Lao

Chapultepec

Genre: ELECTRONIC

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A key spearhead of prevailing rave currents from Central and South America, NAAFI & Extasis label co-founder LAO spells out a compelling, warped definition of hypermodern Latin club music on his sprawling debut album

‘Chapultepec’ is named for one of the biggest municipal parks in his native Ciudad de México - considered the city’s “lungs” for its forests, and an ecology once inhabited by Aztecs - and uses it as metaphor for the wild variegation of his deeply Latin-rooted rhythm programming, as much as the way he animates his synth designs with a restlessly overgrowing, organic quality.

Spanning 19 tunes in 82 minutes, the album is his definitive self-portrait to date and marks the leaps in production quality and blossoming of ideas since his 2010 debut album, in which time he’s come to pull the strings behind the scenes of modern Latin dance music and was instrumental in making it a worldwide phenomenon from the ground up, variously introducing to the wider world a host of artists we now prize, such as Debit, Juanny Depp, Lechuga Zafiro, Paul Marmota.

In his element on ‘Chapultepec’, LAO teases myriad permutations of the triplet-based tresillo rhythm that begat dembow, variously adapting it to surging peak time techno, Dutch-Surinamese Bubbling variants, tribal guarachero, breakbeat hardcore, drill, ambient and many interstices between. There’s a lot to get thru, but we’ll give you a head start with rudest highlights to be scored on synth arp and breakbeat knife play of ‘Alita’, the gnashing bubblers’ zinger of ‘Ha Hypno’, and the wickedly discordant synth fanfare tweaked to dembow-D&B tech step on ‘En dónde estamos’, with deeper pressure points in the gothic drill distillation ‘Lo pregunto’, the tense dread of ‘Axolotl’, and his serpentine title cut with its shearing hyaline synth designs.

MP3 Release (19)