Loukeman closes his Sd trilogy with ‘Sd-3,’ 18 tracks of pitch-shifted brilliance that confirm Luke Fenton as electronic music’s most inventive producer
Loukeman has always been asking the same deceptively simple question: what happens to a sound after it stops belonging to itself? On Sd-3, the 18-track closing chapter of Toronto producer Luke Fenton‘s five-year trilogy, released April 24 via September Recordings, that question gets its most complete answer. The record is a patchwork of friends, local heroes, and carefully chosen samples drawn from a decade of pop, folk, R&B, and hip-hop. But where lesser producers let the source material do the talking, Fenton dismantles it entirely, rebuilding it into something that barely resembles where it came from. That process, more than any single track, is the whole point. Fenton’s toolkit is deliberately modest. The Analog Rytm MKI functions as both rhythmic engine and sonic distressor, pushing crunchy analogue drums and fizzing synth lines through a master saturation stage that glues and degrades everything simultaneously. A handful of pitch-shifting plug-ins then go to work on whatever vocal snippets survived the initial pass. The result is a kind of sonic sfumato, a blurring at the edges that makes each lifted voice feel both recognizable and completely reborn. Bryson Tiller and indie folk singer Lomelda occupy the same sonic neighborhood here, separated by nothing more than Fenton’s rendering. It should feel incongruous. It doesn’t.
Toronto, in Full
Sd-3 is not an abstraction. It is a record rooted in a specific place and a specific period of creative grounding. After months of touring, launching his own club night series, and scoring a forthcoming film, Fenton returned to Toronto and made something that sounds like rediscovering a city block by block. Lead single “To the Sky,” co-produced with Jump Source’s Patrick Holland and built around the ghostly, pitch-manipulated voice of Canadian singer-songwriter Georgia Hammer, is the record’s most immediate argument. The accompanying Marco Lee-directed video, shot at a Toronto ice rink with Fenton and his friends playing an improvised hockey game, looks like a home movie and feels exactly like one. The rest of the album operates with similar intimacy. Across tracks like “All I Could Think Of,“ which also draws from Hammer’s voice, and the percussion-heavy “Elktorn,” Sd-3 leans into instinct over technicality, a shift Fenton has been moving toward since the sprawling, tempo-shifting Sd-2 in 2024. Listeners familiar with his production work for A$AP Rocky, PinkPantheress, and Aminé will recognize the same detail-obsessive ear at work here. But stripped of the commercial brief, Fenton sounds most like himself.
The Ingenuity Is the Point
What keeps Sd-3 from becoming mere collage is Fenton’s insistence on transformation. In a 2025 interview with MusicRadar, he was explicit about his philosophy: “I never want the sample to be the whole thing. I want to mask it.” Across 18 tracks, that masking is the active principle. Vocals arrive processed beyond easy identification, stretched and compressed into melodic architecture that serves the track’s emotional logic rather than its source. The album leans more toward electronic dreamscapes and folk-infused ambience than hard structural genre. Listeners wanting pure outsider house will find those moments, especially on euphoric peaks like “To the Sky,” but Sd-3 refuses to flatten itself into a single offering. The trilogy that began with Sd-1 in 2021 ends here with a producer who sounds fully fluent in his own language. With nearly 360,000 monthly Spotify listeners and a London live date at Venue MOT scheduled for June, Fenton is no longer operating as a local secret. Sd-3 is the record that confirms it wasn’t a slow build. It was a deliberate one.
