“Music is actually useless, especially when it has no human vocals to cling to; only raw auditory stimulus, and yet we care a lot about it because it helps us speaking the unspeakable”. So FLeUR introduce Caring About Something Utterly Useless, their second album to be released on February 12, 2021 via Bosco Rec.
The music of the Italian-based experimental duo, formed by Enrico Dutto and Francesco Lurgo, is all about the dialogue between electronic programming and the warmness of human hands playing guitars and keyboards, one merging with each other until the point where they became symbiotic and the boundaries blur, and so digital sounds mutate into breaths and walls of guitar chords become synthetic roars.
Some written for theatrical pieces (Narcissus’ Scream is inspired by playwright Sarah Kane), some for live performances in art galleries and others conceived in the forced reflections of the 2020 lockdown, the seven tracks of this record became a coherent journey thanks to the production of Emilio Pozzolini, from the never forgotten dreamy electronica heroes port-royal.
For the opening track and first single The Lowest Tide (For Matteo G.), available from 11 December 2020, Pozzolini was joined behind the studio desk by dark ambient enfant-prodige Domiziano Maselli. The Lowest Tide is a free-form abstraction that starts from maximum expansion and reaches maximum saturation, through continuous micro-variations.
Premiered on SonOfMarketing with a deep interview, the videoclip was made by Lurgo himself, also film-maker: the images move mysteriously from an abandoned city to wild nature, hand in hand with the growing dynamics. There you can see an end or a new beginning.
Caring About Something Utterly Useless is a sonic magma from which the melodies emerge like rocks from the waves, which rise and fall in circular motion, from the opening single The Lowest Tide to the finalThe Highest Tide, the only track with vocals, which ends with the same theme with which The Lowest Tide begins. From minimalism we drift towards an organic sound, while the titles of the tracks are transformed into a further means of expression. There are For Pierre Brassau, to recall the alter ego of the chimpanzee passed off as a French artist in the Sixties, and My Battery Is Low And It’s Getting Dark, in reference to the last message of the NASA rover on Mars before going off.
Caring About Something Utterly Useless is dedicated to the memory of the Italian singer-songwriter Gwydion Destefanis, aka Nebbiolo, and arrives four years after FLeUR’s debut album The Space Between. In addition to the attitudinal belonging to a certain scene in their city of Turin, the influences of the duo range from musicians such as Tim Hecker and Ben Frost to the Warp school of Autechre and Boards Of Canada, up to the post-rock of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai and Bark Psychosis, to the dark tones of Coil and Soap & Skin.
A journey where the road bends around maximalist ambient drones, shattered IDM beats and lullabies from guitar and piano, all of this here to speak the unspeakable. Take care of it.
