Yunzero - Butterfly DNA (2022)

Impeccably produced and gripping West Mineral wooze from Naarm’s Yunzero, adding to our sizeable appreciation for the Aussie school with a sublime and frazzled set of gaseous, crumbling loops and effervescent soundscapes that plays like a mixtape we can imagine a descendant of Left Ear would grip in 2045.

Based in Naarm, Jim Sellars is a strong new addition to the West Mineral stable, bringing with him a profound understanding of textural ambient, bass-heavy dubwise sounds and fractured beat music. After a few cassette releases for Naarm's own .jpeg Artefacts and the Chicago-based Lillerne Tape Club - home of West Mineral's Mister Water Wet and Ben Bondy - Sellars has assembled a record that jumps through sonic wormholes as it drags through soundscapes and meticulously chiseled technoid sketches.

Dancing in and around an airspun grid weft with sampledelic fragments of ‘90s ambient dance music, Yunzero lucidly works a sound close to the expansive heart of West Mineral, measured with an equilibrium of drifting out-of-the-lines gauze and cogent, semi-melodic structures that move against convention. From our detached perspective, in the humid post-industrial flatlands of south Manchester, Yunzero’s music feels as though it maps mountain ranges and subtropical climes in its scale and democratic ecology of sounds, projecting escapist sojourns on the back of the eyelids.

‘Butterfly DNA’ lands gently on the mind, with imperceptible jump-cuts and transitions lending to the rolling rural simulacra feel. Plunging in with the cool splash and viscosity to ‘Drop of Honey’, the breezy tendrils of ‘Leaf’ give way to recycled ambient beat loops in ‘Ice Punk’ and the album’s most substantial cut - a nugget of a DJ Plead-like groove on ‘Cupid Television’. From herein the thread gets beautifully frayed between the kaleidoscope turns of slurred downbeats in ‘Snail’ and ambient floor hugger ‘Graffitti In The Pond’, while bush doof echoes perfuse ‘Acrylic Germ’ in a more fractious outburst that brings the album down to close with a surprise in the tail, a reminder that nature can nip as well as soothe.