LOLINA - Monopoly Of Mistakes

Lolina is the reincarnation of Inga Copeland, the moniker under which Alina Astrova, in the early 2010s, kneaded together an ethereal pop steeped in hypnagogic textures. Once her collaboration with Dean Blunt and the Hype Williams project wound down, the Russian artist, now based in London, veered toward an emotional terrain built on dissonance and conceptual minimalism: an economy of means that squeezes the most out of a handful of instruments, inflating and desecrating them amid atonality and lopsided rhythms. The most obvious touchstone is Drexciya, for the same synthetic chaos and instruments that fall like acid rain: synths sliding from sci-fi to aquatic realms, bare-bones drum machines and a Roland TB-303 — the very one Phuture turned acid — here pushed to the point of shrillness.

Over everything looms an excessive use of delay, reverb and a whole alphabet of effects that sow anguish and unease. The synthesizers work in microtonality and imperfect tunings, and the sense of estrangement grows amid feedback and rhythms that sound anything but on time; every instrument seems to go its own way, only to end up caught in the same commotion. Not all of the album follows this path, though. Astrova's voice accompanies several tracks, often run through vocoders, in a tired, mocking, at times lascivious tone: the vocals are treated with apathy, like a synthetic instrument feeding a derealized flow, cold to the touch and deliberately indifferent.

With a noisy yet playful approach, and far from the nocturnal lethargy of the Inga Copeland project, "Monopoly Of Mistakes" finds its character in an excess of delayed timing, warped beats and unconventional tunings, almost as if wanting to make itself a manifesto of error. Lolina moves like a rank amateur throwing caution to the wind — first synth, first recording, first vocal take — and that's precisely its most fascinating quality: a closeness to lo-fi that, paraphrasing the little that's known about her, seems to have been adopted as a rebellion against her background as an art critic. Strip away that closeness to low resolution, however, and the risk is a certain self-referentiality which, while not short on brilliant touches, still holds the record back from making the leap into fully cathartic noise.

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10/08/2026