Galcher Lustwerk: "Parlay"

It’s been two years since New York’s Galcher Lustwerk enraptured a sizeable proportion of the deep-house internet with his mixtape 100% Galcher, an hour-long blend of all original productions. Airy as a feather duvet and warm as the air beneath it, the mix reimagined club music as the stuff of afternoon naps; he overlaid his dusky tone poems with a steady stream of sotto-voce raps that only served to enhance the beats’ narcotic effect.

Though he’s put out a couple of records since then, including the stellar Tape 22 EP for his buddies’ White Material label, the Nu Day EP for Tsuba, and the Freedom instrumentals under his Road Hog alias, the majority of the 100% Galcher tracks remained unreleased individually. That changes this spring, when two EPs on his new Lustwerk Music label will give up no fewer than six cuts from the mix: “Parlay”, “Dockside”, “Kaint”, “I Neva Seen”, “Stem”, and “Cricket’s Theme”, plus two dubs, for good measure.

“Parlay” hasn’t lost any of its power in the past two years. If anything, as commercial dance music has snatched the deep-house baton and sprinted towards the main stages with it, Lustwerk’s restraint—part sullen, part sensual—sounds more distinctive than ever. The drum programming is a steady, muted pitter-pat; the keys are just a pair of chords held down and left swirling, watery and translucent, and accented by the occasional beam of light. (If the synth patch were a preset, it’d be called “Aquarium.”) These humble materials make the perfect frame for a husky monologue that goes from seductive sweet nothings to open-road fantasies in nothing flat. “You know it/ We come through, we bang it out,” he boasts, and somewhere in that contradiction—the omnipresent hush versus the ample confidence—lies much of the project’s exquisite charm.

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