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"You Might As Well Be Dead": How Limbo States of Consciousness Inspired Lapalux's New Album 'Lustmore'

The Brainfeeder artist channeled his experiences with depersonalization disorder into a sophomore release.

British DJ/producer Lapalux (Stuart Howard) sounds a little scrambled when I call him early on a Sunday morning at his friend's apartment in London, where the launch party for his sophomore album Lustmore had just happened. The sound of cats mewing in the background filters through the phone line as he struggles to explain why he decided to move from Hackney in North-East London to Prague—where he knows virtually no one—about two months ago.

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"I wanted to be nomadic a bit, and explore for a little while, so I decided to up and leave," he says, adding that rising prices in London were also a factor. "[In London], everyone's packed like sardines. There's no space, no freedom—I feel like I'm being locked in somewhere."

Howard, who grew up in rural Essex and is currently the only UK artist on Los Angeles label Brainfeeder, seems to thrive on being slightly removed from the epicenter of things. I ask him how this physical distance translates to more conceptual one—how has his music been affected? "I like being alone, I don't like massive social situations," he admits. "Wherever I am in the world, I lock myself away, bury myself in my computer, and mess around until something happens."

"Flying Lotus would say so himself—we [at Brainfeeder] are all bedroom producers," he goes on. "We're the guys who hang back and go inwards a bit, we all just have that about us."

On his second album Lustmore, an eagerly awaited follow-up to 2013's Nostalchic, Howard's signature ingredients are all present: a plethora of samples, an emphasis on texture, and hazy atmospherics, all swathed in layers of bleeding emotion. But Howard says his process this time around has evolved considerably. "Back then, I was experimenting and finding my sound. Now, I've found it, and it's really about trying to bottle it and make it something good. I feel like I've achieved that with Lustmore. I feel like I've cracked the code."

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His first album Nostalchic, Howard says, was "more of an expression of what can be done, sonically—how many layers you can put into a song." There were songs on that first record that contained hundreds of different samples, a crackle here, the sounds of leaves there, a snippet of someone talking. "I was way into layers and experimenting with tape, slamming things that wouldn't work together, and trying to make them work. That was fun back then."

With Lustmore, Howard decided to "make proper songs, instead of these patchworks of different ideas." His process was reductive rather than additive. Going through each track, he thought about which sounds he could take away and have it still make sense, instead of "this crazy, 120 tracks worth of sounds melding together in one song."

In contrast to the sonic precision, Lustmore's conceptual basis is far more ambiguous. Loosely inspired by hypnogogia, the state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep, the whole album channels a feeling of limbo. Howard says he thought of each song on Lustmore playing in an imaginary bar for lost souls—"you know, those shitty bars in the middle of nowhere with that seedy neon glow." Bar scenes from films like The Shining, Blade Runner and From Dusk Till Dawn were particularly powerful inspirations, he says.

Listen to a playlist inspired by lucid dreaming by Lapalux:

Near the end of our conversation, Howard drops a bombshell. "As a kid, I went through stages feeling like I was completely outside of reality," he begins. "Days would go by where I felt completely numb to everything. It's like you could scream and no one would hear you, you might as well be dead." The episodes would "freak the shit me," he continues, but he eventually learned that he was experiencing a condition called depersonalization disorder.

"It feels like you're not living. This has been with me my whole life," he says matter-of-factly.

Lustmore was therefore his attempt to recreate that dissociative realm, and by doing so, maybe work himself out of it. That feeling of limbo, expressed through concepts like the imaginary seedy bar and hypnogogia, is actually also related to an intensely personal experience, and making the album was a form of catharsis. "As long as I can make myself feel happy, it's like a kind of therapy," he says. "Music is about escaping and focusing on something that isn't going to make me feel strange."

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