We’re pleased to share the first two singles from GULFF — a remote multidisciplinary collaboration by Owain Kelly and Tod Lippy.
Lippy is an artist, editor, and the founding editor of the arts publication Esopus in Brooklyn. Kelly (NO CEREMONY///) is an electronic musician and composer in Manchester. The project’s self-titled album, coming later this year, explores the cultural, political, commercial, and technological ruptures of the mid–2020s.
This exploration is communicated through the auditory byproducts of late capitalism — collected through a process they term “digital field recording.” Sometimes eerie, sometimes uplifting, and always world-building textural layers of sampled robocalls, rolling newscasts, studio audience soundscapes, electric static, manosphere podcasters permeate the album’s 10 tracks. Phrases culled from these sources inform the lyrics, which follow a narrator experiencing personal loss and isolation while reckoning with a splintered present and expectations for a dystopic future.
For Kelly and Lippy, latency, static, and digital distance are personal: These two collaborators, who live six time zones and nearly 3,500 miles apart, have never met in person and say they never will. The distance between them — and the intrusive and sometimes terrifying marvels of digital connectivity they use to navigate it — are central to their collaborative process and to the final product.
Flipping the script on an industry built on unlicensed access to artists’ work, “the rumo(u)r” samples the soundscape of Al’s physical infrastructure. It leads with a heart-pounding digital pulse overlaid by static and joined by the autotuned urgency of Lippy’s vocals, which sound as if they’re being broadcast from inside the LLM. As the track’s undulating layers compound, Kelly’s production introduces samples from broadcast news reports — the voices of miserable, defeated-sounding people discussing their inescapable local data center noise; an unrelenting, low-frequency hum that penetrates walls and car windows while falling outside most local noise ordinances.
The release follows GULFF’s debut single “error,” which was released in February. Coordinated entirely remotely — almost exclusively over WhatsApp — and built from sampled hold music, robocalls, and automated messages, “error” opens with a field recording captured in Manchester of a street preacher proclaiming his faith over the din of passing traffic. It ends on a customer-service hold line. At first, the lyrics seem to explore the banal, 404 language of forgotten passwords and systems errors (“this field is required,” “this key has expired”), gradually decrypting to share deeper, darker realizations of systemic error. A music video, assembled from distorted stock footage, of the first known internet commercial accompanies the single.
Both songs are drawn from the band’s forthcoming, eponymous, 39-minute LP, which is built on found audio soundtracking late capitalism: robocall voicemails, QVC shopping channel footage, a Meta Al cooking demo layered atop a men’s rights podcast, crowd noise from a Trump golf tournament, and the 2600Hz tone once used in phone phreaking.
The source material is “the auditory byproduct of the time we’re living in,” said Kelly, “including the noise we’re forced to hear and at the same time not supposed to notice.” Made over email, WhatsApp voice notes, and file-sharing platforms, he says the forthcoming album is wholly dependent on digital technology while the duo draws a line at tools that replace human decisions in the creative process, including, for example, generative tools and algorithmic mastering.
The duo’s name comes from the period in early 2025 when the Gulf of Mexico was officially renamed the Gulf of America. Lippy and Kelly, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, were struck by the absurdity of the gesture, and horrified by the speed at which tech giants coalesced to enforce a new reality. Gulff — and the duo’s parallel, indignant quests for human connection — was born of that moment.
