To call this music spacey would be disingenuous. Lamedd goes beyond the average soundscape album here, delivering a rush of distorted sounds, crumbled beats, and musical electricity. It isn’t until track five, “Hunted,” where listeners are greeted to the cascading bleep bloop Phantom Menace b side bootlegs sped up kind of sound that makes this project enjoyable for me.
“Hunted” rambles with a rattling of video game loading screen glitches and warped perceptions of mood, tone, and feeling. It isn’t ever spooky or evil, yet the hinting aspect is embellished through out the song, with and up and down, topsy turvy melody keeping the three minutes and eight second afloat. The song reaches its peak towards the end, when the “voice” of the hunted finally begins to break down and drone out into the silence.
The opening track “Mercy” is a good one, though a more cut and dry mash up of the type of sounds presented on “Hunted.” What really makes these songs work are their ability to find haunting voices in their keyboards, which makes for many of the stand out moments on “Mercy” and even later tracks like “My Incisor,” a song that seems to embellish 8 bit punches, hi hats drum crashes, and gunfire organ a bit too much.
Where a lot of this album succeeds, it also suffers. There are hyper clean popping sounds on “In Bloom,” the type of stuff you might find on a cult Playstation 3 classic, yet they do not really go anywhere beyond the idea of being played back and forth, touting on and off with a slight stupor at times.
A bit more careful beat change ups would have done this project good, and with tracks at a shorter than usual length for an ambient sound project, Permit struggles to land memorable moments over enjoyable ones. ‘Cut The Wire” is a song that exudes this. Despite having sonic shine and a cool atmosphere, the song doesn’t have a jam out quality or a relaxing one, despite a strong mix of sounds. I guess you need a permit for distinction.
