šmu - morph ⁄ モーフ

 Released: August 25

On their debut album, Croatian artist šmu (pronounced as shmu) brings a spanning and wide-ranging body of work wrapped in a theme of transformation and change, which is certainly lived out in the music. It starts out with “white gold,” a track that feels somewhere in the realm of dark vaporwave with ambient influences. It’s a bit haunting, especially with the eerie vocalizations and a rather minimal use of something that sounds similar to a marimba or glockenspiel, but alien. Then, “pastel blue” comes along and gives a fully-fleshed out rhythm, sparse as it may be in a dark atmosphere that plays on more pinging tones that bounce around in the mix as heavy kicks and basses thud. And this is just kind of the start of things. 

The idea behind the album is a transformation of slowly becoming mad, or quickly if you prefer to listen at 2x speed (please don’t do that and actually enjoy the work). But this theme is quite pronounced as it comes closer to the end. Just by the third and fourth tracks, the tempo has doubled and TB-303-ish basslines are everywhere. On top of that, the influences and motifs are just all over the place a lot of times. We started out with a percussionless bit of dark ambient and we’re already knee deep in rapid rhythms and  squelchy 303s. As we come to the end with “crimson red,” we start with some spoken word samples and suddenly rush into wildly fast breakcore rhythms chipping out glitched up goodness over some rather atmospheric pads and a small lick playing out a simple repeating phrase. 

And that is is where the best parts of this album are; strewn about. It’s feels like an errant but precise collage of sounds and motifs, seemingly thrown together without care but with a purpose. The integration of so many influences and pieces makes it feel progressively more chaotic and weird. But it all comes to a purpose at the end, even if that end is to sonically explore the very idea of being in a state of voluntary madness.