Bleep

Plenty of music can be described as visceral or alien, but this album really takes the cake. For the uninitiated, qebrµs is the pseudonym of late Kepler22B-cum-France producer Thomas Denis, whose enigmatic output and impossibly intricate, unearthly brand of breakcore has captivated musicians from the world over. Amidst a wealth of material that has garnered a cult following, his 2017 album ᐔ ᐌ ᐂ ᐍ ᐚ (possibly pronounced “woo we iy we waa” if we’re to follow the title’s Cree syllabics) was picked up by Love Love Records, and is now very necessarily reissued.

If H.R. Giger were a producer fed on a diet of Venetian Snares and Aphex Twin, his music might have sounded a little bit like this. Indeed, both musicians have celebrated the intense maximalism of qebrµs’s work, its constantly twitching, hyperactive information overloads. With ᐔ ᐌ ᐂ ᐍ ᐚ, there are completely no restrictions on what a track can contain, where it can move, and the sheer breadth of sounds that can be conjured from scratch. Pulsating rhythms like a beatboxing xenomorph, or swinging gamma ray scythes, or bike chains uncoiling at hyperspeed, are simultaneously sludgy and steely, generated from pure synthesis to whizz through labyrinthine soundscapes.

The opening ‘⊶⊚⊖⬚⊟⊑∷༜⊚༜∷⊒⊞⬚⊖⊚⊷’ jumps through portals with subsurface emanations and jittery, guttural, wet pounding rhythms, skipping beats as infinitely diverse sound designs cuts into the mix. Lone thumps in between the amorphous seismic scribbles of ‘ᐛᢰXᒣ ᐂ Mᒷᢳᐉ’ reverberate into endless extraterrestrial caverns where distended human choirs sing, while the next track scrubs a radiation scorched radio dial, switching from luminous sprays to stretchy, slippery harmonic beats splitting from ear to ear. ‘⊶⊑ ♉ ♋ ☮ ♋ ♉⊒⊷’ is a kind of glitch hop fuelled by nuclear fusion engines, perhaps the most familiar sounding track yet still abstract to the farthest reaches, in which the seriously frenzied closing track drills and buzzsaws its noise powered rhythms amidst elasticated freezes of organ like synths.

Seven years on from ᐔ ᐌ ᐂ ᐍ ᐚ, qebrµs’s music is still completely and utterly, mindbendingly unique.