LIFE GOES ON IF YOU ARE LUCKY by NICO MOTTE

After releasing a beautiful debut 12” last year on Antinote, the man behind the visual identity of the Parisian imprint makes an impressive come-back on the label’s catalogue with Life Goes On If You Are Lucky. While listening to it for the first time, we can already imagine the long nightly conversations held between Nico Motte and his machines that gave birth to this album – the man trying to learn from the machines their most secret sounds. TIP!The album opens with Tema d’Amore, a song numbed in synthetic winds and celestial choirs, which sets a foggy atmosphere that is to encapsulate 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 on 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, carefully peeling off each time layers of synths, under which is hidden the heart of each song. We 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 housy influences seem to loom over I.C.A. and La Figure de Rey (which can somehow reminds us of Larry Heard’s Alien-era). Each song seems to be the result of a long session of orchestration by Nico Motte, composer, arranger andconductor, who has been attributing to each electronic component a specific role to play in these 7 littleinstrumental suites, disturbed from time to time by human elements – a saxophone on Terra d’Amore, the voicefrom Syracuse’s Isabelle on Tacotac – only to reminds us that Life Goes On If You Are Lucky is above all about human fragility.