News / / 15.09.14

Lee Gamble

Koch (PAN)
17/20

“There is”, states PAN’s press release for Koch, the sprawling new full-length from the increasingly magisterial Lee Gamble, “a sense of the seen and the unseen, an honest tension between music as function (for this world) and as artistic exploration (for another world) as cracks in the surface appear to reveal the odd and alien minutiae within.” Lofty cosmic assertions they may be, but Koch is indeed defined by the rift between organic tangibility and more impossibly precise angles, made joyously – unexpectedly – traversable.

In Koch, Gamble follows the dug-up jungle and techno excursions of his previous PAN releases Diversions 1994-1996 and Dutch Tvashar Plumes. Drifting effortlessly across a remote sonic spectrum, Koch factors, in part, propulsive floor-ready cuts (Motor System, Gillsman, Jove Layup, HMix); barely embellished studies in fractured oscillatory looping (Oneiric Contur, Ornith-Mimik); and the kind of noise- leaning ambient constructions which, if rendered as ghosts on Diversions…, are repositioned here as drifting wisps of cosmic dust.

If Autechre’s classic Parallel Suns represented enveloping, crushing sonic implosion, then Koch is the iridescent fallout. The result is a resolutely foreign soundscape, so it’s no great surprise that the one overwhelmingly human element – a brief spoken word sample in You Concrete – feels so distant from what surrounds it. Given the woozy disparity of timbre, texture and disjointed rhythm throughout, it’s to Gamble’s great credit that Koch feels like such a coherent body of work. A hugely intriguing set, and yet another triumph for PAN.

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Words: Thomas Howells

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