In just 10 releases over the past four years, Manchester’s Sferic label has established a remarkably consistent identity—one defined, ironically, by the near absence of identifying features. On records from Space Afrika, Jake Muir, and Perila, among others, Sferic has developed an amorphous take on ambient, gently but firmly tugging the music free of any vestigial new-age connotations and pushing it into a nebulous space where certainties dissolve. The label’s releases train a soft-focus lens on hushed synthesizers, spongy textures, and indistinct field recordings, all obscured beneath layers of reverb and hiss. The resulting forms resemble collections of objects buried beneath fresh snowfall, their outlines barely visible, their origins no longer clear. The longer you listen to any given Sferic release, the less apparent it becomes which parts were played, or programmed, and which are pure happenstance. The label’s releases tend to suggest a similar line of inquiry: How pliable are the seams between order and disorder, or intention and chance?
Leipzig’s TIBSLC makes a natural fit for Sferic. His name is short for “The International Billionaire’s Secret Love Child,” the kind of moniker you might expect to find attached to a third-rate ska-punk band, or perhaps a Grand Royal signing that never came close to recouping its advance. But his music over the last few years, mostly self-released, sounds nothing like the associations the alias might evoke. It is a mottled expanse of shimmer and hum: weightless as a sigh, splotchy as a bruise, cozy and unsettling in equal measure.
Delusive Tongue Shifts – Situation Based Compositions, TIBSLC’s first album for Sferic, begins and ends with the sound of trickling water, like snowmelt rushing across mountain rocks. It is an effective framing device: Between these two liquid bookends, the album plunges us into a swirling expanse of constant motion and mutation. The opening “Soft Afternoon Pressure” introduces the sounds and techniques that will recur throughout the album. Muted synthesizer chords roll in waves, joining in a kind of tidal call and response. Tiny clicking sounds evoke pebbles in the surf. Indistinct voices carry on a private conversation, like a radio heard through a neighbor’s walls. As the track drones on, there is a gradual, almost imperceptible intensification reminiscent of an orchestra tuning up, except in place of instruments, there is only running water, wind through dry grass, cicadas, and electrical hum.
Pretty much every track seems to have been made with the same basic tools. The record is awash in indistinct tone clusters, out-of-sync pulses, and fizzy crackling sounds—an abundance of downy chaos. “Extended Stay of Blue Sky” begins with what might be vinyl crackle; “Nightmode” is bathed in a phosphorescent glow. Even at its most peaceful, though, there is a sense of irreconcilable tension at the heart of the music. TIBSLC’s chords rarely resolve neatly; it is difficult even to parse their precise makeup, given the bright overtones that bristle skyward, blurring the intervals between notes. Everything is shrouded in a kind of arctic glare, like a halo around the sun on a foggy day.
It is not necessarily difficult to create ambient music that tumbles, lava-lamp-style, through a succession of ever-changing cotton-candy hues. Every week, it seems, there’s a new wellness app promising an AI-generated soundtrack designed not only to erase its creator’s fingerprints but to make you forget that you are listening to music at all. None of those propositions, frankly, have ever sounded terribly appealing. What draws me back to TIBSLC’s music is the sense that there’s something more there, something just beyond my perception. The buried voices and omnipresent insect buzz lend the impression that there are hidden messages coded into the din; the drone suggests a surfeit of information that resists deciphering.
Listen deeply enough into the murk, and some of TIBSLC’s most outlandish sounds—the chatter of aviary gossip, the whale song crossed with whizzing bottle rockets—begin to reveal their secrets. There are rhythms encrypted into almost every level of the music: galumphing sub-bass pulses, filters that open and close like a bellows, the accelerating clatter of a dropped quarter coming to rest. Innumerable fluttering pulses are in play at any given moment, speeding and slowing, trilling and throbbing, lending movement and purpose to seemingly static sounds. No matter how freely the music seems to drift, there is little doubt that there is a guiding hand behind it; what else could account for this uncanny space where the natural and the synthetic blend so seamlessly and unpredictably? There are entire worlds to be explored in TIBSLC’s mysterious tangle of textures and sensations, and they teem with life.
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