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We Love: Lukid’s Crawlers

We Love is an opportunity for EB writers to contemplate, rant, and rave about one of their current musical obsessions and the deeper issues they inspire. For our first installment of the regular feature, Laurie Tompkins backs Lukid’s Crawlers, on Liberation Technologies.

If someone has recommended Lukid’s music to you, chances are they’ll have lauded its low fidelity and waxed lyrical about its fuzzy textures and degraded beats. While it’s true that Luke Blair’s woozy productions are often drenched in tape hiss, lumping him in with the lo-fi contingent does a disservice to the precision and craft of Crawlers. Of course, I don’t mean to say that the constituents of said contingent aren’t precise or artistic—I just want to explain why Lukid’s latest record stands out.

The EP’s four tracks are full of evocative sound combinations which might appear mismatched in a lesser producer’s hands. “The Brick Burner” plays off cold, plain synths and a rasping banjo line, while the cutting 808 rattles of “Nine” brilliantly sharpen the impact of scaling synths. In the video for “Nine,” digital shafts of light through the windows of an empty club, which strikingly captures the record’s defiant negotiation of grit and gloss.

Crawlers is available via Mute’s sub-imprint Liberation Technologies, the same imprint that released TCF’s new record, which M.E.S.H’s recommended in our latest issue of EB Magazine.

Published October 23, 2014. Words by laurietompkins.