Plant43 - Luminous Machines (2024)

Luminous Machines, the eighth album by UK based Emile Facey recording under his Plant43 alias, is made up of eight dancefloor tracks and eight cinematic interludes all of which are inspired by visits overseas to play live in 2023.

Emile: “The eight dancefloor tracks were all written just before gigs at Tresor in Berlin, for their new electro focussed event, Aquabahn, and the Drift Festival in Nijmegen, which happened on a very hot, sunny day in June. For some reason I’m always inspired to write new material immediately before a gig. I find it’s a good way to capture how I’m feeling in that moment and there’s something both cathartic and inspiring about playing a new track live, knowing it didn’t exist a few days beforehand. Once home in the studio, I completed eight of these new tracks to form the core of the album.

The cinematic interludes which make up the rest of the album came about during the same trip to Berlin In April 2023. I arrived for a gig at Tresor with a whole day to spare and there was an atmosphere in the city that I felt compelled to capture. It was a warm but grey and rainy day, the neon lights glowing faintly in the mist as people rushed from door-to-door under umbrellas, trams were quietly gliding in and out of an elevated station platform while various other smaller vehicles busily scurried around the entrance to a giant shopping mall just outside the window of my compact hotel room. I opened my laptop and began writing a series of short tracks while I was waiting to go to the club for sound check, soundtracking the scene. While I was doing this it occurred to me just how much different forms of transport are interwoven with our lives. In so many ways vehicles are empowering for humans and we rely on transportation for so much and yet we urgently need to change our relationship with fossil fuels. Surely, I thought, human ingenuity can create new machines which transport us around without polluting our planet?

When I was back home I realised that I had 16 tracks that worked together as a whole. I’d experimented before with putting short beatless tracks on my electro records, adding a bit more atmosphere, and my instinct was to put them all on the double vinyl edition. However, having just played at some events where DJs were playing vinyl, I wanted these records to be DJ friendly. The solution I landed on was to create two different versions of the album, the eight dancefloor tracks on the vinyl and the cinematic interludes completing the sixteen track digital, cinematic edition. Clocking in at an hour long, together they form my soundtrack to those Luminous Machines I was dreaming of in Berlin.”

Juno's review: Plant43 is the alias of Emile Facey, one of electro's most tireless innovators. He has a vast discography that never fails to prove he can speak through his machines more ably than just about anyone in the game, and certainly within the genre. Luminous Machines comes on his own label and is an album, his eighth in all, of cinematic and futuristic jams written before a gig at Tresor in April this year. 'Haunting The Depths' has an icy minimalism to it, with crisp drums and snappy hits all underpinned by textured bass. The title cut is a restless affair that pings about the stereo field with squiggling lines and loopy breaks and 'Fixed Point Rotation' has a more dark and menacing feel. These are just some of the highlights of another standout collection.