SAMPLES: soundcloud.com/veylrecords/laggard-permanent-daylight-clips

For its second release of the year, Veyl welcomes composer, producer and visual artist Laggard to the label with new EP, 'Permanent Daylight'. Constructed from sonics that resemble, either literally or figuratively, the unpredictable and unmanageable creaks, cracks and groans of nature at its most volatile, the release consists of five original compositions guided by an implicit narrative: an unknown, cataclysmic event befalls an Antarctic research station. As a project, Laggard is a space in which the artist owns his restlessness and allows for a continuous evolution of sound and space, deploying the tropes of experimental live music and bass music against one another.

Inspired equally by the genre-less excursions of Godspeed!, Liturgy and Coil as the sub-heavy deconstructions of Ben Frost, The Haxan Cloak and Mumdance, we also find traces of Ed Rush and the performatively mutant aspects of early grime instrumentals. While also performing as co-frontman of acclaimed four-piece band, Folly Group (So Young/Communion, Ninja Tune), Laggard operates in a different space, finding the overlap between these areas in terms of mood, when “mood” is considered neither an emotional colouration nor decoration upon a structure, but the structure itself. The result is a powerful EP of electronics which is defined by its breadth but bound by one distinct palette, one hyper-specific vision.

A truly immersive experience, 'Permanent Daylight' plunges the listener into the unknown realms deep beneath the surface. A place where soil meets rock meets the unknown, articulating the violent shifts of the earth that is deeper than the earth. Laggard explains: 

As I finished Permanent Daylight, I found that referring to a loose narrative helped guide me through the maze of perfectionist indecision. This story isn’t supposed to be remotely explicit, and I hope listeners draw their own conclusions about the events and their chronology. Implicitly, Permanent Daylight documents some cataclysmic event occurring at an Antarctic research station. I used Unity to create an interactive accompaniment that documents its aftermath. My aims were to embellish the world-building whilst providing a fun opportunity to subvert the linearity of the EP format and allow listeners to experience the release in whatever order they like, in a thematically consistent space. I couldn’t shake the notion that this music had to sound “tectonic”.

Serving as a conceptual knot to bind multiple inspirations and narrative threads, the interactive project depicts a liminal Antarctic desert, devoid of life, where meaning can only be uncovered by contact with symbolic monoliths, each representing and becoming one of the EP's tracks when touched.