Jeff Surak & Daniel Craig - Gut Health

 

Released: April 7 

Filled with strange rumblings, warbling sounds, and manipulated snippets of speech, Gut Health is a bizarre little exploration on the inner workings of the human digestive system from duo Jeff Surak & Daniel Craig.  Each track is named after one of the hundreds of naturally occurring microbiota found in the digestive system, but don’t expect a science lesson in this album. Instead, expect dark and deeply manipulated atmospheres that sound akin to the nightmare of going through the tract while still fully conscious.

The album opens up with “Firmicutes,” which starts us off with loud and distorted tones that seem close to growling at the listener and seems to be one of the more aggressive tracks here. As we progress on this weird journey, things seem to calm down periodically such as with the slow drones of “Actinobacteria” and the slow detuned twinkling of the final track “Enterococcus.” Regardless of the small pauses, the duo never fails to bring us back to an a certain level of intensity and even some slightly less intense weirdness like on “Fusobacteria” with its severely distorted fuzz bass that has been reprocessed and twisted up in knots. What makes it really work, along with many other tracks, is the integration of these odd pieces of manipulated speech. It really adds this little touch that keeps things even more sonically interesting and confusing.