Lumisokea return with Transmissions From Revarsavr

Stream the opening track from the Berlin-based duo’s new album on Opal Tapes.

Over the course of three albums and multiple EPs in the past four years, Lumisokea have managed to establish themselves as vital explorers of rhythm and percussive tones. The duo of Andrea Taeggi and Koenraad Ecker hail from Italy and Belgium respectively, although they now operate from a logical midway point in Berlin, and their polyrhythmic music has progressively embraced an ever more intriguing palette of sounds from earlier, grubby analogue electronics through to electro-acoustic sound design. Much of this more recent sound has been based around recordings that the pair made of Vladimir Popov’s 1920s Noise Instruments, captured when the curious sonic artefacts were in Germany as part of an exhibition in early 2014. The instruments were designed to preface the advent of mechanical and industrial sound in the early 20th century, and Taeggi and Ecker used this as a jump-off point for their more recent work, including the Mnemosyne album on Helm’s Alter label earlier this year.

Having previously delivered the Apophenia and Contrapasso singles to Opal Tapes over the past two years, now Lumisokea are back on the label once more with another full-length exploration of the sounds created by these archaic but utterly prescient devices. The title, Transmissions From Revarsavr, in fact refers to Russian avant-garde composer Arseny Avraamov, who pioneered non-standardised chromatic scales and called for the need for radio-musical instruments in the early 20th century. The resulting album moves between focused rhythmic workouts and more abstract fare with a focus on acoustic tones arranged with meticulous attention to detail. You can get a feel for the sound of the record via the SoundCloud player below, where the opener  “Generation Z” is streaming in full.