It would be easy just to tell you that London producer Lomea creates beats that are emotive and cross a number of genres. I could do that, but Resident Advisor has beaten me to it.
It’s perhaps the clearest synopsis of his work though.
Known for interweaving a selection of acoustic moments into lullaby-like transitions from ambient to trip-hop and big beat, Echoes In Bloom, the artist’s second album very much continues that formula.
But if it’s not broken, why fix it?
Instead, Lomea has focused perhaps a little more on the inorganic sounds than the instrumentation that sometimes eked its way through in previous releases. “Demina” is a fine example of this; where there is still “real life” instruments in the song, it is instead more focused on the manufactured sounds that Lomea has processed.
The vibraphone is more an incidental loop that cuts through the big-beat nature of what the track is going for. It would seem that is the theme throughout Echoes In Bloom – that which is organic and that which is synthesized working together to create a luscious piece of work.
Oh, and how luscious it is. It seems a shame that the single chosen from the album, “You Are Your Memories” seems to almost shy away from that and present itself more as a synthwave entry. Given the breadth of other tracks that would appear to propagate this concept Lomea has gone for, it seems like it could have been an opportune moment to really showcase how thrilling an album this is.
It’s a pulsating working that so many fans of EDM can lay claim to what it tries to accomplish. It’s an ambient work at times (“Interweave”), it’s got moments of trap-beats (“Sudden Read”), Squarepusher era IDM (“Reach”) and all the hallmarks of breakbeat and trip-hop interspersed throughout.
It’s a bold work that doesn’t try and be something but instead encompasses all the strengths across the populous electronic subgenres of the past decade and beyond.
It works – it really does. I was half expecting on second listen it to be a myriad of ideas scattershot all over the record. However, it’s refined in its movements and never once does anything feel really out of place.
An eclectic wonder. Congrats Lomea.
Echoes In Bloom is released May 31st 2019 through Here and Now Recordings.
