Industrial pop is acquiring the amorphous dynamics that made techno music so fascinatingly fruitful two decades ago. The assembly of daydream aesthetics and the borrowing of afrofuturism in today’s pop frequencies (“chillwave”) is providing us with some of the most avant-garde music we’ve seen in decades. Chilean newcomer Lainus belongs to this line of dreamwavers making greatly challenging and emulsified songs. Highly influenced by Germany’s techno pioneers, Kraftwerk, and the more modern revolutionary kids of Animal Collective, the one-man crusade by Lainus’ synth-maximalist mastermind, Alfredo Ibarra, is quite promising.
Ibarra, who in the past released a microhouse-experimental album with Pueblo Nuevo, sounds like most of his dreamwave contemporaries (Memory Tapes, Pictreplane, Millionyoung, etc.), but far more intimidating. Lyrically, Lainus seems to share the deep concerns toward music form found in many of his compatriots, like Gepe and Fakuta. In the most psychedelic fashion, first promotional cut “Baile Contemporáneo” is so intriguingly abrupt that listening to it requires a certain level of psychedelic coolness. The song’s first fragmented sequence is alarming to say the least (it’s literally a rush of blood to the head). Things only get more confounding in its middle section, but if you stick around long enough, all of your invested attentiveness will pay off with the emergence of glo-fi riffs on the horizon.