Lee Gamble
Models (Hyperdub Records)
★★★★★

BIRMINGHAM artist, producer and DJ Lee Gamble’s latest work employs new techniques to realise his machine learning and artificial intelligence kaleidoscopic compositions. He spent two years building vocal systems using various methods with each vocal on the album cybernetic and all of them almost wordless. 

Purple Orange opens the work heralded by alien-like acapella artificial wails, conjuring up unsettling and out-of-body voices that both haunt and tease. 

She’s Not is the standout track, winding around distant far off-shore Cocteau Twins inspired guitar hooks, then emotive vocals drenched in harmonised reverb. Phantom Limb further explores new territory in distant lands. Plucked strings answered by bell-like distorted guitars. Out of a cacophony of film noir jazz bass, distorted break beats emerge. 

Your Weight ends the album. A slow-tempo sound FX clash of experimental textures. As they approach their 20th anniversary in 2024 the Hyperdub label continue to be a vital force. 

Brian Eno
Top Boy Soundtrack (Verve)
★★★★★

MOST commissioned film and TV scores are composed to fit the picture with frame accuracy. Not so for Brian Eno, who prefers to give directors and editors a range of music when meeting a brief, leaving them to decide where it should fit during the edit. 

Such is the case for Top Boy, Netflix’s contemporary crime drama set in Hackney. Eno opts for soft and hard ambient textures, off-centre rhythms and hidden atmosphere. Standout tracks include Overground, a drifting melodic dreamscape, and the focused modesty of the main titles. 

Eno says of the work: “Top Boy is really about children in a pretty bad situation. So I explored the internal world of children’s characters, not just what’s happening to them in the external world. Quite a lot of the music was deliberately naive, it was sort of simple. The melodies were simple, not really sophisticated, or grown-up.” 

A worthy edition to any Eno collection. 

John Luther Adams
Darkness and Scattered Light
(Cold Blue Music) 
★★★★★

COLD BLUE MUSIC is a Southern Californian label releasing contemporary classical works, founded by Jim Fox in the early 1980s, with good taste and political concerns to the fore.

Recent releases include works by Daniel Lentx for piano, Larry Polansky’s chamber music and John Luther Adams new work for double bass, played by the late Robert Black. 

Luther Adams is a Pulitzer and Grammy-winning composer whose themes gravitate towards environment concerns. Inspired by Alaska, where he previously lived, combined with a fresh approach to minimalism, Three High Places opens the album the piece contains no normal stopped notes, created by pressing a string against the fingerboard. All the sounds are natural harmonies. 

Darkness and Scattered Light evokes an Alaskan winter solstice, scored for five double basses. Black’s poetic interpretation traces long melodic lines across harmonic arcs. Three Nocturnes concludes, pulsing around dark subharmonic into high-tone melodic painterly atmospheres.