UIQ

Emma DJ

g0drm2

UIQ

Pillar of the Parisian scene, Emma DJ presents a second album/mixtape for Lee Gamble’s UIQ label, a 28-track reading of Tik Tok-ready rap featuring a brace of naif melodies embellished with emosh autotune and starring Rainy Miller, Shyweek, Simo Cell, Tmongo, Torus, Yves Ciroc, Cambyse, Cxoxc, Elliotrdv, Eugène Blove, Low Jack, Nonoekichii and more. Back in rap mode after a bout of industrialised grime with L.I.E.S., the prolific producer doubles down on the ‘Godrime’ mixtape for UIQ with a new 72 minute set of acrid, syrupy wooze and strung-out emoting carried by puckered hooks and abundance of gobs on each cut. It’s the sound of smoked-out Parisian bedrooms and backseats, smudging the face of mimetic pop-rap into subtly distorted gurns with a contemporariness reflecting mutant rap’s modern hyper-reality. Like its predecessor, it avoids the concréte clatter of Emma DJ's L.I.E.S. material and instead focuses on airy, inebriated radio trap - the kind of dilated post-sample culture synthetika that lashes Drain Gang with Lil Uzi Vert and Metro Boomin with PNL. Glued together haphazardly but sculpturally, the tape sounds like a heavily stepped-on snowball of the last decade of post-DatPiff iPhone rap, all emosh supersaws, clipped chop snares and downcast AutoTurnt mumbles. Emma DJ holds it together because he balances a passion for the spidery tendrils of localised rap with a robust connection to the Parisian scene; each additional voice helps him assemble a pixelated picture of inebriated DIY shows, low-NRG afters' and stagger'd walks home thru neon-lit Parisian side streets....

Nkisi

7 Directions

UIQ

NON Worldwide co-founder Nkisi rolls out an instant modern classic with ‘7 Directions’ for UIQ. A masterful debut album informed by African Cosmology and Congolese rhythms, it’s aesthetically comparable with music ranging from Æ’s ‘Incunabula’ to The Connection Machine’s ‘Painless’, Lee Gamble hyperprisms and William Bennett’s Cut Hands, but ultimately it’s peerless in the (hyper) modern field... Specifically referencing the writings of Kongo scholar Dr Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau and the African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo, ‘7 Directions’ is offered as a gateway to hallucinatory mindstates via aerobic mysticism. Ultimately it is focussed on the idea that rhythm has the capacity to modulate and experiment with conditions of perception, and to disrupt predetermined expectations, and does so in the belief that new movements of energy can determine collective behaviour and generate new possibilities for knowledge production and dissemination - perhaps even supposing rhythm’s potential for premonitory pattern recognition. We fully concur with Nkisi’s notions about dance music’s potential for transferring and conveying energy, both negative/ecstatic, abstract/intuitive, so it’s a rare pleasure to hear her limn those ideas so beautifully, effectively and open-endedly thru ‘7 Directions’. In each part she inimitably unlocks and retunes the body’s rhythmic anticipation with breathless batteries of incredible polyrhythms that arguably make the majority of Western dance styles sound like rote line dance music for folk with little imagination in their bones. In each direction Nkisi’s drums writhe and rattle in a simultaneously ancient/futuristic style - ancient because they explicitly reference percussive traditions way older than...

Zuli

Terminal

UIQ

“Electronic prism-pusher Zuli explores themes of identity, both hyperlocal and global, in ‘Terminal’; his singular and definitive artistic statement for Lee Gamble’s UIQ.   Expanding his sound to encompass melancholic ambient composition and grimy rap from prominent MC, Abyusif, as well as newcomers Abanoub, Mado $am and R-Rhyme, and mysterious Mecca-based vocalist MSYLMA, ‘Terminal’ finds Zuli drawing upon a multiplicity of personal experiences in a concerted effort to upend preconceptions of what an Egyptian artist “should” sound like.  In Zuli’s own words: “In a world that feels like it’s regressing into tribalism, many of us who don’t fit into any one specific group identity feel sidelined at best. When people talk to me, whether it be the press or peers in the scene I operate in, I am often approached with a preconceived notion of pretty much everything from my influences to and tastes to my politics and lifestyle, solely based on my nationality. It is a caricature that has proven very marketable, one that makes for a more interesting read/conversation/booking, apparently, than a multi-faceted (hence unique) human personality just like each and every one of us.” Across the 14 tracks of ‘Terminal’, he smartly unpackages and dissolves those lazy pre- or misconceptions by forming his own, syncretic musical language. Meshing the rhythmic grammar of hip hop and club styles with the Arabic dialects of his MCs and vocalist and the free syntax of ambient music, he dissolves and undermines outmoded ideas of exotification, presenting an image of...

