Gobby: "Erk"

While several of the UNO NYC label’s boundary-testing misfits are quickly turning into underground superstars of a sort—just consider Arca‘s credits for Kanye, FKA twigs, and Björk, or Mykki Blanco‘s rising profile as a no-holds-barred performance artist, full stop—Gobby has just kept on doing his own weird thing, content to lurk in the shadows. With seven releases for the label in the past two years, he might be UNO’s most prolific artist, but his output hasn’t exactly added up to anything approximating a narrative; shot through with wormy acid lines, broken beats, lo-fi fantasias, and paranoid chillout meltdowns, and flipping both tempos and distortion switches with a wanton disregard for club functionality, his oeuvre takes the form of a switchbacking, sidewinding maze pocked with trapdoors and blackouts.

But with Gobby’s new, free mixtape, Beats by Gobby, the New York producer seems to have taken a major step towards the spotlight. With 20 tracks, there’s plenty of room for him to stretch out, which he does—from the new wave footwork of “Hyuna” to the corroded, barnacled dubstep of “Slasher Bitch”—but the majority of these beats seem like an attempt to steer his idiosyncratic approach towards something we might call classic hip-hop.

Among the heaviest is “Erk”. You can hear a little bit of the RZA in it (that nervous, atonal background wash) and a little Dabrye, too (that bassline, coming on like a blown speaker cone). The laser zaps are likely culled from some classic dub 12-inch, while the overdriven collision of synths and samples—unvarnished, unapologetic—bears some similarity with the millennial style of dancehall captured on Mo’ Wax’s Now Thing compilation. It’s ugly and exhilarating all at once, a real screwface delight.


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