Ixona [LP] (ONLINE ORDER ONLY)

Ixona is the second LP from Chicago composer Conor Mackey under his Lynyn alias. Crafted primarily using hardware, Lynyn's masterful instrumental electronic compositions draw on a wide range of influences including drum and bass, dub-techno, and acid, immersing the listener in an environment that's both vastly spacious and startlingly intimate. As intricate breakbeats skitter through granular textures and pointillist swarms, this place that is no place assembles itself and glows. A classically trained musician and composer, Mackey has worked alongside a wide variety of collaborators from symphony orchestras to pop singers. He plays guitar in the avant-jazz band Monobody, and has produced records with his Sooper Records labelmates NNAMDI and Warm Human. By day, he writes functional music informed by neuroscience principles for a specialty streaming platform. With his Lynyn project, Mackey drills down into the glittering particulars of finely hewn machine music: how clusters of artificial shards can lock together into living movement.Mackey's work is informed by the dense, propulsive intricacies of IDM artists like Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, whose influence rings brightly over Lynyn's 2022 debut, lexicon (Sooper Records). In the years following lexicon's release, Mackey found himself diving into turn-of-the-millennium minimal dub techno from artists like Pole, Basic Channel, and Deepchord. The album Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records by Jan Jelinek proved especially influential on Lynyn's next moves. "It's very much a sink-into-the-couch kind of record. It's extremely spacious, but it feels very close - very haunting, but comforting at the same time," he says. "There's these little vinyl clicks and pops, and the percussion is built out of micro-sounds, and then you have these planes of pads and loops in the background. On Ixona, I tried to integrate those components into the style I've been working on for years."