Fuka Lata

For a mere duo, Fuka Lata have much to offer listeners. The vocalist and producer LeeDVD and the guitarist Mito Day form this band. On this year’s album Saturn Melancholia, they were backed by the British saxophonist Ray Dickaty (who played with Spiritualized, amongst others) and the jazz trumpeter Kamil Szuszkiewicz. Saturn Melancholia is full of very rhythmic, but not severe, electronics. The heavily processed female vocals embedded in looped rhythms, stretched murmurs, clicks and hums build a kind of trance, a point of passage to another reality. The cosmically anchored compositions by Fuka Lata don’t have anything in common with songs. These compositions bring to mind dub, where the rhythm is determined by scarce, regular beats, melodies are diffused in reverbs, and the multiplied and stratified percussive elements seem to have been overheated and later chilled. The duo Fuka Lata specializes in musical landscapes that have a rarefied atmosphere. The artists didn’t lie when they described their album with these words: “Can you imagine Saturn without its rings? A lonely yellow ball in space. No planets around. No gravitation”. These atmospheric, emotional compositions could serve as ideal accompaniment to mysterious silent films from the interwar period.