Garrett Burke collects weird sounds. He has an aficionado’s ear for the wet slap, the digestive gurgle, the fleshy smack that might be pornographic, violent, or both. The Philadelphia-based experimental percussionist crafts all of these noises himself, and then stores them in Ableton, like jars in an apothecary. He hammers out a welter of cross-rhythms on a discontinued MIDI drum pad with all these sounds, piles on effects with a rat’s nest of modules, mulches that back into Ableton, and then spits it back out onto his drum pad, adding ever more layers.
Somewhere in this regurgitative process, the music takes on the quality of the project’s name. The music goes Gloorp. Really, almost no further explanation is required. Doesn’t the prospect of dancing to music that goes gloorp intrigue you? (To hear Burke, though, dancing is not really something he’s considered people doing with his music. “I don’t really go to, like, clubs,” Burke told an interviewer recently.)
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Burke’s music swarms you with an alarming eagerness. He was obsessed with SOPHIE when he was in college, an obsession you can hear in his meticulous sound design. But he reminds me of some older touchstones, too: the forgotten indie-prog powerhouses Battles, for one, and the sound experimentalists Matmos, on the other. Like them, his music seesaws between aggressive and playful, between crowd-pleasing and purposefully unpleasant. There is an antic thread running through it all, a sense that this is a person who would still probably laugh, hard, at a well-placed whoopie cushion.
On Gloorp Life, Burke continues the exploration that animated his 2025 album Gloorp ’Em Up: Precisely how tactile can a drum hit become before it stops tugging at your midline? The drums on “Swag” or “Whatsapp” superficially resemble drum ’n’ bass or jungle in the way they barrel and crowd the frame, but they sound like you would contract mushroom spores on your hands if you touched them. “Jeggings” sounds like a Sorcerer’s Apprentice-worth of plumber’s tools flying about in a flooded bathroom. Burke is aiming for an unlikely union of wrinkled noses and shaking asses, and if this image makes you uncomfortable, wait until the squirting noises hit on “Bali Mode.”
Whatever the tenets of Gloorp life, we can infer that it’s fleeting. Like Gloorp ’Em Up, Gloorp Life lasts about the length of a SpongeBob SquarePants episode. There is precisely one breath for air, and it’s the very last track. “Real Life” has fewer layers than everything before it, as well as the hints of a few minor chords buried in filters, reaching your ears as if struggling from beneath a viscous soup. Burke piles fascinating shuffling sounds on top, invoking a quiet scuffle, maybe some cardboard boxes being knocked over in a storage space. The piece is over before the mental picture really develops, which only compels me to start it over again.
