Veröffentlicht
Aug 9, 2024Veröffentlicht
August 2024
- Brian Leeds revives his Loidis alias for an LP of patient, shimmering minimal and dub techno.
- What a long, strange decade it has been for Brian Leeds. When the Kansas City native first started producing records, he was hailed as the second coming of the lo-fi house boom. On labels like Opal Tapes and Future Times, Leeds released fuzzy, off-kilter tunes that mimicked the gritty YouTube rips of the old house records that were his entrance point into club music. But Leeds wasn't one to be pigeonholed by trends. By the time the lo-fi and outsider house bubble burst a few years later, in the early '10s, he was already onto the next thing.
In 2013, Leeds released Colonial Patterns, a record that marked a pivot for himself and, in retrospect, helped spark an American ambient revolution. The rest of the story has practically become folklore. He followed up with a new album under his Huerco S. pseudonym, 2016's For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have); a murky and dreamy work that has been anointed as one of the best ambient records of the last decade. But all this success had its downside. As Leeds recounted to Bandcamp in 2021, "there was an article in the Guardian talking about the ambient resurgence and it was like, 'Huerco S., ambient for the flat white generation,'" he said. "I don't know, ambient music has just become beats to chill and study to. It's like productivity music, capitalist music."
Since then, he's pushed back against the winnowing of his music by going in different directions. He founded West Mineral Ltd., a label that fuses ambient with everything from punk and industrial to contemporary club (something you can hear in Huerco S. records in particular). Leeds has also cautiously re-approached dance music proper, particularly on his 2018 debut under the name Loidis. Originally written between Colonial Patterns and For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have), A Parade, In the Place I Sit, the Floating World (& All Its Pleasures) and felt like a homecoming; a return to the dance floor as he leaned into simplistic, minimal house grooves and dub techno melodies.
Now Leeds returns as Loidis, this time with an LP filled with some of the funkiest tunes of his career. One Day is a stripped-back record that shows Leeds falling back in love with the art of a simple loop all over again. Across eight tracks, he writes deep, muted and wobbly rhythms filled with the sort of gorgeous dub techno melodicism you might hear on a Shinichi Atobe record. It's a simple and effective formula, but in Leeds' hands, every track is a mini kaleidoscope rearranging into unexpected landscapes with each repetition.
Leeds has described Loidis as his take on microhouse, and One Day continues to riff on that theme. He approaches the sub-genre with subtle differences across the record; there's a slight disco house flair on "Sugar Snot"'s airtight bassline, and on "Why Do," sparkly breakbeat transports us to a sleek, space age-themed lounge. But the basic ingredients never really change: dubby chords, simple, swung percussion and chunky basslines. Working with these ingredients, he slowly tweaks his loops across the extended run times of the tracks, emphasising detail over any of the big and obvious drops pervasive in our era of shorter, faster, louder.
One Day's patient funk and half-cut beauty is most apparent on its two best tracks, "All of Em" and "Wait and See." The shuffling snares and modulating synth line on "All of Em" call back to the mid-'00s when the skippy Perlon school of minimal was slowly morphing into the sleek and swung tech house of labels like Hot Creations. Standout "Wait and See" has the sort of old-school funk that would've been primed for an afternoon at Berlin's Bar 25, with its slowed, minor-key pad progression that staggers across the snare hits every four bars. But the tune isn't overly nostalgic. About halfway through, an undulating chord pattern emerges low in the mix, adding a cinematic flourish of hi-fi emotion.
A quick look around will reveal that Leeds isn't the first person to experiment with these sounds in recent years. There has been a growing resurgence of minimal and dub techno that has been swirling in the ether thanks to artists du jour like Purelink or Kia. Even in this (sort of) crowded field, One Day stands out for just how stately and enveloping it really is. It's hard to imagine another producer who can make a ten-minute track—that's basically a one-bar loop—into something you'd play at a dinner party. But you can also picture your dinner guests' conversations fading as they lean in to try and follow Leeds' subtle chord manipulation on "Lover's Lineaments." With each reiteration, they're ever slightly so different—filtered here, quantised there, moving in and out of time with the drums.
In that same Bandcamp interview, Leeds was asked to describe the obtuse title of his revered 2016 album. His response hedged: "It doesn't really mean anything, but then it kinda does." I kept thinking about this while listening to One Day. On paper, these are simple and functional DJ tools that would work in the more tender moments of the evening (or morning). But with each listen, something new emerges to add further layers of meaning—like the synths that have the elegance of a heron gliding toward fish on "Tell Me," or the almost SoundCloud rap feel of "Why Do"'s pillowy pads. For a producer who's always been hailed as a perennial "innovator" throughout his career, One Day changes tack, swapping revolution for refinement. The results are just as compelling.
Tracklist01. Tell Me
02. Wait & See
03. Tequa
04. Love's Lineaments
05. Sugar Snot
06. Dollarama
07. All Of Em
08. Why Do