"Guardwatcher Pt. I builds a deeply absorbing world, one that lingers long after it fades from view and invites another dip the moment you come up gasping for air."
Lb Honne is an artist whose rise amongst the discerning members of the electronic music community can only be described as meteoric. Guardwatcher Pt. I soars majestically at the zenith of this parabolic arc. The record represents Lb Honne’s third full-length LP and is the fifth release on St. Odes, the label he runs alongside Swiss compatriot Ben Kaczor.
It arrives hot off the back of the latter’s own contribution to the label, Sirene, an album that deviated from Kaczor’s usual house and techno avenues onto the desolate backroads of ambient compositions.
In a (somewhat) similar vein, on Guardwatcher Pt. I we find not the lush, effortlessly moveable house strains we have come to know Lb Honne for, but a deep, deep dive into the murkier depths of dub techno and minimal waters.
From the outset, this new shift in sound is made explicitly clear. “Casted” opens in a haze of tape hiss and low-end pad work, a soft bed of sound over which delicate, ringing synth tones flicker into view. Deliberately imperfect in its construction, replete with small rattles, artefacts that feel like mic distortion or degraded sampling, the overall effect is clean, tender, a gentle immersion into Lb Honne’s newly submerged sonic world.
“Heaven GW” plumbs those depths a little further, introducing a subdued kick and those same glassy, ringing synth textures drifting overhead, accompanied by hushed spoken word and faint, horn-like pads that lend the track a quiet majesty. The ever-present hiss acts as connective tissue, binding the elements together, while the deep, bodily low frequencies give the track a sense of weight beneath its otherwise weightless surface.
“Haouis” is straight out of the Prince Of Denmark playbook. Field-recording textures creep in against a distantly pulsing synth – a signal back to earth from the edge of the galaxy. Choir-like pads swell in the background, a canticle to dissolving bliss. On “QL Essay”, the balance shifts and the pulsing signal becomes more insistent, accompanied now by the first real steady kick and rhythm. Skipping mids and tops give the track a first sense of forward momentum through the depths we’re now plunged firmly into, chord swells break the submersible’s windscreen into psychedelic fractals only sharpened by the nicely chosen vocal sample. A highlight of the album, this one, for me.
“Becoming a Stone” edges closer still to something resembling dancefloor functionality. A deeper, more pronounced kick underpins the track, while vocoder-treated vocals blur into the surrounding textures, their metallic sheen echoed in the distorted percussion. An urgent synth line threads through this razor sharp sonic labyrinth, building tension with deft skill. Tackle for circa 4 ante meridian in techno sets establishing a hypnotic bent.
The sense of building momentum is slowed a little in “Dual Matter”, perhaps the album’s closest brush with the house sound Lb Honne is known for. Spiralling pads and layered synths create a lush, enveloping field, while a more pronounced emphasis on hats introduces a faint sense of drive. The kick drops in and out with his now signature finesse: simple, effective, and every time considered. The sequencing here is particularly strong, effortless movement conjured out of psychedelic darkness. Lovely.
“Misuse” leans more overtly into dub techno’s established vocabulary and back towards that POD sound – if Squidcall was indeed calling out for something, this might be its reply. Aqueous, subterranean synths ripple beneath dark choral strains, while a hat pattern sketches out a skeletal groove. Two tunes just crying out to each other in the midnight zone, echoing across the decade that separates them.
On “By the Sea”, the human voice returns with a good dose of northern grit. Flat, no-nonsense descriptions of dull surfaces made bright, reflective, with a new sense of depth. Industrial monoliths become soft, reflective light shows on the surface of the sea. Lb Honne points, perhaps, to the internal escape that the world he builds can provide, the rich world unlocked by the spiralling psychedelia of the music he presents.
Closing track “Ohh Loop” draws the record into a final, flickering state. Skippy, crunchy rhythms intertwine with dark, psychedelic bleeps and bloops, offering a sense of movement, playful in its detail, but still rooted firmly within the album’s shadowy aesthetic.
Across its runtime, Guardwatcher Pt. I occupies a liminal space between techno, ambient and minimal sensibilities. In prioritising texture, atmosphere and slow, cumulative development, Honne’s shift away from more fluid, dancefloor-ready material feels like a deepening of his work to date, and it’s an incredibly welcome listen. Its pleasures are incremental, revealed through murk, hiss, the careful balancing of structure and dissolution, Guardwatcher Pt. I builds a deeply absorbing world, one that lingers long after it fades from view and invites another dip the moment you come up gasping for air.
Guardwatcher Pt. I is out now via St. Odes as a vinyl-only release. Buy your copy from Inverted Audio Record Store.
TRACKLIST
A1. Casted
A2. Heaven Gw
A3. Haouis
B1. Ql Essay
B2. Becoming a Stone
C1. Dual Matter
C2. Misuse
D1. By the Sea
D2. Ohh Loop