Lippard Arkbro Lindwall - How do I know if my cat likes me? LP

A record that opens with a rendition of a Phil Harmonic track popularised by Blue “Gene” Tyranny and closes with a cover of “At Last I Am Free” (in the vein of Wyatt’s cover) sounds right up our alley!

What lies between these two bookends on the debut LP from Lippard Arkbro Lindwall (yep, Arkbro is the organist Ellen Arkbro, and no, Hanne Lippard is not related to Lucy for those of you looking for art world nepo-baby connections) is an album that skewers the banality and blandness of the digital.

Lippard’s voice and words evoke a the detached presence of an AI chatbot but with slightly more humanity. Words and phrases are repeated with slightly different inflection points, as though there’s a search for the correct inflection to respond to any situation. Throughout she veers from the inane call centre voices (“Your estimated wasted time is…”) to annoying help centre bots to the slop of clickbait articles (“Did you know that a nap could save you life? Did you know that black apples exist?”).

All this is underpinned by Arkbro and Lindwall’s minimal organ backing that at times evokes the digital spaces these voices occupy (one track with a constant notification bing) and at other times offering up meditative slabs of droning organs that lull you further in.

Somewhere between a conceptual poetry work and an art piece in the way that you could spend considerable time parsing these tracks and how densely packed with ideas this LP is (a task for somewhere other than this blurb) - but still incredibly listenable! –Mitch