I’ve never really known where the sonic demarcations in dance music lie, where Downtempo merges into Ambient, where Deep House gets so blissed out it becomes Chill-wave, but then, I suspect not many people have, certainly not those who make the music. To such creatives, it is just music, and the sounds, styles and samples that they use are just tools, a means to an end.
So, I’m not going to try to pigeonhole Lucasso, not least because throughout these seven tracks there is so much invention and adventure, creation and genre-splicing, that such a task would be impossible. If understatement is often the only real connection between what he has to offer musically, even within such tailored territory he manages to be exploratory. Let It Go, a track that has already reached the ears of no insignificant number of people, is the sound of future dance brought to the here and now. Slow burning, skittering and with almost alien sonic elements, it seems to bristle with a pent up energy which it never releases, adding a wonderful tension to the proceedings and After The Space Sun Sets blends shimmering cascades of synths with pulsing bass bombs and skittering beats.
There are more buoyant tracks such as the Ascension and its blend of energized dance beats and swathes of fiddle, Get Down seems to somehow echo electronic music of the past whilst also sounding forward-thinking and adventurous and Falling Upwards is a collection of ambient and experimental sound finding a new path as it navigates its way across the musical map of the clubland dance floor.
If there are still musical demarcations between the various dance music camps, Lucasso doesn’t know where they are, or at least he doesn’t take any notice of them. In his music blissed-out warmth blends with ambient chill, energetic grooves dance with downbeat swagger and the glories of the past mix with the cutting edge of today to help build the future. Often all within the same song. How cool is that?
Like I said before, I’m not really sure where all of this fits in but does it really matter? As long as we have artists such as Lucasso who are more concerned with where we go next than where we have been, music will keep moving forward, sounds will keep evolving and styles will rise and fall, mix and match, blend and create. And that is about all that you can ask of any artist, I guess.
