The track’s central conceit is quietly audacious. Lacewing assembled it from vocal snippets belonging to eight women \u2014 Qualia Cascade, Annette Buckley, Tanya Goknel, Julie Baker, Laura Peglar, Sarah Joy Pearson, Claire Few and Eleanor Murphy \u2014 none of whom had heard the finished work before they appeared on it. These are voices harvested from friendship, from old collaborative projects, from hard drives and half-remembered sessions. Lacewing cut them into fragments, then subjected those fragments to cascading delay effects and drone processing until the human origin of the sound becomes gloriously uncertain. The result is less a choir than a weather system: voices as atmosphere, as pressure front, as the low hum of something ancient approaching from the treeline.<\/p>
Muted trumpet threads through the composition with a grace that calls to mind Miles Davis if Davis had decided to soundtrack a pagan ceremony rather than a Manhattan jazz club. Lacewing cites his love of Indian classical music \u2014 the Mishra brothers among his touchstones \u2014 and the drone sensibility of that tradition runs through the track’s bones. The choruses swell into something genuinely epic: a convergence of treated vocals and brass that earns its grandiosity because it was built from such small, intimate materials. A bedroom, candles, urban foxes at the window.<\/p>
The mixing was handled by Stef Hambrook, associated with Minima, a group known for rescoring silent films, and the collaboration is audible in the track’s cinematic breathing. Every element has space \u2014 the synths don’t crowd the trumpet, the trumpet doesn’t overwhelm the voices \u2014 and the result has the quality of a wide-angle landscape shot: you sense the depth long before you can name what you are looking at. Edgar Allan Poets called it “hypnotic… ancestral and ritualistic,” which is precisely right and also only half the story, because for all its ritualism the track has a strange tenderness to it, a sense of something being offered rather than demanded.<\/p>
The music video, and the title itself, deserve particular attention. The phrase “Land of Enchantment” appears, Lacewing tells us, on the number plate of David Bowie’s car in Nicolas Roeg’s *The Man Who Fell to Earth* \u2014 a film already so saturated with alienation and longing that the reference feels almost programmatic. Lacewing is playing a game of associations here, connecting his work to Bowie’s most interior performances, to Roeg’s fractured editing, to the idea that the otherworldly is sometimes found in the smallest, most overlooked details: a licence plate, a vocal snippet, eight seconds of a friend’s voice captured years ago for a different purpose entirely.<\/span><\/p> What the music video does with this material is fold it back on itself, layering visual texture the way the audio layers sonic texture, so that both experiences \u2014 watching and listening \u2014 feel like variations on the same act of immersion.<\/span><\/p> Lucian Lacewing describes himself as a programmer rather than a musician, and the distinction is meaningful. This is music assembled rather than performed, constructed rather than played. But the warmth that runs through it is not the warmth of algorithms. It is the warmth of someone who genuinely loves sitar and muted trumpet, who records at night by candlelight, who builds something enormous out of borrowed voices and shared history.<\/span><\/p> His forthcoming debut album, *When We Were Hydrogen*, promises psychedelia, sitars, ouds, handpans, cellos, and a lurch from floaty soundscape into “off-kilter, manic pop.” On the evidence of *Land Of Enchantment*, it would be wise to pay attention. This is a genuinely strange, genuinely beautiful piece of work \u2014 and strangeness, when it arrives with this much conviction, is never something to dismiss lightly.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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