Late Night Stranger: Lapalux

Stuart Howard, from Essex, only needed one EP to draw attention to his unusual talent from Flying Lotus. The following Lapalux EP “Many Faces Out Of Focus” was released in 2011 on the Los Angeles Brainfeeder label and focused on “the Electro/Organic Sound Continuum” as he himself described. “When You´re Gone” (2012) masterfully shows how broken beats can produce cinematographic sound pictures of enormous profoundness with both awake and dream-like qualities that are more directed at the listener’s imagination than for dance floor. They are somewhere between Ennio Morricone, James Blake, Jazz, Four Tet and J Dilla. In the albums to follow “Nostalchic” (2013) and “Lustmore” (2015), he was critiqued as more “comparatively accessible” and then as “over-ambitioned” which is not necessarily contradictory in the experimental “Brainfeeder” cosmos. At the end of June, Lapalux released his third album “Ruinism”, an abstract concept album about life and death, full of voices but without lead voices, produced solely with the sounds from the right instruments subsequently deconstructed and »ruined« by the producer. In other words: Lapalux not only has enough self-confidence but also creativity to challenge even his hard-core fans to venture into new terrain. And, of course, everyone else too!