rkss

DJ Tools

UIQ

rkss makes contemporary computer music, exploring the politics and aesthetics of club culture, technology and queerness — ‘DJ Tools’ is made entirely from a sample pack called 'EDM Kicks Vol 1' - rkss has manipulated the packs ‘off the shelf’ sounds using computer music processing techniques and formed it into something perhaps not wholly anticipated by the packs creators..  “DJ Tools was recorded at a turning point for me as an artist & person as I came into the aesthetic and social limitations I was finding in contemporary dance culture. I started to change how I thought about myself as an artist in terms of changing the way I created music, instead of writing the music at home and later arranging it for the club, I started writing music for live performance first. I wanted to be able to arrange these pieces/excerpts/sketches live. I was beginning to re-arrange how I thought about my gender / self and placing, exploring and finding the language to point to my sense of difference as a trans person. DJ Tools was where I began to formulate my own relationship to club culture as a mostly sober, transgender person, what version of club music did I want to engage with in that social space? Fluid, dynamic and reacting to audience. Highlighting the social. Sharing & connecting through my difference rather than erasing it.” - rkss

Sim Hitchins

Vantablank Stare EP

UIQ

Lee Gamble’s UIQ welcomes Sim Hutchins to the hyperprism with Vantablank Stare, an insightful A/V project born from a personal discontent with the vacuous repetition of 24 hour rolling news coverage, and presenting a critical response to, in his own words; “the daily bombardment of news items on corruption and our societal inclination to be ‘in the know’ about current affairs”.   Aesthetically, the EP’s three tracks of roiling post-junglism and fractured dub techno tessellations most acutely recall the tumbling designs of N1L and Lanark Artefax 12”s but, its conceptual drive is closer to Sam Kidel’s Disruptive Muzak in the way it extracts from current socio-political issues ubiquitous to nearly all our lives, and especially for anyone living in the UK right now.   The dissection of its subject is most literal in the accompanying video, presenting stark, stock CGI representations of those coldly contemporary news studios that we’ve all seen too much of in recent times, with accompanying banners ribboning fake “statements” and “breaking news” that, on first glance, are almost indistinguishable from the ‘real’ thing, yet coolly subvert the text to their own end, exposing its function as a tool for public control.  However, the music is less literal and more elusive, abstract and metaphorical, using samples of radio waves, covert signals and intercepted E-Comms as the raw material for an impressionistic tussle of invisible forces, translating as head-stretching recursive phase shifts and disembodied jungle structures in Some Men (you) Just Want to Watch the World Burn...

Renick Bell

Empty Lake EP

UIQ

The angular, abstract funk of Renick Bell’s Empty Lake EP for Lee Gamble’s UIQ is perhaps exactly what you might expect from a pioneer of algoraves - a forward-looking union of live coding and rave music that’s currently taking computer boffins out of the studio/bedroom and placing them in real, physical spaces to hear what happens. To date, beyond the live algoraves, Bell’s music has mostly been contained in his chaotic Fractal Beats series on soundcloud and thoroughly unpackaged in academic papers on live coding and pragmatic aesthetic theory. With the Empty Lake EP he offers a refinement of the ideas in Fractal Beats, skilfully teasing out a tangle of post techno pulses, shards of catty ballroom house, hardcore kuduro and filigree footwork patterns twisted into shimmering, convulsive contours and unstable, scattered melodies.In an obvious sense, his sound is heavily compatible with the recent Lanark Artefax 12” on UIQ and certainly finds sympathies with Lee Gamble’s most obtuse aspects, but it also feels more feral, overgrown that either of those artists’ work in a way that relishes his software’s capacity for creating wild new junctures of sound that effectively re-program his and our brains in real time while we’re listening.From the elasticated, recoiling swang of Trying To Control The Four Winds to the Patten-like melt of The Well and the fluctuating states of Surface Waters Flow Together, there’s a level of detail to these tracks which will become apparent on first listen, and which will continue to baffle your sense...

S Olbricht

ZZM EP

UIQ

Four tracks of rolling, punch-drunk ambient techno from Lee Gamble’s UIQ label. RIYL Huerco S, Actress, Lee Gamble...  Budapest scene lynchpin, S. Olbricht debuts on Lee Gamble’s UIQ label with a sweetly compatible quartet of chiming ambient techno and woozy house trax in the wake of his latest Lobster Theremin LP, For Perfect Beings.  As the label’s 4th release after 12”s by N1L, Zuli, Lanark Artefax - also counting the recent launch of Lee G’s UIQ Inversions series, the ZZM EP rolls deeper into those lip-smacking, thizzing ends of the night with a key subtlety and firm-but-light touch that works so well on tenderised minds and bodies.  These tracks rank among S Olbricht’s most seductive and hypnagogic. From the Terence Dixon-like harmonic suspension systems of 137x3brk and the ruddier, out-of-reach rumble and flickering rim shots embedded in the chasmic headspace of Ktyring on the A-side, thru to wire-woolly texture and glowing chord filaments laced into the 110bpm slug, J_UC.  Finally, the gracefully tilted techno elevation Floa1, which could easily be mistaken as the work of label boss Lee Gamble, closes the rotations of side B in fine style...

