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LP
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ATN 024LP
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After releasing a beautiful debut 12" in 2014 on Antinote, the man behind the visual identity of the Parisian imprint makes an impressive return to the label with Life Goes On If You Are Lucky. One can imagine the long nightly conversations held between Nico Motte and the machines that gave birth to this album, the man trying to learn the most secret sounds from his machines. The album opens with "Tema d'Amore," a song numbed with synthetic winds and celestial choirs that set a foggy atmosphere that encapsulates the whole album. The music on Life Goes On If You Are Lucky is all about building up toward extreme density and accumulating a tension that is only to be released during punctual epiphanies such as the eponymous track's beautiful break. In order to reach the essence of Nico Motte's music, one needs to go through the album many times, each time carefully peeling off layers of synths, under which is hidden the heart of each song. One can definitively feel that Life Goes On If You Are Lucky is an album composed by a man who has spent years loving and collecting obscure German electronic records, ambient, library, and Italian soundtracks. Nico Motte now blends elements from these different musical genres into his own music, while some more housey influences seem to loom over "I.C.A." and "La Figure de Rey" (which somehow recalls Larry Heard's Alien-era). Each song seems to be the result of a long session of orchestration by Nico Motte, composer, arranger, and conductor, who attributes to each electronic component a specific role to play in these seven little instrumental suites, disturbed from time to time by human elements -- a saxophone on "Tema d'Amore," the voice of Syracuse's Isabelle on "Tacotac" -- only to remind us that Life Goes On If You Are Lucky is above all about human fragility.
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