Lucky Dragons
By Sophie in Lucky Dragons | 0 comments
MP3: Starter Culture
LUCKY DRAGONS TOURING AUSTRALIA OCTOBER 2008! watch this space for details
“Dream Island Laughing Language” by Lucky Dragons
Lucky Dragons is the brainchild of Los Angeles savant Luke Fischbeck, together with Sarah Rara and other collaborators. Dream Island Laughing Language, the 19th release by Lucky Dragons details the continuing pursuit of a humble and ecstatic, drippy and explosive, smoldering and upset music.
This is music that articulates Lucky Dragons’ experience in America right now. Messages of unrest have long failed to be clearly understood, solitude and empty organization have given way to a very current volcanic desire for togetherness. Genre has never been less important; influences and ideas are consumed and digested and released in the spirit of a culture larger than music as it is bought and sold. This is world music for a world that doesn’t care about “music” as we have packaged it for the last 100 years. You could call it post-noise, or post-anything you like, but we would prefer to call it pre-something.
Lucky Dragons came together in the spring of 2000 in an attempt to create a band that would never break up. The name is borrowed from a Japanese fishing vessel caught in the fallout of a US hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific ocean that became a focal point for world-wide anti-nuclear sentiment in the 20th Century. With a constantly shifting group of participants, each recording is a record of a specific time and place, and of those present and active as a community in the creation of the recording.
For this recording, the time is 2007-2008, the place is California. The name of the record refers to the landfill-island in Tokyo Harbour where the original Lucky Dragon now lives –”dream island”, and to the creation of imaginary languages — “laughing language” — that can be used to express things our own languages can’t.
As with Lucky Dragons’ legendary live performances, these recordings strive to create a space where community and memory and ritual and perspective all come together as a crystal and then vibrate and shatter.
Cyclic Defrost review :
Lucky Dragons is really quite and intriguing offering. It’s experimental music with a real world music leaning, focussing on these percussive textures, though often adding these shy rhythmic vocals. It begins with the sounds of distorted gongs, so what do they call it? Clipped Gongs - way to cover up a mistake. Except I hope it’s not a mistake because it sounds great. There’s a certain carefree genius at work here. Every rule you’ve ever known gets carelessly broken in a unselfconscious savant kind’ve way. It’s incredibly minimal, repetitive, with very few elements, and an almost cyclical drive, which taps right into the spiritual world music angle. Yet it’s also at times quite electronic with these looped electrical flecks existing alongside spasmodic bursts of acoustic guitar and the odd dose of moaning. Lucky Dragons are not trying to do too much, they get a groove going and stick to it with a vague slightly hysterical bent- these short fragments of song that never wear out their welcome thanks to their brevity. It’s LA based Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara who are part of a collective that has spawned 18 previous offerings, though, if anywhere deserved a little dose of unexpected lo fi post electronica spirituality it’s that terrible joint. It’s innocent, possibly stupid and very infectious as these incredible loops continue to build until you find these fully formed ultra funky fragments of sound and you wonder to yourself, why am I not dancing?
The Big Issue review (4.5 stars):
Dream Island Laughing Language is shudders of sound and melody and rhythm; it is splinters of light through trees. It is a chest full of fresh air and a head full of computer parts; it is clouds and planes and birds in the same sky. It is the 19th release from hyper-prolific young Los Angelite Luke Fischbeck (aka Lucky Dragons) and it is as wonderfully surreal and joyous as its title portends.
Woven via fragments of melody, percussion, texture and wordless voice, the record’s 22 fleeting vignettes reference but never embrace a stockpile of musical and ethnographic intonations. Psychedelic melodic hues, static-riddle noise and placid Japanese folk inflections entwine themselves deep within skittering electronic rhythms. The effect is startling – as equally cerebral as it is immersive and emotive. See the brilliant ‘Morning Ritual’ and ‘Mirror Friends’ for evidence.
Dream Island is a rare and astoundingly individual record. Brimming with both familiarity and near alien abstraction, it resonates with the intriguing contradictions of contemporary culture. Indeed, while these sonic scapes shine with sprawling cross-cultural scope, they also whisper with intimacy, contingence and connection. Lucky Dragons has crafted a work of wondrous, iconoclastic musical syntax.
