Elika - Always the Light

1. Stay Beside Me 2. We Had It All 3. Waiting Room 4. Count Your Steps 5. All My Wishes 6. Never Touch The Sky 7. No One Gets Lost 8. You & Me 9. Trials 10. A Year Alone

Limited edition of 100 pink haze on clear two-tone 180 gm vinyl LP in gatefold with download coupon.

Where ominous, fuzzed-out textures and energetic, geometric electronics meet, you’ll find Brooklyn’s Elika. The power duo of multimedia artists Evagelia Maravelias and Brian Wenckebach have quietly recorded and released a torrent of adventurous music since 2006, earning recognition the old fashioned way. It paid off. Elika have toured internationally, and were recently handpicked to support shoegazers Asobi Seksu and revered dream-electro musician and producer Ulrich Schnauss, who went on to describe Elika as “an incredibly exciting, radical fusion of shoegaze and electronica elements.”

Their previous effort saw XLR8R raving “every musical note seems as carefully placed as a comma in a novel, and Maravelias’ voice soars through a collection of intelligent lyrics centered on lost love.” Elika’s latest, Always the Light, offers the group’s clearest musical vision yet: Finding a path through [Love] + [Tragedy] + [Defeat].

Always the Light places catastrophic personal events into an ocean of complex programmed rhythms a la Lali Puna and M83, with an emphasis on honey-coatedvocals and washes of distant, dreamy synths and guitars. Nowhere is this more evident than on album lead-off, the instantly hummable “Stay Beside Me,” and the Curve-incarnate anthem “No One Gets Lost.” Providing extra dimension to Always the Light, Elika explores more cavernous, ambient IDM-informed concepts on “Never Touch the Sky,” “Waiting Room,” and “All My Wishes.” The many facets of Elika combine in top form with “We Had It All” – soaring choruses, a celestial crescendo, and visceral electrogaze vibes done right.