For the best part of a decade, Lapalux has been one of the most restless producers on the Brainfeeder roster, folding psychedelia and field recordings into beat music that never sits still. Total Reality, Total Chaos finds Stuart Howard returning to where he began. Self-released on 5 March via his own LPLX imprint, it’s a two-part, 29-minute drift into the tape-loop ambient of his earliest recordings—fragments collected over several years, finally allowed to breathe as a single piece.
Total Reality, Total Chaos (Part I) announces its method within seconds: a low bed of tape hiss, a warped piano figure, half-heard voices dissolving into long reverb. Across its twelve and a half minutes the piece tours a series of rooms, each new texture arriving as if through an open door—a drone swelling at the threshold, a dust-flecked loop catching the light before fading away. There’s no percussion to speak of; the momentum comes from the loops themselves, their gentle wobble and phase drift shaping the pace.
Total Reality, Total Chaos (Part II) sinks deeper. Stretching past sixteen minutes, it swaps the first part’s flickering detail for heavier weather: muffled pads, submerged field recordings, harmonics left to decay like damped strings. Around the halfway mark a bass figure surfaces and rolls underneath, and for a while the piece feels like it’s moving somewhere, albeit at the pace of a glacier. The closing stretch strips back to little more than hiss and a single sustained tone—an ending that feels less like a conclusion than an exhale.
Total Reality, Total Chaos won’t be for everyone: it demands patience, stillness and a decent pair of headphones. But it’s a quietly brave release from an artist whose past decade was defined by energy and invention—proof that Lapalux can find just as much detail in a decaying tape loop as in a drum break. Its room-by-room drift rewards the slow listening it asks for, and in these long indoor months that feels exactly right. A deeply atmospheric, welcome return to source.
