LOTO RETINA “Fiction” (Orange Milk)

The new Loto Retina tape from Orange Milk Records’ most recent batch is a sparse blend of digital textures and midi instruments. The album is fairly ambient and changes through moments of glitchy transition. For most of the tracks a single timbre is highlighted at a time rather than there be much layering of the diverse amount of sounds throughout this album. It feels like a majority of the album is immersed in thick swaying digital tones, leaving you unsure of what may come next, or unsure if you may have missed small details while proceeding through “Fiction”. The album breaks into moments of charming computer instrument arpeggios, cognizant of similar electronic records that have been released within the past couple years. “Fiction” is certainly an entertaining listen while remaining mostly minimal throughout, and sounds like Loto Retina’s twist on contemporary ambient electronica.

https://orangemilkrecords.bandcamp.com/album/fiction
https://apothecary-compositions.com/collections/frontpage/products/fiction-by-loto-retina-cassette


-- Lucas Martinez

LOTO RETINA “Fiction” (Orange Milk)

Speaking of Fiction, I’ve just figured it out: Donald Trump drinks the Orange Milk. It’s so obvious in hindsight – an orange drink for an orange man, seeping throughout his presidential body, tingeing his very epidermis. Does everything he touches turn to orange, kind of like old King Midas’s carrot? Maybe we’ll never know. I certainly don’t want to find out firsthand.

To further troll some truly good people at Orange Milk headquarters – and France, essentially, since that’s where Loto Retina is from – why waste a good story on the truth? President Orange Man refuses to do so, and in the spirit of great American storytellers like Mark Twain and Richard Nixon, neither will I. So let’s dive down the rabbit hole of Fiction, Loto Retina’s excellent smorgasbord (or bouillabaisse if we’re being French about it) of smeared electronics and rhythmic spikes, applying a fine sheen of true myth or mythological truth or half-researched slander to the whole thing, shall we?

Actually, it’s less complicated than all that, I just wanted to get you all riled up so you’d be ready for Loto Retina’s output. Because hey, it doesn’t sit still, and neither should you. Well, it sits still sometimes – that’s sort of the beauty of this Logo Retina joint. It almost seems like the French producer has crammed every possible electronic experiment into Fiction just to see where the narrative ends up. But to say that the narrative ends anywhere is wrongheaded – instead, the cassette keeps cycling back on itself the more you listen, and the more you listen the more detail is unearthed from the narrative. Fleeting as that narrative may even be. If there’s any narrative at all.

Or is the narrative everything? Practically. Stretches of ambient tone placidly extend until they’re punctuated by jittering counterpoints, acting as obstacles to overcome or elements to enhance the whole. It’s the great thing about Fiction (and actual fiction), in that the unexpected is always lurking to surprise. And Loto Retina fits within the label’s carefully curated stable, displaying an aesthetic perfected by so many others with an OM catalog number. Thus the narrative is extended, indefinitely, or at least until Orange Milk stops releasing tapes.

So what, then, is the narrative? Haven’t you figured it out? It’s whatever I say it is. My narrative. Orange narrative.

Loto Retina
Orange Milk

--Ryan Masteller