New Music From GULFF

GULFF is 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 explores the cultural, political, commercial, and technological ruptures of the mid–2020s 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, and manosphere podcasters. 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.

Flipping the script on an industry built on unlicensed access to artists’ work, new single “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.

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