spine around which Lapalux’s rippling shards of reverbed decay swell, before his whistful swirl of string samples drops at the 3 minute mark – and ‘Time, Patience, Everything’ is like the one true song construction on the EP; a bastardized voice harmonizes with itself before it slowly melts over 2 minutes, through feedback and reverb, into nothing.

From the first time we heard Lapalux’s music we admired the mix, the way he’s crippled any hint of a clean sample with his tape loops whilst still providing that obvious bass weight punch, but it was more the thought of his processes and, ultimately, the music’s overall impact the made us chase him down to provide a mix for our ongoing series. We caught up with Lapalux during the week his Many Faces… EP was released on cassette tape – the since forgotten format has now completely sold out at Bleep.com – quizzing him hard for the sake of our piqued interest more than anything…

http://www.sonicrouter.com/2011/04/sr-mix-78-lapalux-pictures-music/

1. Lapalux – Intro
2. Culp – Agnes
3. Chocolate girl – Sakura
4. Lapalux – How it feels (I want you to know)
5. InfinitiRock – NunTaken
6. SeePM – De Caca PuPulu
7. S.Mahabra – Nice to meet you
8. Lapalux – Lost consonants
9. Quetzal – Give something
10. Mount Kimbie – 50 Mile View
11. Lapalux – Operate
12. Abel – Free birds
13. LDFD – Outtacontrol
14. Aphex Twin – Xtal
15. Lapalux – Kecksys Farm
16. Dorine Muraille – Muraille 3

http://www.sonicrouter.com/