Laughing Ears - Blood (2021)

Laughing Ears is poised to release her second LP this January via club music vanguards, Infinite Machine. Her lengthiest offering to date, Blood consists of 10 tracks that highlight Laughing Ears’s knack for building otherworldly atmospherics within club-ready, dance music structures. Taking the tale of Fenrir as it’s starting point, (a giant wolf in Norse mythology who spent much of his life bound and chained to a rock in captivity), the album conceptually deals with family ties and the melancholic beauty that can be found in the darkness of loss.

Blood opens with the airy, gliding synths and heavy drumwork of Flickering Shadows. The track has a unique sense of space due its wide stereo-imaging as well as Laughing Ears’ haunting melodies and driving rhythms. A 100bpm creeper fit for exploring uncharted virtual lands. On the following track, Loki, things are stripped back to their functional essentials. Tabla hits, bass pluses and strange whistles brush up against each other in a head-spinning assemblage before surging towards a climactic resolution.

The serene Untouched Places showcases Laughing Ears’ unique approach to melody and harmony. With a background in singing herself, her synths lines here seem to tonally intertwine, like vocal DNA, veering from harmonious and dissonant phases. Compared to the tranquility of Untouched Places, LP title-track, Blood, moves the record in a more intense direction. A brick wall of compressed percussion and humanoid-sung samples seem to battle it out for the listener’s attention in an enthralling sonic confrontation.

On Blood’s mid-point, Night Whisps, the producer’s love for the thrilling soundtracks of Satoshi Kon’s anime movies definitely comes through clearly. Bass drones claustrophobically reverberate around the mix - acting as a musical backbone that a wide array of staccato samples are stitched onto. Next up, Murderous Means, as its blood-thirsty title suggests, is a brutal and hard-hitting club track that’ll keep listeners guessing as the composition twists and turns. The song’s furious, ever-evolving drum patterns create mesmerising rhythms you can’t help but bob your head to.

The polyrhythms continue on the following piece, Buona Fortuna. Like footwork, a genre she looks to for inspiration, on Buona Fortuna, the main groove is built out of a disparate family of drum samples which work in tandem - much like how individual dots of an Impressionist painting cooperate to form a single, concrete image. Laughing Ears then slows things down slightly with Glimmer, which sees the producer mix the low end stylings of UK Funky with strung out horns and gong hits.

On Potcheen, the longest of the record, Laughing Ears ambitiously constructs a track that starts from curious, ambient beginnings before morphing into a ferocious footwork-infused banger. Rounding off the release, Warm as A Lizard is a groove-laided drum freakout, crammed full of dense textures which build into a tonal fever pitch.