Iglooghost is Seamus Malliagh, who grew up in Shaftesbury, a small town in the south of England, and says he was raised on the internet. He started out making rap beats for other kids online, and Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder released his EP Chinese Nü Yr in 2015, while he was still a teenager. Neō Wax Bloom, his first album, followed on September 29, 2017. He made it under one rule: never copy and paste a single bar, so that every song keeps changing instead of settling into a beat.
The story continues the EP’s. Two giant eyeballs crash into a misty world called Mamu and throw its creatures’ life cycle off balance: Yomi, a multicoloured pom-pom monk; Lummo, a blind witch training a band of melon-coloured babies; Uso, a bug thief in a green cloak. The artwork is his own, and the vinyl comes with a 12-page comic and a sheet of character stickers. In interviews he kept a straight face and said it all really happened, through a portal in his garden. To Noisey he gave the plainer version: the record deals with “primal religious themes”, and escape, because real life is boring.
He began at the turn of 2016, after six months in which he could not finish a single song for it. “Bug Thief” was the first to come, and the album was done by March 2017. Every track took more than a month in Reason, at one or two bars a day, and he wanted each to have its own mood. He was too tired in the evenings for new electronic music, so he listened to choral music, Balinese music, Steve Reich and 1980s Japanese ambient records that imitated acoustic instruments with early synths. The work felt “like military camp”, he said, and he “sorta broke my brain in the process”. By the end he had damaged his health.
“Göd Grid”, the closer, runs at about 220 BPM. It took three months and was eight minutes long for a while before he cut 64 bars he hated, and the project file grew so heavy that he had to bounce the audio after every small edit just to hear it. Critics singled out the saxophone running up and down “Super Ink Burst”. “White Gum” chops up the grime MC AJ Tracey’s vocal from “Naila” and pitches it high, and “Sōlar Blade”, by his account, follows Uso as Yomi chases him across a mountain range made of chalk. Cuushe sings the ballad “Infinite Mint”, and Mr. Yote raps a pitch-shifted verse on “Teal Yomi / Olivine”. The thread through all of it is Charlotte Day Wilson’s voice from his 2016 track “Gold Tea”, reshaped each time it returns.
Reviews were close to unanimous on the invention. Metacritic averaged 83 from six reviews, PopMatters and Loud and Quiet gave it 9 out of 10 and AllMusic four stars, and it entered Billboard’s Dance/Electronic Album Sales chart at number nine. Pitchfork’s Jay Balfour, at 7.3, admired how little ever repeats, but heard the tracks run together under the same gloss and called the album “a sensory attack”. Spectrum Culture’s Nathan Stevens found it thrilling and exhausting at once, with little room to breathe, and wanted more of the gentler side heard in the guitar break of “Bug Thief”.
The rule that makes the album is also what wears it down. In dance music, repetition is how a track gives you a place to stand. Take it away from every bar of 41 minutes and density becomes the only constant. Malliagh saw it coming: he expected the record to sound “jarring and overwhelming” to a lot of people. The craft is real, and so is the fatigue. The steadiest thing on the album is Charlotte Day Wilson’s voice, lifted from one of his own older songs, which Pitchfork called “a rare bit of human comfort”.
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