Pyur - Lucid Anarchy

The Quietus

It’s a misconception that experimental music has to be viewed academically to be appreciated. When artists get tagged with the ‘experimental’ label (see also: IDM), some listeners are put off by the highbrow packaging. While us weirdos might enjoy writing rambly philosophical pieces about the thematic background of a record. Others see it as homework. In reality, boundary-pushing music is some of the most instantly affecting and emotional music there is. Pyur’s third record Lucid Anarchy proves that.

The Berlin-based electronic artist Sophie Schnell makes music that puts feeling and texture first. Her compositions bloom from nothing. The full dynamic range is used. What at first sounds minimal and breathy becomes maximal and overwhelming. There are some traditional instruments heard – a human voice, or a few piano notes – but they melt into abstraction. Her music is clever and refined, with its detail-rich sound design and slow-motion melodicism, but it never feels studied. Instead, it’s the sound of something natural and inevitable spilling out.

Lucid Anarchy is her most emotion-forward offering so far, thanks to her clear and purposeful harmonic choices. Tracks like ‘Night / Sea’ and ‘Windings On a Charged Wave’ have hearty melodic hooks despite their looseness. Layers of skin-tickling percussion and digital manipulation are elegantly placed to emphasise and colour the core of these songs in new ways. She retains the brashness of past material, too. ‘Moving, Not Knowing’ is based around a squelchy two-note arpeggio that uses its roughness as a source of contrast for the beauty around it.

Pyur’s last record, Oratorio for the Underworld, was nebulous and haunting by comparison, more willing to hide its intentions behind a smokescreen of uncertain resolutions. Here, there’s an openness to her production. Though the title Lucid Anarchy is about finding comfort and meaning in uncertainty, you know you’re in a safe pair of hands.

Still, Schnell finds ways to shift expectations, like the closer, ‘Nectar’. We begin with a rare percussive focus, where rigid toms repeat in an upward climb. Three minutes in, they disappear. We’re dropped into a melancholic space, forced to adjust for a moment.

The lack of a tight climax on these songs might frustrate, given they build with such intensity. Admittedly, the record is most exciting in moments of agitation. Ambiguous conclusions on songs like ‘Ripples, Inner Outer’ can feel more underwhelming than reflective. Still, there is plenty of purpose in this more fluid approach.

Lucid Anarchy was made during a period of upheaval for its creator. Schnell found herself living between Berlin, the Jura mountains, and a small fishing village. The jumbled mix of experiences and locations inspired the vastness of this record. But you don’t have to hear the backstory. You can feel it.

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A Closer Listen

Lucid Anarchy is an album in search of itself.  Unlike Oratorio for the Underworld, it offers more textures than beats, more questions than answers, and more experience than clarity.  Pyur sets out on a path of self-discovery but instead finds awe.

Everything is open to interpretation, beginning with Pyur’s own cover.  Is this an image of a maelstrom in the sky, or a terrifying angel, a seraph come to witness or to judge?  The titles, too, suggest opposites but are often skewed: lucid is not the antonym of anarchy, but it could be.  The same is true of “Night / Sea,” while the punctuation of “Ripples, Inner Outer” affects the read.

The album does, however, proceed from abstraction to form, although it is not completely abstract at the start or completely structured at the end.  Instead, the gradual addition of rhythms and beats suggest the coalescing of knowledge or the forming of identity.  Sometimes wisdom is learning which questions to ask.  The liner notes list “a period of personal and emotional upheaval” and an ultimate inability to know one’s self fully, despite moments of connection with a chaotic universe.

One yearns for these signals to break through: glimpses of meaning, represented in short segments of accessibility.  Opening tracks “Delta” (a river that divides into before flowing into the sea) and “Intersections” suggest diverging paths, mirrored by a fracturing of sound.  “Ripples, Inner Outer” begins with a clock beat pulse that also splinters, like an insight too great to grasp for more than a moment.  The first obvious growth spurt occurs at 1:51 of “Night / Sea,” as percussion contributes the promise of lucidity.  Yet this too is a trick of the ear, ending precisely 90 seconds later; Pyur’s title is not a single word, but an acceptance of dueling forces.  The center of “Azur Wake” also toys with club sensibilities before relaxing the beats and drifting back into a more nebulous form.

Such moments increase as the album continues, although never throughout an entire track; the energy increases in the first two-thirds of “Windings on a Charged Wave,” then the second half of “Moving, Not Knowing” and the first half of the closing “Nectar.”  In these segments, Pyur sounds fully alive.  Has she found what is been looking for, or at least a framework in which to place her questions?  The struggle is apparent, as is the progress; she has not tamed chaos, but made peace with it, content for now with lucid anarchy.  (Richard Allen)