Lukid - Onandon

Lukid's debut album on Actress' consistently great Werk imprint is an intriguing and strangely contradictory work, combining fresh-faced experimentation with surprising maturity and in-depth knowledge of electronic music. Straddling the ground between instrumental hip-hop and minimal electro, Onadon is brimming with four minute sketches of fragmented brilliance that echo round your head and tingle down your spine. Chock full of unique sounds and enigmatic structures, tracks such as Wonder Years and Light Up take a blowtorch, crowbar, and monkey wrench to the likes of Madlib, Dabrye and Prefuse 73, occasionally mangling everything with carefully controlled chops of static, glitch or silence. The excellent Piano Nono emphasises the contradictory nature of the album as a rolling piano riff struggles for dominance over stuttering attention-deficit beats that constantly threaten to fly off into weirder, darker, and noisier passages. What at first listen seems infuriatingly restrained, grows with every repetition as the puzzle-box subtleties of the record unfold. [Liam Arnold]