The nanotechnological dream of photosynthesizing computers appears within reach when listening to Lucky Dragons. While the Macs employed by the LA duo are probably the regular kind - plastic, circuits, software - the weird and near-total naturalism of their sound on umpteenth release, Dream Island Laughing Language, begs the question - are they not living things, inlaid with grass, coconut husk or animal skin? While everything here is excessively treated, chopped and processed, somehow it comes across as Natural History - ethnomusicological and live, suntanned and relaxed - like a bunch of geckos and undiscovered aboriginal life jamming together on some Tron-island beach.
Twenty-two tracks fly-by on the wind, light and sunny, but as complicated in detail as any rainforest walk. Players Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara push seemingly unlimited sound sources through the digital glass - tabla, shakers, wind-chimes, recorders - yet never unnecessarily pile up the layers. Tracks are short patterns that typically drop away once formed, with nothing overly laboured or ‘meaningful’ in a pop sense. But this is pop as regularly issued by Mistletone; unrecognisable, alien and joyful. Our closest touchpoint might be Black Dice circa Creature Comforts, or locals Snawklor, but even then we’re still a way off.
Like a friendly cousin to Black Dice, or the difficult offspring resulting from a one-night-stand between Boards of Canada and Panda Bear, Lucky Dragons main man Luke Fischbeck, here with Sarah Rara, have produced an intoxicating blend of digital samples, non-descript vocal chants, handclaps and muted recorder lines. Dream Island’s 21 tracks have no real structure, building up and buzzing around the ears like mosquitoes on a hot night, before changing direction or disappearing completely. Despite its digital leanings, Dream Island is a very organic sounding album, almost trance-inducing at times - Wander Birds is a dark electronic track built from light synths, reminiscent of Clark’s Body Riddle, and Wooden Cave Loop is a great acoustic tropical island cave jam. Were you to bury a microphone deep in an anthill, amplify the resulting recording a thousand times and play it through a stack of giant conch shells, and this is probably what you’d hear. Yes, it’s a good thing.
“Lucky Dragons create ecstatic music that completely transcends genres. My attempts to describe what their music actually sounds like always fall short of the magic they are making. I guess you could say it sounds like — ecstatic magic. Challenging stereotypes that electronic music is cold and sterile, Lucky Dragons’ live show, though conducted via computers, is a truly great celebration of the human spirit, giving real hope for the techno-future our society is racing toward.” -artforum
“A line between the handmade and the distanced digital… a successful forging of the personal detritus, the mic-ed moments between moments”
-All Music Guide
“Lucky Dragons have managed to create a completely new strand of West Coast American psychedelia” -frieze
ABOUT LUCKY DRAGONS
“Lucky Dragons” means any recorded or performed or installed or packaged or shared pieces made by Luke Fischbeck, Sarah Rara, and any sometimes collaborators. They try to do as many different kinds of things as they can, high and low, fast and slow. They would say they are “artists who use music” and if they make performance art it is to alter and append it, but they give respect to history and the people who live there.
Today’s influences include: Nikki de St Phalle, Joan Didion, COBRA, Hieronymous Bosch, Thomas Jefferson, Tina Turner, Allan Kaprow, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, Mayan codices, Ivor Cutler.
Lucky Dragons shows are about the birthing of new and temporary creatures– creating equal-power situations in which audience members cooperate amongst themselves, to build a fragile network of digital signals connected by touching on the skin. There have been hundreds of these simple yet shifting and unpredictable instances– with audiences ranging from the intense intimacy of one person to the public spectacle of over one thousand people. At the heart of it all is playing together– building up social collectivities, re-engaging the wonder and impossibility of technology and live performance. It sounds– and looks– like simple and ancient patterns coming together and falling apart in a sincere attempt to let wires and screens and words become clear and crystal.
They keep a busy schedule of performances and visits and festivals and workshops and things, in the present, and in the past: NY’s PS1, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Philadelphia Institute for Contemporary Art, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle, Los Angeles’ The Smell, NY’s The Kitchen, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial. In the future: The Smithsonian Institute’s Hirshorn Museum, etc.
Lucky Dragons live in Los Angeles California and have recorded 7 albums which are all available for downloading.
Lucky Dragons’ sister projects include sumi ink club — a weekly collaborative drawing society, and “glaciers of nice“–a small press and internet community.
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