New Music From GULFF

GULFF is a 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 first offering is a self-titled album exploring 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, and manosphere podcasters permeate the album. 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.

RIYL: Negativland, The Books, Broadcast, Oneohtrix Point Never, The Residents, Holly Herndon, NO CEREMONY///, Clark

FCC Warning: Track 4 “too late”

Recommended Tracks: Track 7, “neighborhood(u)r,” Track 1, “the rumo(u)r,” Track 5, “error”

Goes For Adds 9/29