Erik Ludinart’s latest musical collection is a series of sketches painted with bold, challenging strokes. Manic and cacophonous, his glitchy atmospheres are fleshed out and greatly encompassing. Amours is an engaging listen that will test even the most seasoned experimental music veterans.
Based in the French town of Tourves, Erik Ludinart is a musical composer whose intricate constructs of glitchy electronica can each be considered a self-contained piece of work. Usually unafraid of taking his time, Ludinart’s pieces on Amours easily go for more than 7 minutes, during this time Ludinart introduces his ideas, and nurtures them into maturation, his compositions ending up hypnotic in their noisy nature, and in the sensory overload they induce with their delicate, flittering, glitchy samples.
Ludinart’s pieces on Amours give a uniform sense of impending doom, usually with dark, howling pads and fragmented crystals of suggested melodies with glitchy and fractured synths. A landmark piece on the album is the gargantuan ‘Storge’, a 13-minute stomper that induces hypnosis with its driving yet gentle beats and seemingly infinite loops of a litany of snaky synth lines. A spectacular structure.
There’s not a boring moment on Amours 1 hour and 5 minutes runtime. The music is rich, to the point of it being occasionally too dense for any casual listening sessions. An album that takes time to unfold and make its statement, but when it does, the statement is grand and is beautifully expressed. Not for everybody, but for those who can appreciate this kind of music, there is an immense wealth of enjoyment to be found in Amours.