Deluxe vinyl edition out this week.

So entwined were the form and content of Stuart Howard’s new Lapalux album, that the UK producer has coined an ‘ism’ to try and capture it. While Ruinism may evoke structural decay, the building blocks of the record are far more redemptive, crafting a sonic language salvaged from disintegration.

Using just analogue hardware and real instruments, Howard says he would “record synths and drum hits and re-sample, re-pitch, twist and blend the sound until it was ‘ruined’,” only to stitch them back together again into more recognisable forms.

Unlike the self-consciously “time-stamped” aesthetic of the cover she designed for Lapalux’s previous album Lustmore, art director Marielle Tepper favoured geometric surfaces and colder tones in shaping the visual identity of Ruinism.

Here, the anonymous figure absent from Lustmore is suspended in a future-facing void that references both brutalist architecture and pixelated blocks of data, the rope from which she hangs described by Tepper as “lifeline that dips us into Eternity for our few years to live among the surfaces.”

In her new video for ‘Data Demon’, Tepper takes this a step further, charting that life “among the surfaces” from Kubrick-esque birth and death through a series of abstracted environments as the track swells from orchestral beauty to its paranoid denouement. Watch it below:

“Stuart’s music moves me, sometimes quite deeply,” Tepper says, speaking of the way the images interact with his sound. “The images that came to me when I heard these tracks struck me as both classical and modern. The geometric shapes I used are reminiscent of the “Hard Edge” paintings of Lorser Feitelson, an American artist who was influenced by Henri Matisse. Against the flat un-decorative “architectural” surfaces, I juxtaposed a human about whom we know nothing. Hopefully, the image gives the viewer an impulse toward inquiry and — while listening to the album — resolution.”

Ruinism is released as deluxe and standard vinyl editions on Friday 28th July on Brainfeeder. Click here to order your copy and catch Lapalux on tour at the following dates.

07 Oct The Sugar Club, Dublin, IE –

10 Oct Patterns, Brighton, UK –

11 Oct Headrow House, Leeds, UK –

12 Oct Stereo, Glasgow, UK –

13 Oct Soup Kitchen, Manchester, UK –

14 Oct Village Underground, London UK –

18 Oct Dürer Kert, Budapest, HU –

20 Oct Slakthuset, Stockholm, SE –

21 Oct Loppen, Copenhagen, DK –

24 Oct Paradiso, Amsterdam, NL –

25 Oct DDW-Music, Eindhoven, NL –

26 Oct Simplon, Groningen, NL –

27 Oct Upload, Barcelona, ES –

28 Oct Point Ephémère, Paris, FR –

04 Nov Reflektor, Liège, BE –

07 Nov Stall 6, Zurich, CH –

09 Nov Gretchen, Berlin, DE –

10 Nov Enjoy Jazz Festival, Mannheim, DE –

11 Nov Garaj, Istanbul, TR –