Love and addiction are two themes that Lake Michigan has centred this intimate and hushed collection around and La Madrugada feels as urgent and obsessive as you would expect from those catalysts; but this is a whispered, small hours urgency, as the dawn evoking title would imply, and there is a half-lit, long-shadowed quietude to the sparse but intense tracks presented here.
Place has always seemed an important facet to this long-time DIY experimenter’s recordings, and this is very much the case here – where you not only feel the atmosphere of the room in which these songs were recorded but also somehow the fading streetlights of the darkened world outside. Indeed, as much as this album is about the carefully picked and textured guitar patterns and the hushed humming depth of its half-spoken lyricisms, it is also about the spaces between the sounds. Atmosphere is key here, the creak and shuffle of someone used to experimenting with field recordings’ evocative possibilities. You can hear the night breathing.
The songs are augmented with subtle but carefully manipulated drones, subdued, occasionally twinkling keys and blurry ambient textures that add to that whispered nocturnal atmosphere. La Madrugada is an original, carefully constructed and consuming set of hypnotic songs that evoke with a poetic intensity the dawning glow of a morning still very much clinging to the night.
Written by M.A Welsh (Misophone)
Music | Misophone (bandcamp.com)
