Roe Deers - Voodoo Gym

April 9, 2021 - Turbo Recordings

After a brief spiritual recharge during the early months of the new year, our beloved Turbo Recordings has emerged fresh and refreshed, ready to shine a spotlight into the Long Dark of Existence. The soft rays of radiation fall gently onto Roe Deers, née Liudas Lazauskas, a Lithiuanian native and powerhouse of the capital Vilnius’s dance scene. The Long Dark has been especially long and dark lately, fully primed and ready for the next chapter of dance enlightenment to begin. Lazauskas cares not for chapters or enlightenments, choosing instead to continue on his own path; a Penrose staircase, forever upwards and onwards.

Lazauskas opens with the closing of eyes. ‘Voodoo Gym’ is a time for meditation. We follow suit, confidently closing our eyes as well. But this is no self-guided meditation. We are meditating through the artist, aware of his cognition but unable to form thoughts on our own. Lazauskas takes the captive audience through the dark corridors of his mind. Focus blends with inspiration as countless rooms open their doors to reveal sound bytes and percussive snippets à la The Magic School Bus s1 ep8 “The Haunted House.” A sick bassline infects Lazauskas’s brainwaves, and ours by proxy, sending us further into the depths towards ‘Bottom Monster.’ The thirty seconds of intro is all the respite allowed before tensions rise again, fueled by a pair of dirty synthlines gyrating against the napes of our collective necks. It’s a fantasy-land, a perfect representation of the sweaty dance chambers we’ve all had to form and hold onto in our imaginations for over a year. 

The meditation party is propelled forward again. After another lengthy turntable-friendly intro period, ‘Jackpot in Space’ bears its booty-bouncing teeth. Lazauskas lets a synth drone drift off on its own, letting it think it has achieved a level of autonomy, while never letting go of the strings. There is an air of delicious smug confidence that permeates these tracks; Lazauskas has a mastery over loose-fitting percussive loops and dissonant melodic twitches that flow in and out of cohesion, all the while teasing narrative and explorative depth behind a level of absolute control. ‘Moody Express’ takes a turn through the neon halls of funky and jazzy and talk-boxy, hinting at a more luminous world beyond the dark walls of the mind. 

Voodoo Gym as an experience feels introspective, but when it’s over we feel like we’ve learned more about the artist than ourselves, enough to confirm that we would all like to be a little less like ourselves and a little more like the artist. Lazauskas pushes the limits of dance-emulsion, letting elements feel out of control or on the verge of random but never straying from the tried and true Equation of Dance that exists in each of us. These tracks are putting in work in our minds and will undoubtedly put in the work in our future realities. 🍍