If there’s one constant for the UK’s Wisdom Teeth label, it’s evolution. Perhaps that’s fitting, given that its name implies growth and maturation. Since it was founded, just a little over a decade ago, Wisdom Teeth has traversed a gamut of styles, moving as steadily as the progress bar crawling across the waveform of a DJ mix. Early experiments in dubstep gave way to unorthodox bass music and leftfield techno; successive compilations have been dedicated to narrowly bounded experiments in the wiggly terrain around 100 BPM or the quick-stepping possibilities of the 150-170 zone.
Wisdom Teeth cofounder K-LONE, on the other hand, is a model of consistency. On both his albums so far, 2020’s Cape Cira and 2023’s Swells, the producer (aka Josiah Gladwell) has chipped away at a modest set of sounds with the dedication of a sculptor hunched over a milky block of marble. He likes his synths luminous and his drums razor sharp. His harmonic elements, though electronic, tend to have a suggestively physical heft, reminiscent of struck mallets and wheezing organs. His percussion, on the other hand, is unusually unassuming, at least compared to most contemporary dance music, implying not so much the force of drumsticks as the light glancing off a burnished hi-hat.
His new album sorry i thought you were someone else is of a piece with his previous two LPs—supersaturated with color and driven by finely honed drums. But even without making any major stylistic leaps from his previous work, it’s the most satisfying record of his career so far. His textures are softer and more enveloping than ever, and his emotional range has expanded beyond his previous albums’ demure glow.
The record’s lushness might at first seem surprising, given that Wisdom Teeth’s most recent compilation was dedicated to minimal techno, and K-LONE has been talking up his love of minimal in interviews. (It’s worth noting that the album appears on New York’s Incienso, whose co-founder, Anthony Naples, recently offered his own contribution to the minimal revival.) But peer beneath those billowing pads and the deceptively streamlined nature of K-LONE’s album becomes clear. Tracks are built on the barest boom-ticking drum patterns; basslines operate by dint of suggestion, sketching out a few sternum-tapping notes before plunging back below the limit of audibility. But every element is carefully polished and set in ways that mask the subdued movements of his jewel-toned clockworks.
In both tone and tempo, the album itself is remarkably consistent from start to finish. Its materials sound drawn from a relatively small set of machines and patches: sparkling chimes and bright chords, swollen sub-bass, snatches of spoken-word vocals that flit like ghosts across the edges of the stereo field. His drums are more refined than ever. Often they take the form of bursts of hissing static or sculpted white noise—echoes of classic minimal producers like Matthew Herbert, but set to aquamarine chords more reminiscent of Pépé Bradock. He uses effects sparingly but effectively, occasionally twisting the knob on his dub delay to send a sound ricocheting across the margins of the music, hinting at maze-like expanses just out of earshot.
The album is so consistent, in fact, that you suspect Gladwell could easily recombine many of the record’s elements—blending the scratchy drum groove of “slk” with the dub-techno chords “sslip,” say, or the exhilarating pulses of “fauna” with the crisp, loping toms of “the haze”—and the results might not have been all that different. That’s not to say that the results are samey; far from it. On every track, he’s whittled everything down to a tightly focused idea. “slide by side” is a masterpiece of pointillism, every sound—nubby bass, blippy woodblocks, a topline that drips like beads of honey—as casually yet carefully arranged as the stones of a Zen garden. In the zig-zagging “sslip,” monochromatic chords flash back to the heyday of the Force Trax label while a tinny vocal sample injects some of the insouciance of Chicago ghetto house.
Sometimes the hook grabs you immediately: That’s the case with opener “someone else,” the album’s obvious highlight, built around a downcast vocal sample and chords that burble like a water foundation. Sometimes there’s barely any hook at all: “gurgle” is built atop a rubbery bassline that just toggles between two notes. But beneath the surface, there’s always more than meets the ears: “Gurgle” is a palimpsest of dubby pads, filigreed details, and murmuring voices, while “someone else” is so masterfully mixed that every sound bobs in the mix like marshmallows in Jell-O. Some tracks are so exacting in their use of empty space that they feel almost like photographic negatives.
sorry i thought you were someone else strikes an unusual affective note: It’s quick-stepping yet subdued, with tempos keyed to amped-up dancefloors and moody tones more suited to watching the sunrise from your apartment window. Perhaps that ambivalence stems from the circumstances of its creation, written in the aftermath of Gladwell’s father’s death. Yet K-LONE’s album is never maudlin. If anything, it’s shot through with a palpable sense of hope, and an abidingly clear-headed spirit. Some dance music shouts at you; K-LONE’s invites you to get cozy with your feelings.
