Roots In Heaven - Edge Of Non Compliance (2023)

Back in 2009, Italian DJ and producer Luca Mortellaro - better known simply as Lucy - established the Stroboscopic Artefacts label. And over the last 14 years, the imprint has nurtured a reputation for its line-blurring electronic abstraction and dancefloor experimentation, releasing influential material by artists like Speedy J, Kangding Ray, Donato Dozzy, Paula Temple, Rrose, Ben Klock, Wanton Witch, and of course Lucy themselves. Naturally following the label's ten year threshold, the pandemic pause and Mortellaro's subsequent artistic re-evaluation, OTHER FACTS emerges as a fresh entity, fully unplugged from Stroboscopic Artefacts' dancefloor mainframe, with its gaze pointed on widescreen cinematic sound design and audio-visual art.

To inaugurate the label comes the sophomore album from masked, anonymous artist Roots In Heaven, following their acclaimed 2017 opus "Petites Madeleines". That debut took its conceptual cues from Proust's seven-volume masterpiece "À la recherche du temps perdu", and while "Edge of Non Compliance" has no such literary focus, it's no less layered or philosophically rigorous. In fact it's the ideal vehicle to launch OTHER FACTS: an album that's rich, suggestive and delicately textured, that proposes a visual accompaniment without overstating its motivation.

Elegiac, wordless vocals draw us into 'By Way of Pain', transporting us across vast oceans of time and modishly contextualising the artist's subtly braided electro-acoustic treatments. It's tempting to label the evocative mood as like a soundtrack to a movie that doesn't exist, but Roots In Heaven sounds more eager to challenge a narrative than let themselves become beholden to one. On 'I Saw No Heaven' their motivations are clarified completely as tonally diverse horn blasts levitate cooly over percussion that sounds both ritualistic and peculiarly cybernetic - if it's a score, it's more Geoff Barrow than John Williams.

The push and pull between history and a projected future is crucial to fully unpacking "Edge of Non Compliance". Using unusual tunings and sounds that appear to flicker psychedelically between the real world and the virtual, Roots In Heaven melts our perception of the new and the old. Narrative storytelling is far more important here and the artist's experience is nudged into the center allowing them to harness emotion, using restraint and negative space to highlight a mood that's suggestive without being prescriptive.

The artist realises that stories are exactly what we make them, so is able to balance the searing industrial noise and bleak beatless soundscapes of 'May Your Walls Fall Down' with the sensual John Carpenter-esque moodiness of 'Deeply Dug', reaching a point of harmony that's almost pure cinema. It's a concoction that's as coherent and mutable as the best DJ mixes, but as thematically single-minded and intentional as the wildest concept albums. And just like all the most enduring movies, you're likely to be unravelling "Edge of Non Compliance" for many years to come.