Whenever the crushing immensity of the Internet makes today’s music feel impenetrable, try to remind yourself that the human experience is a listening experience. Then maybe go listen to the new Galcher Lustwerk album.
It’s his understanding of life’s most mundane physical repetitions that makes Galcher Lustwerk’s third album, “Information,” feel discreetly profound. Instead of pushing out toward the frontiers charted by the electronic musicians who inspired him, he moves his music inward until it starts to feel as intimate and intuitive as everyday life. His sound feels easy to know because it already knows you. It knows what you’re doing with your body when you aren’t out on the dance floor.
Its other distinguishing trait is more obvious: Galcher Lustwerk’s rhymes, which bounce across these rippling house tracks like skipped pebbles. Delivered in purrs and murmurs, his lyrics can be as deep, meaningless, funny or mournful as you need them to be. But his best lines have always felt like fragmented poetry, economical and deadpan. In 2018, he delivered an existential shrug for the ages: “Life is but a b----.” An equally exquisite cut from 2015 simply asked, “Remember?”
On “Information,” his locomotive chitchat feels most vivid during “Fathomless Irie,” a song that tiptoes past the two-minute mark before our narrator’s indoor-voice fades into the picture. “I feel like I’m in Africa,” he explains. “I ain’t never been to Africa.” As his voice floats toward the foreground, the song becomes a confessional daydream, a yearning for ancestral homeland, an astral projection built atop a drum machine’s devoted pulse.
The trivial clacks and clicks of your daily life might provide a portal into this music, but once you’re inside, it takes you far away.
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