Perhaps more than any other quality, a sense of restraint characterizes the music of Galcher Lustwerk. His dusky deep house withholds more than it reveals; it's given to minor keys and downy textures overlaid with his own sparse, impressionistic rapping—if "rapping" is even the right word for a style of vocalization that could almost be mistaken for talking in his sleep. Above all, the music never complicates itself unnecessarily. Why use two elements where one would do? For that matter, why use one where none would do? Forget less-is-more; his approach seems more like less-is-just-enough.
The same goes for the Cleveland-born, Brooklyn-based producer's release strategy. Ever since he emerged, in 2013, with 100% Galcher, a free, downloadable mixtape of original productions for the Blowing Up the Workshop series, he's courted a fair amount of attention from fans of underground house music, certainly more than you might expect for a virtually unknown artist and a mixtape with zero promotion behind it. Many musicians in his position, it's safe to say, would have been happy to be courted by labels, happier still to sign on the dotted line. Lustwerk didn't, though. He put out an EP on Tsuba Records and self-released a downloadable mini-LP under the alias Road Hog, and he played some gigs, but aside from those trial balloons, he kept a low profile.
Now, more than two years after 100% Galcher blew up Blowing Up the Workshop's servers, he's finally returned to releasing music, and he's doing it, once again, 100% Galcher. As he recently explained to Juno Plus, he met with labels about putting out the material featured on the mixtape, but "things weren't clear enough for me. I had a lot of unanswered questions. I decided that I would get the most personal experience (and also the most money) by releasing them myself." The Parlay EP's three tracks (the fourth is an instrumental mix of the title track) were all featured in the mixtape, but they sound ever so slightly better here: shinier, crisper, more enveloping. That might be explained, in part, by the fact that he was forced to remake them when his computer crashed shortly after he uploaded the mix.
For all their outward similarities—the scratchy, unadorned drum-machine patterns, softly glowing chords, and gruffly muttered vocals—it's striking how much variety Lustwerk gets out of such a tightly focused style. "Parlay", with its steady groove and references to rocking the drop-top, is all about the pleasures of the open road. Not a lot happens, besides a few sparkling notes in the upper register; a single chord flickers, unchanging, like a highway mirage. But nothing has to happen; it's hypnotic enough as it is. More variation is built into "Dockside", in which a handful of chords vamp around a two-note figure that threads the track from end to end. For the chorus, if you can call it that, Lustwerk's voice slips into a sing-speaking cadence with the faintest suggestion of dancehall reggae, and it's exciting to hear him testing the possibilities within the narrow limits of his preferred style.
"Kaint" is the most harmonically rich of the three—two chords in the right hand flutter against a three-note bassline—but it's also the most vaporous. The synths are the color and consistency of a Campari and soda, and the only percussion is a lone lawn-sprinkler hi-hat flicking back and forth. There is no kick drum. It falls to the bassline to serve as an anchor—and to Lustwerk's own baritone, which occasionally murmurs, "Remember?" as though he had just been stirred from a daydream. The song's oddest feature is a wordless grunt, looped in time with the music and buried almost inaudibly deep in the mix. In "Parlay", there's a similar sense of disturbance beneath the surface, in the form of a noisy, metallic filigree that curls around the beat. Even Lustwerk's restraint doesn't stop him from indulging a fondness for odd details, and it's in the tension between those two urges that his music really shines.
