Raymond J. Lustig has shared ‘That’s The Moment,’ the first taste of his forthcoming solo album ‘Welcome’, out November 20th via Respirano Records.

It arrives only a few months after ‘SEMMELWEIS’, Lustig’s large-scale song cycle based on the life of Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis. Anyone coming directly from that record might be surprised by ‘That’s The Moment.’ Here, Lustig turns toward something closer to psychedelic pop and alternative rock, although his instinct for unusual arrangements hasn’t gone anywhere. The song was made with Chaitanya Sangco during an intensive weekend of recording. Rather than beginning with a finished arrangement, they amassed sounds: acoustic and electronic instruments, voices, guitar and prepared harpsichord among them. The finished track seems to have emerged gradually from what they recorded. There is something uneasy running underneath it from the beginning. Voices gather almost imperceptibly before the song opens up, while the repeated chorus has the strange insistence of a mantra. Lustig describes the feeling behind it as one of sensing menace somewhere nearby, which fits the song better than any straightforward narrative explanation would.

As he explains: “Chaitanya Sangco and I sequestered ourselves for a whole weekend and recorded dozens of acoustic and electronic instruments in all different ways, as well as our voices on the mantra-like chorus. What we made came from a feeling we were both having of a lurking menace about us in the world. ‘That’s The Moment’ emerged from that trove of audio. From an opening of guitar and prepared harpsichord, murmuring vocals build, leading to an explosion that opens up a micro-tale of psychedelic peril.”

His background is unusually broad. Before concentrating on composition, Lustig worked in molecular biology, studying cell division and polarity. He later completed his graduate work at Juilliard and has written orchestral, chamber and music-theatre pieces, while increasingly moving into less easily defined territory. In recent years that has included Manicburg, the New York band he formed with Italian musician and producer Luigi Porto, whose music draws together post-punk, psychedelia, electronics and theatrical pop.

‘Welcome’ pushes Lustig’s solo work further in that direction. He describes the album as circling around anxiety and fear in a threatening world, with each song approaching that feeling from a different angle.

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