Bleep

Zeroh’s BLQLYTE is one of those albums that pushes at the very edges of hip-hop and R&B. The artists that come to mind when listening to this strange, incantatory, often rather unsettling album are those who operate at the extreme fringes of genre - Moor Mother, clipping., Shabazz Palaces.

Sounds fight for breath on BLQLYTE, with beats pushing to the front of the mix as if emerging from a swamp before they are dragged back into the depths a couple of minutes later. Tracks bleed into one another and conventional structures done away with in favour of impressionistic, abstract ruminations. Be his vocals sung, rapped or spoken, it’s unclear if Zeroh is dictating proceedings here or struggling against them. See how he and Busdriver at once resist the evil that lurks in ‘Metacine’ and yet submit to it, the haze of harp and granular synthesis twisting up their voices into something monstrous.

The soupy fog of noises that pass for instrumentals on BLQLYTE are spun in many different directions across the record. On the album’s eponymous opening track we find a tense, abstracted version of something you might find on a MHYSA record; there’s some Yeezus in ‘JAADE’; ‘TRUE 7’, the track that rounds out BLQLYTE on the digital edition that is exclusive to Bleep, rises with the playful flamboyance of serpentwithfeet or Bat For Lashes.

On BLQLYTE, his first LP for Leaving Records, Zeroh comes through with a murky, moody and ultra-leftfield set which defies easy categorisation.