Lotz, Givan

***South African musician and visual artist GIVAN LÖTZ is a shape shifter, an aural savant whose sound projects operate exterior to expectations. This is evident in the casual shift from the sparse, mesmeric meters of his striking debut, the predominantly acoustic troubadour/seer release Easy Now [2010], to the eclectic sprawl of four-disc follow-up Snarl [2013] and its redux version Snarling, borne of sonic miscellany. Highly conscious of the weight of sounds, and the potencies of space separating and shaping them, Lötz carefully employs the very canvas of timed space into his composition. With 2016’s MAW, Lötz embarks on capturing an imagined humanity which exists post reason—its ten songs shed waning light onto and into this post-scientific realm where meaning is unhinged, shedding the loci of lexeme and category. Lyrical perspectives swell and distort, images fuzz into and from view, buoyed on the undulating melancholy, the inconsistent desire of instrumental undercurrents. Enigmatic and beautifully assured, MAW is a cryptic, strangely optimistic travelogue of some alternate human reality. Housed in beautiful reverse-board jackets and pressed on translucent blue vinyl with download.