Heart & Soul

Heart & Soul are Léon Lo and Jacob Chelkowski, a pair of experimental musicians who once manned the counters at the now-defunct Esoterik record store, one of Montreal’s best out-there music purveyors. Lo co-runs Natacha Records, a local mail-order boutique label that specialises in electronic noise, field recordings, psych folk and other out there music. Both members have a long history issuing limited-run CD-Rs in those genres. With Pulsar to P.U.L.S.A.R., they’ve gotten together and made an album filled with 11-minute Detroit epics that, somehow, rivals practically every techno/house record to come out of this city since the minimal techno boom of the early part of the decade. Lo and Chelkowski wear their influences on their sleeves and as a result, P.U.L.S.A.R. sounds like Luomo’s Vocalcity as filtered through a heavy Jeff Mills and Underground Resistance obsession. Without ever sounding like a retread, Heart & Soul manage to create a love letter to Detroit and a tip of the hat to the heyday of classic techno.