Lyra Valenza - Joy Divided

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Lyra Valenza are back for the first time since their 2020 EP, Nightshade Edition, with ‘Joy Divided’, the first single from their debut album, Low Gear No Pressure. Working in collaboration with artist Signe Dige, the Danish duo bring the intricate club construction to life with a video exploring abandoned urban spaces using janky 3D scans. “I love ‘poor’ 3D scans,” explains Dige. “They have a sensitivity and vulnerability that you often don’t see in digital media. Everything can be adjusted and controlled when working digitally, so I truly adore these fractured copies of real places, as it maintains a kind of soul within its flaws.”

“In big cities, we are surrounded by people, causing these urban places to exist in their function for us, Dige continues. “But when abandoned and taken out of their context, these places become a physical space of memories and time.” Winding our way through neglected streets, all crumbling concrete and lurid graffiti, Signe Dige patchworks together a glitched-out assemblage of 3D scans and CGI, following a suspended thread of fluid, as though the track’s glistening synths have manifested as material in virtual space.

“Each space shares their abandonment and connection,” adds Dige, “while we follow a lead all the way up to the top of town, to a line of people waiting to enter a new beginning.” In this way, her patchwork of scans merges domestic environments – bedrooms with doors left ajar, the transient hallways of apartment buildings – into public space, with street-level entrances to subways twisting out into open-plan living rooms and tiled pavements. The result is part collapsing dreamscape, part broken metaverse, a breakbeat-assisted study of digital space and the ways we can inhabit it.

‘Joy Divided’ is taken from the debut album from Lyra Valenza, Low Gear No Pressure, which arrives later this year on their label, Petrola 80. You can find Lyra Valenza on Instagram.