IOVid001 // Luke Sanger
To celebrate the release of his amazing new album Dew Point Harmonics, Luke Sanger demonstrates two distinct approaches which feed into his gloriously unusual strain of ambient-not-ambient.
Quite often an artist arrives at an album when they strike upon a particular way of working. In the infinite chasm of ways to make noise with machines, devising a coherent system can be a reliable route to inspiration and a collection of tracks that logically hang together. When Luke Sanger presented his Languid Gongue album as the first release on Spanish label Balmat, he seemed to have conjured a self-contained world of wonder and invited us to miniaturise and step inside.
Your humble editor spoke to Sanger about the album and its processes back around the release date in 2021, and found out there were in fact all kinds of wholly unrelated ways he approached making the music. It was more the label (Lapsus’ Wooky and esteemed journo Philip Sherburne) combing through stacks of material and divining a thread of music which resulted in the album feeling like a rounded listening experience.
Sanger has been serving at the behest of electronic music for decades now, wrenching out warehouse-ready, artfully skewed techno as Luke’s Anger on labels like Don’t, Sneaker Social Club and Tigerbeat6 alongside scores of other aliases indulging his various sonic urges. He follows the time-honoured tradition of using his actual name as an outlet for his ambient, ‘serious’ music. Thankfully his ambient music still retains a mischievous spark, which is partly what makes it so captivating.
Sanger has followed up Languid Gongue with a new album for Balmat — Dew Point Harmonics, and it follows a logical path from where the previous record left off while remaining freewheeling and curious in its outlook. There are certain wobbly pitches and glistening synth parts which feel cosily familiar, but it’s far too slippery and surreal to repeat in any obvious ways. Having previously gleaned some understanding of what might be at work behind some of these luxury mind massages, we spied an opportunity to see Sanger at work with a couple of his chosen tools, and he was happy to oblige.
In the two videos he’s graciously recorded for us, Sanger demonstrates unique systems with results which transcend the trappings of most tedious YouTube gear demos.
First up, we’re invited into an arcane interface between monome‘s grid controller running a self-developed norns script to trigger a Buchla Music Easel. monome’s music systems aren’t for the casual knob-twiddler — norns is a small, open-source sound computer you can load your own scripts into for custom sequencing, synthesis and myriad other sound-manipulation tasks. It’s the sort of system that rewards the more technically savvy, with vast possibilities for those who get a handle on it. The monome grid controller can be used for many different applications from sequencing to melodic playing, chopping up samples and more besides. The Buchla Music Easel is an iconic piece of hardware which dates back to the early 1970s, steeped in Don Buchla’s organic, expressive brand of ‘West Coast’ synthesis.
The second of Sanger’s videos demonstrates the curious logic of the Ciat-Lonbarde modular tools — beautifully sculpted objects designed by Peter Blasser with purposes and circuitry that are hard to puzzle out. To the untrained eyes and ears, it’s a mystery what’s occurring on these incredibly organic-sounding boxes, where even the wooden panel fronts seem to respond to touch and send the mycological patterns off in unpredictable directions.
Two very different ways of making music, and yet so complementary in shaping out this incredible run of albums Sanger has been trickling out on Balmat in recent times. Keep ’em peeled for more process-focused videos in this new series on IO.
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