FLeUR

FLeUR: Caring About Something Utterly Useless is the new album by the electronic Italian duo, out on February 12, 2021 for Bosco Rec; listen to the first single The Lowest Tide

“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, 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.

Pozzolini himself made the alt-mix of Narcissus’ Scream (For Sarah K.), the new second single inspired by playwright Sarah Kane available in its double version. The videoclip was directed by the Lurgo himself, also film-maker: “Narcissus’ Scream (For Sarah K.) was initially born for a theatrical piece and in the specific for a physical performance, so we have created a contact improvisation performance with Gianluca Bottoni, actor, performer and theater director, and Mara Roberto, dancer and performer. We wanted to mark the difference between the chaos of the first part of the track, with the loneliness of the characters and the deconstruction of the images that recalls the beats, and the calm of the second part, with the search for human warmth and intimacy as a protection, underlined by clean frames“.

For the opening track and first single The Lowest Tide (For Matteo G.), 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. The videoclip was made always by Lurgo: 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.

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Label: Bosco Rec | Press: Digipur – press@digipur.it