Welcome in!
WEȽ∝KER's 'ENHANCER' offers a high dive into the soggy hands and lands of Dujat & Beedles. Having planted their flag firmly at the forefront of modern computer music, WEȽ∝KER return with 'ENHANCER', an astonishingly dynamic display of technique and form.
This isn't sound for sound's sake; the duo's playful approach to composition ties many discrete events together to weave a warm-bath narrative. A tug at the skittering top layer reveals something so rare: there's real musicality under there, aching chords snaking through the crunchy boot-up sequence of "GATOR" and underpinning the pneumatic drift of "Ohmbase".
ENHANCER's tracks unfurl with an instinctive flow, pulling/pushing in all the right places and guiding the listener through aural aqueducts. WEȽ∝KER are just truly properly at it again. Dive in, isn't it?
- Calum Gunn, 2022
The album's artwork is the result of an all-Mancunian collaboration with sculptural artist and dead-powder virtuoso Nicola Ellis. Photographed by Glen Cutwerk and Bazz Patel, shot in the spleen of Salford's The White Hotel. Drippy, oily notes with a hint of flesh.
Interview feature on Collide24
Emulsified circuitry and nanobot rhythms by Joe Beedles & Guillaume Dujat’s WEȽ∝KER (pronounced “wet locker”), moving to to new strengths on a curiously expressive debut LP for reliable Florentine label OOH-sounds - RIYL Autechre, Farmer’s Manual, Active Listeners Club.
Making strange sounds listenable since 2020’s ‘Gulp’ for Calum Gunn’s now defunct Conditional, WEȽ∝KER take a marked leap forward with the world-building imagination and illusive technicality of their 2nd release ‘Enhancer’. As one of Manchester’s leading young acts for progressive contemporary electronic music, they hold to their own fiercer than ever and with a growing sense of development across these nine fleeting glimpses at the uncanny valley. At the intersection of generative and man-made music, they draw on multiple strategies of algorithmic and hands-on production to eke out their own space in the niche of computer music and the broader sphere of experimental sound arrangements.
If the “experimental” bracket begs the question, why are they doing it, what is the purpose of their music? The answer here is arguably to entertain and tickle the senses, juxtaposing a wide range of textures, shapes, tones and timbres that provoke unusual headspaces and baffle proprioceptions in those who like to question their sense of self. If it was held up to the critical values of noncy goblin rockists it would surely all collapse - where’s the lyrics, where’s the melody, it’s just not the fucking Beatles! *fleg* - but taken on its own merits there’s a uniquely engaging abstract narrative spelt out in synaesthetic terms to follow between the shearing contours and blissed but quizzical chords of ‘Gator’ to the knotted whorls of ‘J-pump’, with echoes of future folk music in ‘mcks_eeks’ and castles in the sky structures of ‘Ohmbase’, plus great, roiling psychedelic space for exploration on ‘VLAFh’, and electro-jazz-funk’s freakiest nightmares evoked in ‘nunnfir’.
November 25, 2022
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.
Cover Art by Nicola Ellis.
Photographs by Glen Cutwerk & Bazz Patel.
Layout and design by incepBOY.
All music written & Produced by WEȽ∝KER.