We really enjoyed Woebot‘s first forays into music-making, the Automat and East Central One EPs which the FACT contributor and former blogger extraordinaire put out last year.
Now, out man is set to loose his self-titled debut album on the world. Released via his own Hollow Earth imprint and available directly from woebot.com/buy.html, it’s a sample-based affair celebrating both the faintly occult, artisan London of old and the postmodern hyper-referentiality of the modern day. And it sounds really fucking good.
The mellifluous female vocal on ‘Diudatae’ feels like a knowing nod in the direction of Burial’s Untrue, and is offset by a fractured, sub-heavy rhythm, ominous strings and a male voice intoning words that could be gibberish, or a foreign language, or…? There’s a post-concréte, library music-gone-wrong feel to proceedings that puts us in mind of Bernard Parmegiani and Basil Kirchin; the Stanley Unwin sample is a nice touch. ‘Maker’ is reminiscent of The Focus Group, but with an Eastern-tinged dubstep cant, while ‘Fivenine”s one-note repetitions and chopped vocals are genuinely psychedelic and disorienting. ‘Horse’ has the same queasy, hauntological quality as some of the best Mordant Music fare, but is altogether less fuggy, with a forthright string and woodwind melody rising brightly from its yawning drones. From there we head to the radiophonic jazz of ‘Pubtronic’, the Popol Vuh-in-dub feel of ‘Daisy Chain’ and the Kraftwerkian electronic pop of ‘X-Ray’. Album closer ‘Vicar’ reconciles dramatic cine-strings with gabba-style drums and FX.
"The world imprints itself upon us," Woebot writes in an accompanying ‘press release’, "And we produce a copy of the world, not an exact copy but one inflected by who we are now. This PR sheet started out as a thought, it was transcribed to a word processor, was copied out on a typewriter, digitised with a scanner and then printed out. Each step of duplication came with its own alterations adding a thickening layer of silt, a deeper grain of place and time.
"Sampling is a pracrice that explores the same dynamic. The babble of concrete poetry, a Diva’s crack-addled moan, a Gabba kick-drum or the splutter of an ancient modular synth is transcribed from crackling vinyl. An Analogue to Digital convertor (ADC) adds ita own colour. On the way, back out from the crucible of the mix a Digital to analogue converter (DAC) changes the sound once more, a Pre-amp colours the sound again (production voodoo), then to a hard disk via ADC, befre finally dithering down-bit to the CD you hold in your hand. Then, hopefully, into your own CD player and once again the process recommences.
Witty,withering and with passages of genuine beauty, this is a wonderful and agreeably weird record. Find out more at woebot.com
