Iso Le

It’s been four years since Lorenzo Montana has graced Carpe Sonum with a solo album, though he surely hasn’t lain fallow: in between that recording and the sheer aural wonder that is Iso Le he found time to collaborate with CS colleague Mick Chillage, as well as Alio Die, and released records for labels such as txt, Psychonavigation, and Projekt. Montana’s canvas of hues and tinctures is vast and seemingly bottomless, which explains the almost painterly compositional methods that make up the complex interplay of sound and vision informing his tracks. He maintains that the fundamental designs for Iso Le lie in his fascination with Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, Yma Sumac, and other dabblers in exotica. While little of Denny or Sumac’s frenzied glossolalia appear to have survived intact within Montana’s own supple grooves, their serpentine synth lines and wildly percolating programming still retains some of those faux-pop artist’s own mercurial aesthetics. Iso Le also benefits greatly from Montana’s innate fascination with video, still photos, and landscape; it’s easy to imagine the topography of a track such as “Tiche” to arise from the humid environments gracing foreign warm worlds and otherwise, or likewise, the kinetic motion within the underbelly of “Vineta” centering its locale inside computer-pixellated greenhouses of splashy primary colors. Echoes of Montana’s kinship to early 90s acid house, an obvious admiration for widescreen flair, and the hyper-drama resulting from the marriage of swift ambient-inflected textures to machine-soldered beat patterns certifies Iso Le as a potential future classic, carrying the torch in the finest post-Fax tradition.