Mexican artist Camila De Laborde is involved in not one but two releases intriguing releases over the next few months or so, that both vividly show an experimental and visceral emerging talent. First South East London collective Lumen Lake have teamed up with Berlin-based labels Schamoni Musik and SVS, to release her debut EP ‘Opuntia’ on 12″ vinyl.
‘Opuntia’ is an extraordinary multicoloured slab of four pieces of avant-garde electronic music; the sound of an artist experimenting for the first time with self-made electronics and how she can harness them to create bewildering, challenging and quite striking music that puts one in mind of Bjork at her most challenging and experimental or the work of Jenny Hval.
Fragments of self-talk and screams of self-consciousness are splattered over opener ‘The blue stone’; an intriguing aural canvass of creeping keyboard motifs and fractured fizzing, bleeping electronic circuit board. Bizarre melodies flit in and out of the looping, buzzing artistic shapes of “we are conducting” as Laborde personifies the off-kilter sounds she is crafting. Perhaps most digestible is the delightfully bizarre ‘Him. Solid’, her fragments of half-sung melodies sound like the breaking down of self-identity decorating a tech board rhythm that sounds like hundreds of old PC’s being prodded.
http://www.camilafuchs.com/cdl/index.html
Not just that, Camila is also involved in Camila Fuchs a London (via Mexico and Berlin) electronic pop duo who produce a more starkly direct sound, compared to her more esoteric solo work. Their debut album is billed as ‘possibly’ the first Brexit record, Singing From Fixed Rung is released on the 28th of October.
The first teaser ‘Striking Doubt’ is extraordinarily affecting voyage: above a rising credsceno of synths, and patterns of beats and instrumentation that puts one in mind of the work of Oneohtrix Point Never. Camila’s swooping vocals are daubed in doubt, melancholia and fear as she watches on in horror at the political end times around the world: “Brexit, the rise of Germany’s far right, Calais Wall and the rhetoric of Donald Trump. Music of outsiders to outsiders.”
