Luminous
Precarious Karma (Studies of The Absolute)
(Soundbox)
Luminous is/are Glaswegian multi-instrumentalist Andy Isacsson, who on paper, and from looking at his Youtube videos of a few years back, would have terrified my teenage self with his musical and technical skill. Whereas, traumatised by the experience of browsing local guitar stores unable to pluck up the courage to even attempt to twang a string in front of an audience of sarcastic musos, I opted to muddle my way through live performances and recording sessions under the guise of experimental electronics, Andy played, produced, and recorded to a standard of excellence far outside of my reach.
I’m putting this in the past tense as, having spent a couple of years improving his musical skills in order to be able to play every instrument on every song on ‘Precarious Karma’, just as recording finally started, disaster struck. After emergency surgery to correct sudden blindness, he became visually impaired and developed a rare neurological condition which left him with long periods of being unable to stand, talk, move, or process sensory information - leaving him severely disabled. For most of us that would have called an absolute halt to the album, but not so for a spirit like Andy, who slowly, very slowly, continued to work on the album and piece-by-piece constructed it over a 10 year period until we reached the point we are now, with the album completed and finally released. That is beyond impressive. Every instrument, aside from a few guest female vocals are played by Andy. That includes (deep breath!): Lead and harmony vocals; electric, acoustic, fretless, slide and dulcimer guitars; electric, upright and fretless bass; drums and percussion; piano, Rhodes, B3, clavinet, harpsichord and mellotron; synthesisers and sound design, rhythm programming and sequencing, brass and string arrangements and scoring, saxophone, harmonica, mandolin, theremin, and; (no doubt) more. What you get generated by all of that on ‘Precarious Karma’ is an expansive, ever-changing kaleidoscope of sounds and styles without boundaries.
Luminous asserts that his lifetime of musical experience fed an unquenchable curiosity to break down the constraints of genre. That is certainly true, if not even an understatement here. Opening with the glorious, Eastern tinged, ‘Liberte-Moksha’ (‘Moksha’ being a term in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism for emancipation, liberation, or nirvana), via the lolloping and commercial ‘Call His Name’, we drop to the title track with its whispered secrets, strings, fretless slides and warnings of a New World Disorder, before getting to one of the album standouts ‘The World Still Turns’, with its Pink Floyd tinged scale and soar. We are back to sinuous Eastern mantras and Tabla rhythms on ‘Multiplied By The Sands of The Ganges’. There are Lounge Jazz touches (‘I’d Love You To’), a Tom Waits sounding outing (‘Saint August’), ‘Cathar Heretics’ (think Radiohead at their peak), and the wonderfully titled ‘That Venn Diagram of People You Don’t Want To Meet’, which rises and falls like a black sea. I make no apology for the comparisons here. They are all good ones to make. If I had any doubts, it would be that at times it is just a bit TOO clever, throwing in all sorts of fancy chord progressions, diminished sevenths too no doubt (whatever those are), and a plethora of instrumentation and vocals. It works best when the songs are allowed more space to breath.
I doubt that with the advent of AI musicians, it will be very long now before it is rendered unnecessary to study and graft to learn to play every instrument in order to create an album like this, but the knowledge that Luminous overcame such personal adversity to do so lends this album a very special quality that you just can’t synthesise into an algorithm. And amen for that!
Essential Information:
‘Precarious Karma (Studies of the Absolute)’ is available on CD and download on Bandcamp here
