Ideas Flotantes

HALLUCINOGENIC SIGILS WAFTING INTO A FOG OF TRANSCENDENT REPOSE

For his third full-length release on KRAAK – and first LP since 2016’s Hacia la luz – Bear Bones, Lay Low digs his probes into the serene chaos of his floating ideas. The eight tracks that make up Ideas Flotantes speak to an ineffable expanse of plausibility where sensorial matter suggests itself, peeks out from under glowing foliage and moving stones, and flares out into the murk and fluorescence of auricular biospheres. Sonic elements disjoint and bounce off each other, shedding bits of scintillating detritus that settle in and just as soon evaporate into an hazily melancholic semi-slumber. Imagine Jean Jacques Perrey’s Prélude au Sommeil emerging from the thick sweetness of tropical malady and you start to get the picture.

Composed at the height of confinement days and during the last moons of the iconic Drogenhaus era, Ideas Flotantes provides a lulling, inquisitive counterpoint to the tribal-leaning cosmic psychedelia that the Bear Bones has been feeding our orbit these recent years. Nonetheless, a recognizable core remains, with entrancing synth ruminations and a deeply melodic intuition serving as tools for exploration, giving way to resonances that thrive like a beating heart until their pulsating tapers off into the uncharted void. But even the void contains hallmarks: the lurking amphibian presences in Renacuajo, semi-terrestrial yet sybilline; Uzumakia’s spirals closing in and unfurling in a dance of claustrophobic emboldenment; temples of the uncanny inhabited by teetering monks in La mano morada ~ in sum, a teeming multitude of auditory critters dwelling in lacunas of incidence, laid bare to discover and to befriend. Floating though they may be, the ideas sparked by this solemn journey pinpoint to the larger truths that the seeker will always seek, with the embedded understanding that most all truths will never be fully grasped.