What to Do, How to Live?

Swiss resident Lana Kostić is a cellist trained in Western Art Music, a member of the Bosnian diaspora, an experimenter with audio texture, possibly a gender essentialist, and most clearly on this, her first solo album as Lakiko, a theorist of dystopias. She is an astonishing live performer, using loops and distortion to build a complex texture from her cello and voice alone, but even here, with all the resources of the studio at her fingertips, the music retains some of that fearful onstage energy generated by wire-walking without a net.

Many of the songs, for instance ‘Ovce’, ‘Testosterone’ and ‘I Lost My Baby in the Sea’, treat of past, present and future loss and annihilation, to the extent that her song about leaving a homeland, ‘Ovo Je Samo Glad’ (It's Just Hunger), with its rising arabesques and plangent cello roulades seems almost optimistic in comparison. The cello parts are largely drawn from western tonal music, while the voice echoes traditional Bosnian song, both urban and rural. These miniature compositions develop without recapitulations, in a process of organic growth and shift, their textures building by superimposition, or dissipating in a wash of electronic distortion. It's uncomfortable but rewarding listening.