Famed US label picks up on veteran Glasgow duo

Naum Gabo have been discuseesing the first release by the Glasgow duo on the legendary DFA label, a dark ambient album called F.Lux.

Naum Gabo are Glasgow’s Jonnie Wilkes (one-half of venerated DJ/producer/party promoter/record label duo Optimo) and James Savage ,a prolific mastering engineer who works regularly with labels including Optimo Music, Palace of Lights and Invisible Inc.. F.Lux was written and produced entirely by the pair at their Glasgow Hottrax Studios, and mastered by James, naturally. The album’s cover art is by cherished Scottish painter, Andrew Cranston.

Although not completely unrelated to the duo’s past endeavours, F.Lux is darker, heavier, more comprehensive and more enveloping than anything they’ve done before – something they attribute to altered working methods and an unhurried, pressure free schedule, as Wilkes recounts:

“It was 20 years that we’d been meeting up religiously on a weekly basis to work on music so when we were banged up at home in March 2020 we naturally found ways to fill that void, maintain the collusion and began sending sonic doodles to and fro. Layering/reducing ideas back and forth with the minimal resources we had at home. A hodgepodge of analogue sequences, drum programming, sampling, sound design, field recordings along with experimental processing.

“The characteristics and sonic qualities of the sound took precedence over the need to have tracks completed. No dogma. If anything, denying ourselves the security of anything that had come before or may lay ahead in our work.  A year or so later these Glasgow/Bathgate smoke signals became culminated in the album as you hear it.”

“Accepting that sound is affecting us all the time is very curious indeed; that we are required to live with it constantly. That’s a lot to consider then when it comes to making ‘music’”, says Wilkes. “A consistent source of fascination for us are sounds that sit with some difficulty beside one another, but once heard just have to be. A perversion, misapplication, accident, call it what you will, but we see this inelegance as OK.”

Pre-order your copy of F.Lux, out on March 8 by clicking here