Lanark Artefax

Glasz E.P.

UIQ

Lee Gamble's UIQ label returns with the debut 5-track EP from 22 year old Glaswegian Lanark Artefax, whose precarious ballistics place a queered sidespin on Lee Gamble’s own dancefloor discombobulations, highly recommended if you're into Autechre, Brood Ma, Rustie or Gabor Lázár...  The Glasz EP is a trippy, time-warping suite feeding complex rhythmic structures and bent club blueprints thru meticulous FX contouring, re-shaping conventional shapes to create something almost gaseous in form. It's a sound rendered most explicitly in the title track and the lush, polymetric gyroscopics of All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, or with more elusive, prism-pushing aspects of cone-buckling subs and interlaced choral frameworks in Remainder I that sound like ‘ardcore filtered to plasmic, quantum jelly.  Glasz opens the other side with a curdled take on trap, oozing queasy stripes of melody and rave stabs on a brittle, percolated rimshot/snare, before Phasze (s_h_i_f_t) diffuses grime in an aether fantasy of sci-fi romantic pads and scything, elastic drums, and Virtual Bodies glitches a sort of shatterproof, neon-coloured chamber music.  Killer stuff once again from this firing, singular label.

Lee Gamble

Chain Kinematics

UIQ

New EP from Lee Gamble, the first release on the UIQ Inversions series dedicated to his own productions. Comes with Artwork by Dave Gaskarth, who has also made videos for two tracks on the EP. Lee Gamble strikes from the void with Chain Kinematics; the first release on his UIQ Inversions series - exclusively reserved for personal productions, and intended to run parallel and perpendicular to UIQ proper, which has heavily impressed with early 12”s by N1L and ZULI since emerging in 2015. This is Lee Gamble upping the dynamics and heading into new realms at the intersection of jungle tekno ballistics and ambient dimensions, providing UIQ with its most forward, heady, and hard-to-classify material, and possibly best representing the delirium and oneiric appeal of Gamble’s incredible DJ sets. Dovetailing the artist’s interests in astrophysics, geometry and the dancefloor’s mechanical systems, Chain Kinematics presents four powerful studies for bodies in motion and students of the future; bending time, light and space between 004’s mutated percussive dimensions and the thizzing warehouse wormholes of For Infernomatics, the suspended proprioceptions of Kinematics’s emulation of a night flight thru Gamble’s glittering grey matter, through to the helter skelter torque of Cnull, ending proceedings with what sounds like a bombed-out building site and a helicopter flying past... Hear for yourself; they’re undoubtedly some of Lee Gamble’s strongest, layered and developed dancefloor productions, awaiting your immersion and collision with compatible trajectories and objects from all quarters of the ‘floor and beyond.

Zuli

Bionic Ahmed EP

UIQ

Lee Gamble’s UIQ label introduces the hypnotic, rugged and cerebral solo debut by Cairo multi-instrumentalist, producer and sound artist, Ahmed El Ghazoly a.k.a. ZULI, with the Bionic Ahmed EP. Ghazoly is a co-founder of VENT, a music-space-turned-club-night in Cairo with a sister night and record label based in London, and he has also been a prominent figure in Egypt’s underground music scene for almost a decade now, ZULI has conceived a unique sound straddling slow techno and jungle with squawking, alien electronics and smeared microtonal melody in a familiar spirit to his label boss’ psychoacoustic dancefloor projections. At the top of the EP he offers a knuckle-cracking Robotic Handshake in 4D synching neck-snap sub knocks with shimmering gamelan tones and gremlin voices like a lost Dabrye bomb, before seducing us with the creamed microtonal timbre of Compactpact and resetting the levels to Beneath-style bleep & bass pressure with 131001G. However, the biggest highlight appears on the B-side opener Robotic Jabs in 4D, where desiccated 2-step jungle patterns spark at the core of a lush, fluid synth swell like some nerve-pinched Nubian Mindz reverie, whereas the decelerated thump of Ahmed? trades in STL-style dub-house triplets, and Dr. Beckett convulses like a Gantz riddim undergoing an ayahuasca ceremony. In all, a striking debut from a highly individual new voice on the scene - highly recommended if you’re into Lee Gamble, Coil, Urban Tribe or Beneath.