The musician known as Gi Gi understands the magic of a slow burn. In his chillout room, sounds waft from unseen corners into the middle distance, hovering like smoke illuminated by a flashlight. Each of the Texas-born, Melbourne-based producer’s albums has the hazy quality of a sense memory, the unexpected pleasant feeling of deja vu on a spring morning. His tunes seem to curl outward until they take up the whole screen, dazzling, pastel-tinted arrays that organize themselves without drawing attention to the process. Suddenly, it’s there, as are you, and everything feels locked into a specific but fleeting place.
For the better part of a decade, Gi Gi has been a reliably prolific source of foggy downtempo bangers, with releases on boutique ambient labels like Good Morning Tapes, Ways Inner Pass, and Quiet Time. Tracing his discography rewards patient, attentive listening as it slowly deepens and shifts, pooling into new shapes like beads of mercury. I was first enamored by 2022’s Sunchoke, which split the difference between lush, melodic drones that oozed into one another, and lush, melodic jungle tracks stripped of any extraneous bits. That album felt like Gi Gi’s statement of purpose: You probably need to calm down, so I’ve concocted just the tonic to do so. After four more records of increasingly globulous electronica, he’s back with In Lieu, his latest dispatch from the heavy-lidded realm. Here, he mostly eschews the hooks of his previous work in favor of dubwise rhythmic workouts, using percussive textures to explore that familiar, serenely meditative space.
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The songs on In Lieu shimmy and shudder, with fluttering delay blanketing nearly every element. It creates a dreamlike sheen, as each minuscule sample chop, blip of noise, and skittering hi-hat wavers in close proximity to one another. The overload of shaking, clicking, and popping can be disorienting at first, and despite the overall gentle nature of these compositions, they build a decent amount of tension. The release usually comes from the drop of a heavy bassline or hefty kick, which, rather than snap you out of the trance Gi Gi has so adroitly built, draw you in further. In the best dub versions, low frequencies act as an all-consuming black hole, turning a sound system or pair of headphones into a portal. Gi Gi has clearly understood dub’s raw psychedelic power, and the moments where he fully leans into it, like when the bassline and 4/4 groove finally align on “Arque,” or sparse low notes first curl around a tinny drum pattern on “Harmless,” are In Lieu at its most transcendent.
It would be a stretch to call these tracks earworms, as they’re generally just vamps on a chord or two, content to swim in circles for a few minutes. On prior records, Gi Gi stretched melodies until they drooped low, almost imperceptible. Here, he seems more interested in constructing complex grids of beats and samples, layering different rhythms to create a single, undulating organism. The song structures are pretty basic; a few motifs repeat, with the odd tasteful, low-key drop sprinkled throughout. If you give it your full attention, you’ll notice the sheer amount of sound happening at every moment: Take “Downswept,” an impeccably arranged groover that billows nonstop for three and a half minutes. Drum fills splash in the distance; the snare has enough gated reverb to sit unimposingly on top of the mix, steadying a wobbly scaffolding; tiny vocal samples implore you to listen; clouds of what could be filtered field recordings of traffic or old radio transmissions settle like mountain fog. Somewhere deep in the mix there might be a loop of bongos or congas. In most cases, trying to identify everything happening in one of these songs feels like standing between two mirrors and in search of gray hairs.
