Working under the alias Loukeman, Toronto’s Luke Fenton makes fuzzy, fractured beats that sound like they’re breaking apart at the seams. Lifting vocals from pop, indie and R&B, Fenton runs his samples through pitch-shifters and saturators to gift them with ghostly textures, before setting them against glowing synth lines and crunchy analogue drums.
There’s no blueprint to Fenton’s music; his latest project, Sd-2, takes in tempos spanning hip-hop to drum & bass, with a few fruitful detours into beatless ambience and guitar-led instrumentals along the way. The thread that ties the tracks together is Fenton’s talent for recontextualizing unexpected samples through his truly unique take on effects processing, which makes everything sound beautifully degraded.
We caught up with Loukeman to hear more about the making of Sd-2.
How did you first get involved with electronic music-making?
“I started in university. My best friends and I just started making music. My laptop broke and I had FL Studio on it, so I got a new laptop and got Ableton, and from then on I was hooked, and I just started making beats every day. .”
Tell us about the background to the new project.
“The firstwas very much just a mixtape. It was a compilation of beats. I was flipping random samples and making random stuff. I made it within a month, mixed it and I didn’t even get it mastered. I uploaded it, and it chilled for a while and some songs got picked up. That was unexpected.
