French artist Axel Lacan’s first release for Preston, UK’s Them There as Pun Collins is awash in nighttime atmospherics, the mood surely “influenced” by “lunar” effects. Obviously, then, Lunar Influence creeps along unobtrusively, its languid beats propping up purple melodies as shadows cascade across dreamscapes. The sounds slowly coat your perception, settling under their liquid weight, and begin to affect you at an atomic level, warping reality.
You know what they say about those untrustworthy atoms — they make up everything!1
Still, the effect is mesmerizing, as if time becomes unstuck during Lunar Influence’s cycle. Matter drifts, evaporates, reconstitutes. Atoms lose electrons and mutter to themselves, “I really gotta keep an ion those things.”
The music penetrates your mind, and the past, the present, and the future manifest themselves in physical form in front of you, the form explicitly dictated by your own imagination. Then the three of them, past, present, and future, walk into a bar — and the scene is tense.
Friends like Fumitake Tamura and Nico Niquo show up to help out, adding an extra layer of digital smear, increasing the sense of slo-mo club environs. It’s like the three of them are hanging out at a party at the bottom of the sea that Pun Collins is DJ-ing, causing unnatural currents and tidal swells — hopefully nobody pulls a mussel on the dance floor.
In the end, how can a dude named “Pun Collins” not homonymically title a track “I Decay (idk)” with a straight face? You can check out some tracks below. Me? I’m going to go back to reading this book about anti-gravity — I can’t seem to put it down.
LP/digital drops 2/2 — tracklist!:
1. Esc (Part. I)
2. I Decay (idk)
3. Crushed Heart
4. Lunar Influence
5. Sulphur Drip
6. Mediation (feat. Fumitake Tamura)
7. Mainframe (feat. Nico Niquo)
8. 4EVA (Fadin’ Away)
9. Esc (Part. II)
1. None of these puns are original — they appeared to me in an internet search and likely need attribution. But screw it, they’re puns.
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