Toshi Eat Barry - The World My Oyster

Released: August 14

The World My Oyster comes across as a slightly spicy electronic soup. It adventurously blends a wide array of electronic styles including elements of shoegaze, downtempo, and ambient with heavy foundations of drum and bass and techno. It’s a rather eclectic blend to say the least, but there’s an element of that it part hazy and part gritty that seems to make everything gel together surprisingly well. Even with the heavy drum and bass influence, things stay relatively chill throughout the runtime and remain in the mid-tempo region with a few exceptions. “Let’s Take a Walk Through My Bug Garden Just You and Me” comes across as almost breakcore with some rapid fire drums coming in at the beginning, then distorting and giving a timestretched effect that gives all kind of brain-tickling artifacts. 

“Evidence of Frog Communication with Whales Via Binarual Beats” feels like one of the more inexplicable entries. It comes across with an almost 80s retrowave vibe with a minimal beat and rhythm. It’s enjoyable, if not a bit confusing in its presentation. The following track, “Hurricane Oyster, 1950,” keeps a similar vibe with the minimalism, but has a mostly downbeat vibe rather than leaning on a more simple rhythm. Then “Mogging By the Stream (Dubwise)” presents us with an odd blend of dub influences and a kind of balladeer-y melody playing out in a rather foggy soundscape. The album closes out with “Oyster Returns to Ocean ASMR,” which is a blend of deep house rhythmic currents and super airy pads that wash around the space like high tide coming in. 

The album is a lot of a mixed bag sonically. There’s obviously a lot of different influences that come in and those influences blend very nicely in most cases, with a few mixed results. Some of the slower pieces have quite a vapor or retro-adjacent vibe with the faster bits lean more on the break and DnB elements, all while keeping that hazy veneer on top of everything and giving this eclectic album a sense of continuity.