‘The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master’

With the name Lucy, don’t be fooled into thinking you’re letting yourself in for something sweet and innocent; all of the things that this album isn’t. This debut album from Berlin based DJ and producer Luca Mortellaro is a dark and brooding piece of work, which leaves an imprint in the room well after the last track has finished. It is also the first full-length release from Lucy’s label Stroboscopic Artefacts. You can tell from the pace of the album that each track has been painstakingly considered and recalculated, with a moody build up of tension, broken every so often with a powerful techno kick .

Here are my stand-out tracks.

bein – The third track gets the tempo of the album going after a very steady and atmospheric start. The sound is pretty exotic, with a syncopated kick giving the track a slight buoyancy to juxtapose its dark mood.

gas – Following straight on from bein, gas is one of the dubbier tracks on the album. Here Lucy has used vocal samples of a speech by Le Corbusier, a famous architect, designer and urbanist. These slivers of ideas about light, dark, and space are perfectly set against the unsettling background of the track.

ter – The final track on the album is the perfect finish to an insight of an hour of what Lucy is about. It’s a reflective track with drums teasing to take it further throughout. For a few seconds halfway through, everything but the percussion falls away, the beat intensifies, and you wonder if the track is about to explode and go mental. But then – it doesn’t. And that’s not a bad thing. As quickly as the moment came, it went, and it fades back into an ambient chill.
I wouldn’t want to hear some of these tracks in a club; that’s not what they’re made for. But I was certainly intrigued by the 60 minutes of deep, dub-filled techno that Lucy presents here, and it is persuasion enough to ensure I’ll be catching him on his next Berlin date.

WORDPLAY FOR WORKING BEES IS OUT 4/3/2011