MORE CALM THAN LUNATIC
When I began revisiting the Lunatic Calm archive earlier this year, I assumed I was simply tying up loose ends. There was a body of unreleased and half-finished material that had followed me around for years, and More Lunatic Than Calm Vol. 1 felt like a way of finally giving some of that high-energy, more abrasive work a proper place in the story.
What I didn’t expect was that, once I’d opened that door, another one would quietly present itself.
Running alongside all of that more kinetic material was a slower, heavier, more inward-looking thread that never quite fitted the narrative of Lunatic Calm at the time. Tracks that leaned towards trip-hop, dub, downtempo breaks and atmosphere rather than impact. Alternative versions, early demos, and reinterpretations that explored tension and mood rather than propulsion. They were never rejected as such, but they were always slightly out of step with where the project was pointing publicly.
More Calm Than Lunatic grew out of that realisation.
Listening back now, what strikes me is how recognisable the Lunatic Calm identity still feels, even when the temperature drops. The tension, the unease, the sense of mechanical pressure sitting just beneath the surface - all of that is still there, but refracted through a slower, more psychological lens. Instead of serrated breakbeats built for forward motion, the focus shifts to weight, space, and atmosphere, to grooves that feel suspended rather than driven.
Some of these tracks reveal sides of familiar material that were never really heard before. Safe From Harm drifts between blues-inflected guitar phrases and slow-motion percussion before slipping unexpectedly into jungle territory. Future Left Behind is rooted in detailed breakbeat work, while Area 51 (1998 Dub Mix) reconnects the track with the sense of alien mystery that surrounded it from the outset. Elsewhere, Neon Ray (Lunatics Alt. Mix) leans into heavily treated guitar textures and cyborg vocals, Nobody (Epic Album Mix) settles into darker, more introspective trip-hop territory, and Leave You Far Behind (1995 Original Balearic Demo Mix) offers a glimpse of a very early, very different incarnation of a track that would later take on a life of its own.
This isn’t an album built for immediacy, and it was never intended to be. It’s music for late nights, for quieter moments, for the kind of listening where genres blur and the emphasis shifts from momentum to mood. In that sense, it feels less like a new release and more like completing a picture that was always there, just never fully visible.