By the mid-2010s, Luke Blair had definitively moved on from the post-Dilla-style instrumental beats and experimental tweaking that had defined the early stages of his career. Instead, he began to uncover just how much tenderness could be found in house experiments that only appeared abrasive on the surface. Fragile noise, minimalist bleeps, and muddy textures became his signature. For his more hard-edged material, there’s the side project Rezzett, which he launched with Jackson Bailey.
On his sixth album, now released on tape, it’s once again the signature Lukid sound that dominates – a sound no one conjures quite like he does. It’s as if you’ve stumbled across a long-lost radio signal from a sunken ship in the middle of the night, still playing the last cassette left behind by the onboard DJ. On Underhand Brokery, blurry beat skeletons tremble hypnotically against each other, delicate loops in Reducer fold in on themselves, and the album’s highlight, Overloop, drifts toward the surface with a gently pulsing beat and an eerie melody that never fully resolves.
Underloop
