Sapphire Send - LAITR (Acroplane)

 

Title: Sapphire Send

Artist: LAITR

Label: Acroplane

Cat Number: ACR046

Genre: Beats and Breaks 

1: Tend

2: Alephs

3: Zero Archive

4: Parsa

5: Ekerio

6: Sacrament

7; A Fire Derides

8: Raiene

9: Under Ether

10: Await

I am writing this review while trying to come to terms with a lack of sunshine in July. Hoping against hope that this will mean the summer stretches long into August. This album by LAITR, based in Madrid, but from Manchester seems, on paper, to be the perfect soundtrack for my almost certainly misplaced optimism. It’s a largely beat inspired collection of pieces which have a subliminal understanding with each other, and whose dense, sample-driven sound design unfurls levels of hidden meaning upon the listener. A lot of this wouldn’t be out of place in the golden age of trip hop, but there’s much more than meets the eye. The tracks spend their time burrowing their way into your inner consciousness, coming up for air with the chopped and flanged ‘A Fire Derides’,  ‘Raiene’  and ‘Await’. The prevalent ambience is one of suffocating intensity though, which fluctuates throughout all of the compositions and makes listening to this collection an out of body experience.