Lakker - Struggle & Emerge - LP Vinyl

Lakker’s 3rd LP is a roiling, intense concept suite based around the Dutch struggle against The North Sea, drawing exclusively from an archive of field recording, TV and radio broadcasts from the Dutch National AV archive. It's also easily their best work to date. If nothing it’s an abject history lesson in that region’s legacy of surmounting the physics of nature by technological means, but thankfully it’s also a hydrollicking good album, capturing the irish duo at their most febrile, urgent and vital.<br/><br/> Connecting extensive research with imaginative license, Struggle & Emerge forges 8 tracks of turbulent dynamics and tortuous emotions with a stoic sort of persistence and involving dramaturgy, flowing from the coarse, salinated noise-techno textures of Reclamation thru the clanking mechanical filtration of Maeslantkering Gating to the widescreen, impending calm of Emergo and banking harmonic noise structures threaded with the voices of a broadcast made the day after a Nazi-induced flood of 1953 in Broken Clouds.<br/><br/> With Ever Rising the sound out a gritty electro-acoustic dimension somewhere between modern Dutch artists, Funckarma and Machinefabriek, leading to the viscerally submerged light shows of 5000 People and a sharp contrast with the sweeping, bilious forms of Open Clouds. In all, it’s a sensitive but unflinching album, drawing links between the dykesmen’s history, the dynamics of electro-acoustic music, and, to some extent, even gives some background to the west coast dutch obsession with Drexciya and electro-techno hydraulix.