There is barely a repeated moment on the bizarre Brainfeeder full-length debut from Irish producer Seamus Malliagh, aka Iglooghost. It’s a more radical prospect than it might seem. Put aside the bewildering nature of his actual sounds—painstaking maximalism on a shapeshifting grid—and Neō Wax Bloom is frantically composed. There are no loops at all, and there is rarely a sustained melody to latch onto; that many of his alien-sounding electronic bursts are immediately fleeting makes their novelty all the more jarring. Neō Wax Bloom is an insanely ambitious inversion of the comfort of repetition, and the whole album spills forward to unnerving effect.
The audiovisual concept behind Iglooghost is a zany hallucination: an invented backstory replete with graphics of googly-eyed kitsch, which actually do help explain the neurosis of his sound. When Brainfeeder released the album’s second single, “White Gum,” Malliagh took to the YouTube comment section to explain himself: “PLS IMAGINE A MONK CALLED YOMI & A LITTLE BUG BOY IN A CLOAK CALLED USO HAVING A HUGE FIGHT - HOPPING OVER LEVITATING FRUIT & FIRING LASERS AT EACHOTHER [sic],” he wrote. Malliagh has earnestly designed a sound that belongs to Yomi’s laser and another that belongs to Little Bug Boy’s, and every moment on Neō Wax Bloom is ostensibly a prop or landscape element in their universe. Of course, none of that alleviates the confusing thrill of listening to the song itself, which seems to crumble and crackle under its own weight in a constant morph.
Malliagh once said his first impulse, when he started making music, was towards “terrifying breakcore,” and he’s strayed well beyond that ambition with Neō Wax Bloom. But the album does carry that genre’s attendant fidgeting. Malliagh weaves manic combinations of footwork and techno for aggressively paced tracks. “Göd Grid” tops out at more than 220 BPM without ever settling into a groove, seemingly dozens of sounds flurrying forward to combine for the record’s harshest track. “Super Ink Burst” feels like a barrage of body punches despite its cartoony landscape: a frantic saxophone trickles up and down, a kick adds a breakneck thump, the invented synth sounds glitter relentlessly. On “Pale Eyes,” Malliagh pits that same saxophone alongside an anxious harpsichord sound, as bulbous little meeps and moops share background space with not-quite-human gasps and moans.
Throughout, Malliagh injects manipulated vocal samples that are often twisted beyond recognition into a chipmunky gibberish. On “White Gum,” he flips the grime rapper AJ Tracey’s already relentless “Naila” vocals into a peculiar high-pitched attack. The ambiguous underground rapper Mr. Yote shows up for an original feature on “Teal Yomi / Olivine,” braving the storm of complexity with his own other-worldly pitch shifting. The pair have worked together before, and here they push avant-garde hip-hop that demands exacting listening. With an opposite approach, the Japanese dream-pop vocalist Cuushe glides over “Infinite Mint,” a succulent ballad that devolves into one of the album’s most soulful appendages. Malliagh softens his edge for moments like these without sacrificing the encompassing effect of his excess.
There’s a glistening sheen to nearly everything Malliagh touches, and his songs blend together if for no other reason than their similar hue. He’s also self-referential, sampling his own work throughout the record as a rare bit of continuity. There’s a soaring, soulful vocal sample that needles its way throughout several tracks as a shimmering mirage of familiarity. It seems to have first appeared on a previous Malliagh production, last year’s “Gold Tea,” and it pops up throughout Neō Wax Bloom like a beaming signpost, a rare bit of human comfort in an otherwise austerely alien landscape.
Even at its most elegant, the album unfurls like a sensory attack. This seems to be Malliagh’s odd equation as Iglooghost: filtering outlandish electronic music through his saccharine world-building to intensely emotional effect. To his credit, he’s architected a world entirely unto itself. It’s the type you might take deep a breath before jumping into, knowing that the strangeness of it all is not built to last.
