Germ Lattice - Gipping Through The Ages (2024)

This Norwich-based trio hit our radar earlier this year when we caught their third live performance in London. Gipping Through the Ages is their debut release.

Joe Barton, Mickey Donnelly, and Louie Rice met in London during the 2000’s but it wasn’t until they had relocated to Norwich in recent years that they rented a studio in a condemned brutalist shopping centre and the Germ Lattice sound was formed. They began by agreeing what they didn’t want the project to be: no improvising or jamming, no overdubs, keep the tracks short etc..

Gipping Through the Ages presents the band’s structured, repetitive & linear tracks built around drums, bass, and synth with deliberately abstract vocals, which draw as much from folk traditions and the broader east Anglian landscape as they do from our fragmented modern world. Their novel use of microphones and live tape processing add a dynamism to the music where elements mask each other or the overdriven meters suggest the whole thing is on the brink of collapse.

Imagine this record as a palimpsest, rooted in place but spanning time, layering ephemeral traces of Mark E Smith, WG Sebald, and Laura Oldfield Ford. Musical references to Mosquitoes, Tools You Can Trust, Dome or Metabolist do not mislead.