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Lee Gamble - Mnestic Pressure


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Hyperdub - HDBCD037

releases September 15, 2017

 

01. Insta Centre

02. Istian

03. East Sedducke

04. 23 Bay Flips

05. Swerva

06. Quadripoints

07. You Hedonic

08. UE8

09. Locked In

10. Ignition Lockoff

11. A tergo Real

12. Ghost

13. Déjà Mode

 

Snippets + visuals http://mnesticpressure.leegamble.net/

 

https://leegamble.bandcamp.com/album/lee-gamble-mnestic-pressure-hdbcd037

 

r1Unnxm.jpg

 

https://twitter.com/GambleLee

https://twitter.com/Hyperdub

 

Lee Gamble debuts on Hyperdub with the future clad junglist navigations of Mnestic Pressure. Where his previous albums on PAN moved through a thick hypnagogic vapor that explored areas and signals transmitted from within a range of deep subconscious thought patterns and memories, Mnestic Pressure focuses on how contemporary memory is pressured with thirteen tracks that explore alien territories with a fully automated tech-heavy surreal glaze.

 

When his Diversions 1994-1996 album arrived on PAN back in 2012, the blend of ambient breakdowns from classic jungle trax immediately tapped into many people's memories of the heady mid '90s period of hardcore drum & bass, portraying those now-classic sounds as ghosts of themselves, the audio both tantalized and haunted the minds of many clubgoers and music aficionados who still place (and rightly so) the mid '90s jungle sound as one of the highlights of the hardcore continuum. This unique approach to production and way of thinking about this sound opened up the door for an academic approach to rave nostalgia that was executed in a way that both delivered goods that were engineered to sound as home in the middle of the night on a massive soundsystem while also acting equally well in the post night out chill out zone of your mind, rarely before or since had anyone provided such a perfect platform to explore deeper recesses of thought while zoning out to some serious tunes both on the dance or bedroom floor.

 

One of the most brilliant things about Mnestic Pressure is its ability to play around with your senses in what the last piece of the album fittingly refers to as Deja Mode. Vibrations from previous Gamble recordings fluctuate in and out of the mix and have your synapses snapping out patterns as a way of attempting to build connections between your memories of previous tracks and what's presented to you now, from sounds that may or may not exist within the music at hand. This is none more evident than on the skyscraping dub chords of You Hedonic, the feeling that this could be the moment when we hit speeds beyond that of comprehension on Motor System (Extension) is inescapable, while the street level drop of Istian feels like the gloopy head rush from looking up after a night down the front of the speakers, bowed down deep in the Mimas Skank. By building in these audio hallucinations there are cross-border complexions to Mnestic Pressure that create bridges both in the music and your mind to what has come before and what is coming next.

 

Describing the processes behind the album, Hyperdub explains: "The title ‘Mnestic Pressure’ comes from Lee’s thinking about how our contemporary memory is pressured, individually, but also collectively. ‘We live in these strobing, visual times, like a constant subliminal advertisement but, also over the last few years the world seems to have become more and more dreamlike, alien, and parodic itself and there was this part of me that wanted to drag my music back from this Shangri-La, but fully drenched and infected by its ghosts..’" these concepts are perfectly captured on the expertly titled MDMA haze of Ghost, its ripping breakbeats could be lifted direct from an OG mid-'90s white label cut, if it was not for the dense, almost melancholic gaze that its unseen MC chatter throws our way post-breakdown, a homage to what Leyland Kirby perfectly titled the death of rave. While 23 Bay Flips strips all this back to drop a serious suburban bassline over a scattered rhythm that could be a Jean-Claude Risset VIP mix of Digital Mystikz & Loefah's 04 classic Twisup.

 

Throughout the years there have always been pockets of (underground) resistance within electronic music "club" culture, artists operating on the fringes of scenes and diverting their own unique take on the singular sounds of hardcore, jungle and techno. From the early days of A Guy Called Gerald's Juice Box ambient jungle and No-U Turn's skunk-induced mutated techstep mission to the more modern day approaches of Lorenzo Senni and EVOL's deconstructionist take on trance and acid, or perhaps most fittingly Burial's angelic memories of stepping out of the club and into the rain with a UK garage soundtrack ringing around his ears like tinnitus, Lee Gamble is an artist operating within the core of this hidden reverse, transforming the forever-engrained-within-our-memories sounds of jungle and techno whilst continuously rearranging and shaping them into bold new shapes, constantly updating whilst pushing his sound, us and everything around hard into the future.

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This guy always puts out top notch albums, each a different style/sound, already pre-ordered.

Hyperdub suits him well. Ive read that promo text 3 times and still have no idea what the albums gonna sound like other than 'more breaks'.

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This guy always puts out top notch albums, each a different style/sound, already pre-ordered.

Hyperdub suits him well. Ive read that promo text 3 times and still have no idea what the albums gonna sound like other than 'more breaks'.

lol thats the worst promo text i ve ever read. His own words would have been enough : "The title ‘Mnestic Pressure’ comes from Lee’s thinking about how our contemporary memory is pressured, individually, but also collectively. ‘We live in these strobing, visual times, like a constant subliminal advertisement but, also over the last few years the world seems to have become more and more dreamlike, alien, and parodic itself and there was this part of me that wanted to drag my music back from this Shangri-La, but fully drenched and infected by its ghosts.

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WATMM against pretentious pseudo-academic press releases for IDM albums 2017.

bleep bit isn't the press release tho ? (not sure if hyperdub even does PRs altogether)

 

here's a snip from previously linked interview:

One thing I’m absolutely dedicated to, though, is that the music should be able to stand out on its own. It doesn’t need all this stuff I’m talking about. That stuff is there to think about, but it shouldn’t be important if that’s not how you want to listen to it. I like it, but if you just want to put on headphones and listen, fine. I’m not gonna hide the reasons I’ve made them, though.

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WATMM against pretentious pseudo-academic press releases for IDM albums 2017.

bleep bit isn't the press release tho ? (not sure if hyperdub even does PRs altogether)

 

Ah, well pseudo-academic 'hype' in general then. I'm still reeling from that Ben Frost one.

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cory arcane found her comfort zone in a constant state of crisis, and her liberation through love, sensuality, and high-speed internet access.
 
as some might recall, she used to struggle with her own decay, navigating an intricate web of bureaucracy, endless social-media scrolling, 24-hour news channel feeds and marketed strategies of seduction.
 
her intense and continuous obsession for surf, breakdancing and cat videos might have saved her from a silent decline, but it would be her first attempts at integrating a professional ballet company that provided the initial spark. her unorthodox dance movements were often considered shocking, transgressive, and barely legal; and even though some recognised her genuine talent, it was clear she would never make it into this structure. this is when she started her slow drift towards the outer limits of society, in search of the way to achieve the conditions for absolute freedom.
 
her emancipation was surely marked by different forms of excess: the inappropriate use of fireworks, the consumption of large quantities of alcohol and controlled substances, as well as the occasional blasts of kitchen appliances.
 
she bypassed the gender war and became an expert in advertising sabotage. soon cory would give academic courses on the true liberation of the mind, or, in her own words, the apotheosis of senses.
 
lately, she could be seen squatting in the outskirts of different giant metropolises, embracing the mayhem, contemplating the crumbling of a system. the sound of the city, mixed with the music on her headphones, would weave complex rhythms and futuristic textures into a beautifully coloured, pixellated surface.
 
looking out onto this fabulous chaos, she smiled.

 

 

That's from the Raster page for that album. 

 

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