LNOE Vol. III – Sasha & LAU.RA, Locked Groove, Qrion [LNOE]

Three’s a charm, as lau.ra and Locked Groove join Qrion collaborating with Sasha for his LNOE TEN Vol III EP, celebrating the label’s ten-year milestone.

Fresh from her successful album ‘Vol.1 The Mixtape’ (NeedWant), lau.ra aka Laura Bettinson is a natural choice for Sasha: her previous trio Ultraista’s track ‘Small Talk’ featured on ‘Involver 3’, she sang at his 2017 re-Fracted live shows at the Barbican and her ‘I’ll Wait’ featured on his LUZoSCURA project.

Locked Groove has LNOE history, with his remix of Max Cooper’s ‘Careless’ for their 100^th release. The Belgian artist, with releases across Hotflush, Life and Death and Permanent Vacation and his own Locked Groove Records, has also notably collaborated with Mind Against, and most recently with Gacha Bakradze.

‘Dry & High’: Sasha’s recent collab with Qrion opens the EP with a lo-fi feast – a sweetly melodic vocal phased, fuzzed and shaped into an instrument over a stealthy cat-feet beat and quietly growling bass. A meditative musical mandala for those blissed-out club moments or intimate listening.

‘Burnt Letters’ (Sasha & lau.ra): complex yet danceable, percussive yet lyrical, a galloping beat with teasers of distorted vocal giving way to Lau.ra singing pure and clear in the extended breakdown and beyond, with a heartfelt elegy to love’s evanescence.

‘Exploding Suns’ (Sasha & Locked Groove): a dynamic hymn to chaos, exciting and doomy, as pulsing synths woven with half-heard voices tuning in and out alternate with phases of crazy, clattering percussion before a throbbing diminuendo takes us past supernova to eventual white dwarf.