Light Dancer - Hudson Lee

This is one of the few albums that can have a bizarre cover art and a tracklist that matches that cover art perfectly.

Hudson Lee adds the "Light Dancer" LP to his catalogue, and it sure is a good one. He's always been known for his intricate sound design incorporated into offbeat atmospheres and this project is no different — perhaps even more so with the addition of acts like voljum, Frequent and KOAN Sound to its collaborator list — employing meticulously crafted, rather naturalistic elements in a very well-produced fashion. If nothing else, "Light Dancer" is simply impressive for its sound engineering, because the production quality on this is incredible. Hudson Lee pairs rich synthwork, unique beatwork and occasionally distorted sound design with more organic, non-electronic elements like strings, and the result is something... different. "Light Dancer" manifests an atmosphere that sits in a seemingly limbo state, because despite being ultimately rooted in electronic music, it feels so abstract that it doesn't quite feel grounded in any element of reality. The natural elements are there, true, but Hudson Lee crafts musical shapes that twist and weave into new dimensions that have never been explored before, dimensions that no producer has even thought to explore before. But, truth to be told, "Light Dancer" is much more than a simply impressive record. Mood and atmosphere plays a sizeable role in its tracklist, from the distorted "Twine Tree Tether" to the intimate "Weathervein" to the upbeat title track, often accompanied by cheerful vocal chopping — a strange art to perfect, but one that interacts wonderfully with the production. Natural and organic are the threads of reasoning that "Light Dancer" follows, even if it does so in a rather abstract manner, and they help immensely to tie together the 13-track-long tracklist, lending a much-needed measure of cohesiveness to this project. At the end of it all, "Light Dancer" is a holistically complete record traversing a range of music that sounds extraordinarily unconventional and simultaneously pleasing to the ear.

It's not without its flaws though: Hudson Lee does largely fail to bring in enough diversity to the tracklist to feel constantly engaging, and a lot of the motifs can be too similar, so much so that it becomes repetitive; and at times the pure musicality of the record can suffer in favour of being bizarre. Yet still, these are flaws that I think I can live with — a small price to pay for abstract art in music.