"GULP"
CON033
CASSETTE / DIGI
25 SEPTEMBER, 2020
UK (Boomkat) - EU (Conditional) - SEOUL (Ropeeditions) - MOSCOW (Stellage)
WEȽ∝KER (pronounced “WET LOCKER”) present a voyage into the warm heart of computer music on “GULP”.
Messrs Dujat and Beedles dredge up a lucent world of fluctuating sound and rhythm, often narrated by an impossible throat hawking up glottal stops. Their playful approach to composition pushes “GULP” untethered through shimmering corridors, jagged rips of discord and rib-shaking bass weight.
Mastered by Calum Gunn
Boomkat Product Review:
Class debut batch of warped algorithmic IDM from WEȽ∝KER (Wet Locker), aka Manchester’s Dujat and Joe Beedles, sprouting strange new computerised forms for fans of Æ, Lee Gamble, Kindohm, Sote
Presented by Berlin’s intrepid Conditional as “a voyage into the warm heart of computer music”, following the label’s sympathetically skewed turns from Kindohm and William Fields, WEȽ∝KER’s ‘GULP’ marks a leap forward from what we last heard of Joe Beedles, who appears here to spark off new Manchester artist Dujat in a prism pushing style that wickedly tesseracts with their adventurous labelmates while lending a vital streak of strange, computerised “soul” to their flux.
The 9 tracks make a perfectly oddly proportioned body of work that feels like a semi-artificial organism coming to life over the course of the album. From a polychromatic tonal soup ‘velarized’ is laced with pangs of stringy synth emotion and a bodygurning muscular-skeletal structure, replete with with ligaments and glowing flesh. Crucially a throaty voice emerges that comes to haunt the album as a feral variant in ‘razzi’ and the Autechrian techno of ‘(self titled)Chugg’, while their organism seems to grow in emotional intelligence and complexity with the lusher surges of ‘hinterhioj’, and the schizzy switches between alien BM atmosfear and grizzled rhythms in ‘ATLAMS’, and the IDM-as-hyper jazz fusion bursts that close the album, and surely leave us looking out for their next instalment.
One to watch for all IDM electronica dreamers and earnest futurists, then.
