ISSUE #10
Information - Galcher Lustwerk
It's Friday, baby. Here's why you should listen to Information by Galcher Lustwerk.
Ghostly International's latest release is an insomnia-induced late night drive through murky side streets littered and forgotten. With the windows down and volume up, this album breathes life into an otherwise empty cityscape.
Information is a lot of things: at times it's sleepy, smooth, cloudy, and other times it's frenetic, restless, and alarming. In other words, Information is dynamic as fuck. It somehow manages to take bits and pieces from several genres, sub-genres, worlds, universes, dimensions and amalgamates them into an album that takes you places you've never thought to enter.
Galcher Lustwerk, photo by Collin Hughes
Its dynamic nature is made evident within the first two tracks. Where Left In The Dark consists of dissonance and dramatic crescendos, I See A Dime is an upbeat chase scene in a heist movie. They couldn't be more paradoxical to one another. But this dichotomy is what makes this album so interesting. Some of our favorites off the album include the clubby beats of Fathomless Irie, Speed, and the smooth bass lines and hip-hop inspired rhythms of Been A Long Night. This album rules.
I love an album that illustrates an artist’s mastery of genre-blending. I love not being able to label an artist with a blanket-statement or an over-generalization. Galcher Lustwerk is challenging, thoughtful…. just listen to it. To be completely honest, I hadn't heard of Galcher Lustwerk until very recently, and I'm so glad to have taken the plunge into his eclectic psyche. Hopefully you’ll dig it too.
Have a beautiful weekend. Love and light.
❤️Mando
AIKON EP - Eprom
Churning, corrosive and fluctuating at an atomic level at all times, the music of Eprom is what you might expect to hear at an underground rave in the smoldering ruins of Chernobyl. From the heart of the Bay Area, Alexander Dennis has lacerated the ears of the world once again with the much-anticipated AIKON EP.
Leading the bleeding edge of west coast bass, Eprom has gained an irreplaceable place in Bump’s Hall of Grime for his radioactive approach to high-octane drum, bass, hip-hop and general sludge crossover. 2012’s Metahuman melted onto the scene with a viscous hybrid of IDM, bass and experimental soundscaping. The next year, Half-Life upped the ante in an intricate series of mechanical mutations and textural tessellations. From the haunted flute-trap samurai swords of Beasts of Babylon to the 8-bit acid of Wizard Island, this album continues to capture the imagination and adrenal glands.
Alexander Dennis - Eprom. Image courtesy of Conversations About Her.
It’s been a long time since his last LP, but we haven’t been without our share of glistening, undulating aural venom. A frequent collaborator with the likes of fellow UC Santa Cruz alumni G Jones, Claude Vonstroke and ZEKE BEATS, and half of the group Shades with acclaimed drum n’ bass producer Alix Perez, Eprom has kept busy.
AIKON is actually the 5th EP to rampage its way out of the studio, and it has razed a trail of distorted, bit crushed reality behind it. While the opener Hope feels a bit indulgent at first with a 2-minute intro, all is forgiven at the drop as the listener’s brain cells instantly re-arrange themselves into the truest form of entropy. If high velocity particle collision wasn’t a genre before, it is now.
Daemon Veil clearly features G Jones - the duo’s joint creations have spawned a sound of their own, born on the Acid Disk EP and honed to a vorpal edge on this wildly revolving progressive drum programming tour de force. This music may be hard to dance to, but it’s a true feat of sound engineering your ears won’t soon recover from.
It’s not all shock and awe though - demonstrating his previously established range, the EP closer Shirow Softworks gives our bruised brain a much needed break in the form of shadowy breaks and atmospheric pads.
