First they’re tentative, gingerly picking up the homemade-looking cables, passing them from hand to hand, friend to friend, as they crouch on a London basement venue floor. Then the shaky camera catches smiles and the rough audio catches an incremental pileup of glitching, glistening sounds that move in time to the physical contact made between skin and electricity. Pixels scatter across a projector screen, visual realisations of Lucky Dragons’ intimate, intricate interactive electronica.

Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara are the crafters behind Lucky Dragons, an ongoing sound-art project-cum-band that works across contexts, from the Whitney Biennial to outdoor noise shows. Heard live, it’s music in which generative software, knitted textiles and an audience member’s decision begin to feel joyously equal in complexity and approachability and artistry: connectivity is all.
Collating such visually effective and participatory music into something as linear as a 22-track album seems an unlikely move, yet Dream Island Laughing Language, out on Upset The Rhythm, allows the listener to focus away from the spectacle and in
on Lucky Dragons’ miniaturist sonic exotica.
“Most of the original pieces were little looping things that needed to be joined together…Some
of them we would just listen to for months and months until they seemed to stop having beginnings and ends, and changed into something else,” says LA-based Fischbeck of editing process. “It is hard to make just one album, but that’s good because we can keep making more. Also, since most of our process is just listening to things, the making itself feels very flexible and interactive too.”
Are there any tracks on the album that include audience-generated sounds?
“The audience participation sounds were treated just like any other sound – there’s bits you can hear in ‘Realistic Rhythm’ and ‘My Are Singing’ but nothing representing those performances in a direct way… that record comes next! We have been having fun gathering different people’s recordings of shows and editing them together to get this impossibly multiple point of view on things.”
Dream Island’s hypnotic loops are invitingly other, ‘tribal’ in the vague, non-specific use of word that is used to describe so much of today’s DIY and noise music. Yet there’s a complex, alien quality beyond the chants and beats that brings to mind
the synthetic fairylands of Susumu Yokota, the bright distortion of Konono No 1 and the relentless patterns of Philip Glass. The idea of a communal response to and use of technology seems to guide the album, but behind the loops and harmonies one senses a computer game built from scratch by a wilderness hermit with insect helpers – fiendishly hard to play; controlled by sticks, stones and water.

Clipped Gongs
You seem drawn to chiming, gong-like sounds…
“We were trying to make something that sounded loud even when it was quiet, like a signal or a voice that you can hear even if you are asleep or there are lots of distractions. Bells are for alarms, for calling people and ghosts, for messages.”

Morning Ritual
Are you interested in devotional or sacred music? Do you feel that there are ways to make devotional music that is not tied to actual religion?
“Maybe all music is religious, if you think about it in the sense of binding people together. I think there is something very private about this song, though – directed inwards and outwards at the same time. That’s a conflict in devotion I am in awe of.”

My Are Singing
What’s your relationship with improvisation?
“Every track started as improvisation, for sure! We try to make space for play, and for good dialogues…Sometimes this is a process of building up, sometimes tearing down. This track used to have words but even they got improvised away!”

I Keep Waiting For Earthquakes
What presence has dance music had in your life? Often your music feels to me like a miniature or home-made form of techno or trance…
“My friend Kristian [Goodiepal/Gaeoudjiparl] learns to speak new languages – English, for example – by making English-y sounds, speaking ecstatically in right-sounding accent and rhythms until it comes together all of a sudden as legible English. I’ve always loved that moment when things start to come together into something new, and the trance-sense of moving forwards and backwards at the same time – that is so strong in dance music.”

Realistic Rhythm
This makes me think of the compositional methods used by Steve Reich or Philip Glass. Is minimalism an influence on Lucky Dragons?
“We’re really into the sculptor Anne Truitt…she never identified as a minimalist but what I take from her work are the most essential minimalist things: the reasons for being so careful about forms or methods is to let things carry a colour or a history,
or anything so vague and personal and delicate and difficult and unknowable, in such a way that what you see – or hear – is as open and unresolved as it really is: purely, not more or less.”
Wooden Cave Loop
Can you tell me about how you work with others?
“There’s the two of us that made almost all of the sounds on this record, Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara. Sometimes the best way for us to connect with people is through playing together, having a simple dialogue, and having that process open up into something else. Music isn’t an end, it’s just the means, right?”
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