Iglooghost returns to form with Tidal Memory Exo's bass-heavy fervour

Give Iglooghost a moment, and there’s dissonant harmony among a patchwork of synths with such multiplicity that every track is a bet with himself with how many presets he can fit into three minutes.

Tidal Memory Exo is overwhelming, detailed, textured, and wildly bottom-loaded, but then it continues. The next burst must recapture my imagination, fighting for my attention with itself like infinite pairs of jingling keys taking turns in the spotlight before my Zoomer ears. Against all odds, he finds almost enough ingenuity to make it work.

Iglooghost is forever the maximalist, and the optimist for that matter; forget the abject nihilism one could pick up tone-wise from his work the same way the average moviegoer deduces that the bad guy of the story is evil, take a look deeper than your contract requires. There’s grace, not in the bass-tortured mixes and cannibal dancefloors this record shotguns like tequila the last night of a Miami trip, but there’s grace in the novelty: every moment is an uproar, every texture an opportunity, for better or worse.

Self-confidence like this cannot exist in a vacuum, you have to be there, too. As a producer, he may be packing his record with laser-focused rhythmic violence destined to bore a hole from headphone to headphone, but there’s an art to doing exactly what you wanted, with the listening world to the wayside.

Not to portray this record as a burst of chaos to an electro beat, its variety is present as the black sheep cousin hiding in the basement at a family gathering; “Flux Cocoon” incorporates borrowed vocals to break up the monotony of Iglooghost’s deadpan faux-rapping, and the sheer auditory audacity of “Coral Mimic” being this bass-boosted brings a wide grin. The 1997 Pontiac Bonneville that I sent to the junkyard as a teenager pines for the honour of having it blow its speakers.

Tidal Memory Exo is that high-octane romp that plays well on a speaker, the sound and the fury, but less so in every other conceivable music-enjoying circumstance. Yet another lesson to be learned: music is about positioning the right moment, and putting oneself in the proper current. This record is then just another child of the Zaireeka! family tree; find the right spot, and anything can have its moment.