J.Tripp - Lethe (2022)

Justin Tripp is a constant in the US underground music landscape. From his 10-year tenure in Georgia with Brian Close to a plethora of personal and collaborative projects, Tripp has never deviated from a path of absolute devotion to polychromatic, wild free-form and playful noise-obsession. As one of the sparse solo releases made under his own name, Lethe sees his debut on Haunter Records, toying with an approach that finds Tripp experimenting with a kind of minimalism which draws away from the polyrhythmic mayhem of his past, making for a unique chapter in his discography.

Utilizing virtually no traditional instruments, the elements that form each track on the album were generated by processing bits of well-known music through a single piece of outboard gear, letting the original sounds splinter apart and return completely new. From disintegration to reconstruction. Drenched in the moody experimentalism that ties contemporary bedroom productions with post-punk sensibilities and the isolationist branch of the glitch era, Tripp uses the accumulation of un-functional forays as a way of molding sound into structure. In the end, not even a hazy memory of the original audio survives, the ghosts of each sonic source phasing in and out of perception.

The result feels obsessive and meditative at once, a type of sampledelia rooted in contemporary urban anxiety, sublimating itself into a thing of precarious beauty.