Lee Gamble’s Models is a cold, sad, wispy album whose songs are like ghosts trying to communicate their unfinished business, unable to puncture the barrier between their plane of existence and ours. The seven tracks on the UK producer’s new album don’t just deconstruct pop music; they obliterate it, leaving unmoored vocal bits gasping and choking in dead air, as if separated from their parent songs and starving for oxygen. There’s something curiously touching about these twitching, disembodied songs; you almost want to pick them up and try to put them back together again.
There’s not a single actual human voice to be found across the record’s 32-minute runtime. Instead, Gamble assembled an arsenal of synthetic voices, which he then fed through neural networks that scrambled the syllables beyond recognition. At times, the results resemble human language, as when “She’s Not” repeats its title over and over like an overzealous trained parrot. Others are pure generative gibberish. Once you realize which pop song Gamble is atomizing on “XIth c. Spray”—hint: it’s an early hit by an American pop star whose last name rhymes with “spray”—the contrast between familiar melody and alien language becomes funny, poignant, and frightening. You almost feel sorry for the artificial voice as it performs the function it was created to perform, endlessly and unthinkingly, with no comprehension of how ridiculous it sounds.
Gamble’s production feels just as incorporeal as the voices. Composed of endlessly circling rave melodies and chord progressions that lead nowhere, it harkens back to the ambient jungle deconstructions on his 2012 album Diversions 1994-1996 and conjures the same feeling of cavernous emptiness. His productions may not be composed by AI, but they don’t exactly sound human either, with “Purple Orange” daringly disappearing into silence in its opening seconds. (Many listeners may find themselves checking their volume settings.) Even unmistakable nods to Hyperdub labelmate Burial on “Juice” and Boards of Canada on “Blurring” feel less like references and more like errant bits of cultural detritus that Gamble just happened to scoop up while digging, WALL-E-like, through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The album’s one moment of stunning beauty—a wash of Ashra-like guitars at the beginning of “She’s Not”—seems totally divorced from the rest of the music here, which proceeds from such inhuman logic that the idea of “beauty” seems as foreign to it as it would be to a crocodile.
