Lussuria returns with Fresco, the latest full-length from the New York project of Jim Mroz, issued on LP by Hospital Productions. A quieter and more painterly record than much of what has come before it, but no less haunted.

Active since 2007, Lussuria has quietly assembled one of the most distinctive bodies of work within the Hospital Productions orbit. Mroz came to wider attention with the American Babylon series in 2012, then a run of releases that moved between dark ambient, muted industrial, abstract techno and soundtrack-like collage: Industriale Illuminato, Immemorial, the eight-cassette Standstill, Three Knocks, Borgia with Alberich, and his contribution to Prurient's Rainbow Mirror. His touchstones have always leaned toward Italy: the early 80s industrial underground, giallo scores, church music heard through a closed door. The Italian title is no accident.

The record takes its name from the mural technique of painting on wet plaster, where pigment binds with the wall and hardens as it dries. The image is apt. Across eight pieces, each running between four and five minutes, Lussuria works in thin, translucent layers: field recordings, sampled loops, choral fragments and long electronic tones, applied while the surface is still soft and left to set into something fixed and faintly luminous. Melody surfaces more often than on previous albums. Slow harmonic sequences drift under corroded textures, voices appear as residue rather than as presence, and rhythm, where it exists, is a pulse felt through a wall. The label's own text speaks of "portraits of machinery left running" and of "contemporary electronic pathways to lonely fulfillment", and that tension, between the mechanical and the devotional, between the abandoned factory and the chapel, is where the album lives.

Titles like The Fresco Still Bleeds, Fata Scribunda, Faces Remembered In Windows and You Will See The World Again trace a loose narrative of memory and looking: figures glimpsed in glass, inscriptions on plaster, a view from two tables over. It is a record about what remains once the room has emptied.

Among the most refined statements yet from a project that has never courted attention, Fresco is the sound of Lussuria at full maturity. Issued by Hospital Productions on LP, with digital download included.