The creative arc Lee Gamble’s music has taken is a strange and wonderful thing to behold. It began with a literal tearing apart of his influences, and then set off on a journey to see how much further away he could progressively move from them. His first full-length release, Diversions 1994-1996, tore passages from jungle mixtapes, stripped all the beats out, and reimagined them as dysfunctional bad dreams. The word “abstract” is never far away when people reach for descriptions of the London-based producer—and with good reason. His second release for Pan, Dutch Tvashar Plumes, was a hollowed out shell of techno, where all semblance of form and shape was lost long ago, leaving only fragments of a former good time. Gamble’s music is staged in an unusual place, somewhere between the unreal and the all-too-real, where wretched drug experiences at past-peak club hours somehow end up in a form of metaphysical drift into the following morning.
KOCH is a sprawling record, containing 16 tracks spread out over more than an hour. It takes time and patience to figure out what Gamble is going through, and even then, there are no easy answers. It’s a work of complexity, although its parts, when isolated, don’t necessarily form knotty riddles. “Motor System” quietly pounds out a rudimentary beat while flattened voices curl around it, suggesting a highly mechanized form of industrial music. Often there are layers of distortion coating everything, such as on “Caudata”, where Gamble constructs graceful shapes over a wall of fog, putting it in a similar place to Leyland Kirby’s work with old 78 rpm records on An Empty Bliss Beyond This World. Another technique he’s fond of is spinning out the club experience in slow motion, or making it feel like it’s happening in a place that’s far away but just close enough so the tiniest welt of bass can still be heard (“You Concrete").
The overriding feel on KOCH is one of removal, of distant observation. Gamble’s music has the feel of someone floating above it, looking in, only tangentially participating in what’s going on. Beats are muffled, signals echo for an eternity; on “Head Model”, there’s acres of room between the parts being triggered, but it never feels like there’s a ton of space opening up. Instead, it’s all dense, claustrophobic reflection, with many of Gamble’s tracks trapped in one very specific moment without any forward flow at all. Occasionally there’s movement, but even that verges on the cyclical. “HMix” begins with a charge of muddied beats and bass, only to get filtered into reedy compression that resembles the worst kind of amphetamine headrush. There’s a similar mindset here to others who have attempted to scoop out the innards of electronics to see what remains—Actress, Autechre, Pan Sonic—but Gamble is in an even more detached place, where the inclusionary side of club culture appears utterly alien.
An emergent motif on KOCH is the awkwardness Gamble siphons into his work, where parts only just fit or threaten to fall out of sequence altogether. “Ornith-Mimik” is all glistening, high-pitched tones sloppily vying with a straight pulse and random video game interference, while “Gillsman” is so purposefully clumsy it gains a drunken lop to its stride. It fits perfectly with the sense of separation this album is built on, as this is not music that has easily definable origins beyond Gamble’s headspace. It all revolves around small glances and split-second patterns, resembling the minutiae of club culture, taken and amplified into a bigger space where there’s barely any room left for it to breathe. At times, KOCH is so microscopic it feels like there’s barely any place left for this music to go. But Gamble keeps finding new ways to take it apart and reassemble it, to the point where something so closed off, so concerned with the smallest of gestures, feels thrillingly open.
