A partial list of mechanical devices that gyrofield’s music has recently brought to mind: bear traps, pinball bumpers, rotating lawn sprinklers, massage guns, and the split-flap displays of 20th-century train stations, with their endlessly clattering alphanumeric cascades. Now imagine linking all these objects together, along with several more boxfuls of gizmos, via a succession of cogs and cables and hair triggers. The Hong Kong-born, Utrecht-based 22-year-old, aka Kiana Li, makes club tracks that are dazzlingly kinetic and mind-bogglingly complex, in which every action—a choppy snare hit or undulating bass riff, say—sparks a corresponding chain reaction of ricocheting micromovements, every rhythm a virtual Rube Goldberg machine of implausibly interlocking pieces.
For the past seven years, most of gyrofield’s music has fallen loosely under the umbrella of drum’n’bass. Youthful experiments in EDM quickly gave way to a catalog—for labels like deadmau5’s mau5trap, Noisia’s Vision Recordings, and even the legendary Metalheadz—as varied as it is prolific. A gyrofield track might be smooth and gliding, buoyed by uplifting chords, or tearing and contorted, filled with Aphexian menace. What most of Li’s work bears in common are its ingeniously chopped drums and cybernetic sound design, along with the occasional hyperpop flourish. But a new EP, for Objekt’s Kapsela label—the latest in a triumphant 10-month run that includes standout releases on XL and FabricLive—ventures into new territory, dropping the tempo and trying out different rhythmic cadences, trading the familiar bump and snap of drum’n’bass for unpredictable new grooves.
Anyone who might have heard the opening “Vegetation Grows Thick” in one of Objekt’s sets over the past year or so could be forgiven for mistaking it for a long-lost gem of ’90s techno or progressive house. It’s not that the track sounds retro—quite the opposite—but something about its ambient shading and kelp-like sway invariably makes me think of a track like Two Full Minds’ “No Smoke” (a favorite of Objekt’s friend Call Super), or the muggy delirium of Underworld. It opens on a scene of mystery: a mist of hi-hats, rhythmic chirps, and what might be the singing of forest sprites. Over the track’s five-minute run, gyrofield toys with the mix of punch and flow, dialing up the drums and then pulling them away, letting the remaining elements drift like ink in water. Much like Djrum’s remarkable Under Tangled Silence, “Vegetation Grows Thick” seeks a new balance of club intensity and pure psychedelia.
The rest of the record is similarly humid and churning; file under monsoon-season techno. “Bolete” takes a page from Plastikman’s iconic “Spastik” but wreathes its snare tattoos in foam. The background is thick with what might be the whirring of sentient machines; another bird-like chirp is the closest thing to a melodic hook. The mood is primal, animalistic, with a lumbering kick drum that seems designed to elicit heavy stomping. “Rorschach” is built around similarly martial snares, conjuring visions of a drumline filing toward the apocalypse; chimes and bells fill the air like crystalline particles. Bristol’s Flo State intones a half-audible stream-of-consciousness monologue (“I’m drawn to those who want to escape black mountains, encounter that bird stuck in mid-flight; you reflect the topography of the temple, the divine language of ethereal whales, this radical wholeness…”) but it’s the drums that do the real talking. To lock into gyrofield’s percussive flow is to open up a world of call-and-response patterns, coded signals, secret messages conveyed in dots and dashes. Once again, there’s no melody; everything you need to know is conveyed in knotted strings of pulse and thwack.
