Lee Gamble’s Fashions is a chilly, unhappy, wispy album whose songs are like ghosts attempting to speak their unfinished enterprise, unable to puncture the barrier between their airplane of existence and ours. The seven tracks on the UK producer’s new album don’t simply deconstruct pop music; they obliterate it, leaving unmoored vocal bits gasping and choking in useless air, as if separated from their father or mother songs and ravenous for oxygen. There’s one thing curiously touching about these twitching, disembodied songs; you virtually need to choose them up and attempt to put them again collectively once more.

There’s not a single precise human voice to be discovered throughout the file’s 32-minute runtime. As a substitute, Gamble assembled an arsenal of artificial voices, which he then fed via neural networks that scrambled the syllables past recognition. At occasions, the outcomes resemble human language, as when “She’s Not” repeats its title time and again like an overzealous skilled parrot. Others are pure generative gibberish. When you understand which pop track Gamble is atomizing on “XIth c. Spray”—trace: it’s an early hit by an American pop star whose final identify rhymes with “spray”—the distinction between acquainted melody and alien language turns into humorous, poignant, and horrifying. You virtually really feel sorry for the substitute voice because it performs the perform it was created to carry out, endlessly and unthinkingly, with no comprehension of how ridiculous it sounds.

Gamble’s manufacturing feels simply as incorporeal because the voices. Composed of endlessly circling rave melodies and chord progressions that lead nowhere, it harkens again to the ambient jungle deconstructions on his 2012 album Diversions 1994-1996 and conjures the identical feeling of cavernous vacancy. His productions is probably not composed by AI, however they don’t precisely sound human both, with “Purple Orange” daringly disappearing into silence in its opening seconds. (Many listeners could discover themselves checking their quantity settings.) Even unmistakable nods to Hyperdub labelmate Burial on “Juice” and Boards of Canada on “Blurring” really feel much less like references and extra like errant bits of cultural detritus that Gamble simply occurred to scoop up whereas digging, WALL-E-like, via a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The album’s one second of beautiful magnificence—a wash of Ashra-like guitars at the start of “She’s Not”—appears completely divorced from the remainder of the music right here, which proceeds from such inhuman logic that the concept of “magnificence” appears as international to it as it might be to a crocodile.