LokaiTransitionReview

Named after a breed of Tajikistani horse, no less, Lokai is the chosen name of instrumental duo Florian Kmet and Stefan Nemeth, sometime guitarists with Superlooper and Radian respectively and serial collaborators with everyone from Rhys Chatham to Christian Fennesz. Their previous album, 2005’s 7 Million, was an electro-acoustic affair which erred toward the forbiddingly austere; but all that interim collaborating seems to have lightened the duo’s touch. Granted, Lokai’s sonic realm is still one which favours ethereal drones, percussion plinks and disquieting, David Lynchian hums over a jolly melody, but for all that, Transition proffers an involving palette of beguiling yet somehow unsettling textures and the odd moment of stygian beauty.

To achieve these, the album’s ten tracks boast an impressively odd instrumental arsenal; everything from ‘prepared’ Fender Rhodes electric piano to the struck body of an acoustic guitar and the aged heating pipes of the Vienna apartment in which the recording took place. None of the discreet, voiceless, digitally manipulated essays ever really ‘goes’ anywhere - there’s very little sense of soundtrack narrative – but nor or are they mere static ambient wallpaper. Instead, pieces tend to begin with a cluster of disembodied layers of sound which become gradually more congruent, often ceding to passages of relatively orthodox, ‘played’ guitar or keyboards.

Curtain raising track Roads is such a symphony of shipwreck creaks, liquid glitches and sub-aquatic purrs that you imagine the titular thoroughfares must be located in downtown Atlantis until the addition of a skeletal Rhodes melody ushers proceedings toward terra firma. Salvador makes room for the opulent toll of metallic prayer bowls and cartoonish, pizzicato violins while Panarea leavens its initial miasma of dissonance with contrastingly genteel acoustic guitar arpeggios that effortlessly marry folk with Steve Reich.

Perhaps the highlight is Volver - a track that recalls Mark Nelson’s post-electronic dub project Pan American or barely recalled early noughties post rock duo Corker-Conboy. Its spectral driftscapes support further chordal guitar traceries, keyboard figures pregnant with watery possibility and blasts of melodica which briefly threaten Morricone mellifluousness before being enveloped in the album’s default sonic murk.