Listening to the music of Spanish musician, filmmaker, and visual designer, Joaquín León (aka, Litorate) is to become entangled in the thought process of an artist keen to guide you on a dreamlike passage to a mysterious, alternative world. A place where the rug is pulled out from under the familiar and your senses are cast adrift in alien waters.
On “Yellow Pool”, taken from his forthcoming EP Staring at the Floor released on 22 June, Litorate brings together realities that are seemingly out of sync. Strange bedfellows in the place they inhabit. Something that is wholly deliberate as he explains. “There are two different worlds dancing with each other in “Yellow Pool”, like having a pajama party in a bunker.”
Opening with a steady, cavernous beat, like the rhythmic pounding of a heartbeat that throbs in your ears, the listener tentatively enter a maze of sound crafted from Literate’s fertile imagination. It’s that beat that acts as the track’s, one, key constant – the thread that allows the listener to navigate the twisting soundscape that he creates. As the track advances, Litorate cleverly obfuscates any sense of space or depth with stretched, dream-like vocals and glitchy IDM sounds. Soon, all sense of clarity and definition give way to abstraction with no sound given time to settle, as the track rumbles on in a state of constant flux.
“Yellow Pool” is a compelling, hallucinatory trip of a track that seems to operate in a parallel space where the tangible and intangible merge.