If I got a redo on our Top Avant-Garde List of 2022, O R B E L’s Lur Hezea would be in our Top Five. This stellar record came out last year on USOPOP // Medication Time and deserves all of the shine it gets, and then some. I swear this album slaps as hard as the first Sigur Ros and possesses the same sort of ethereal magic! Vocally O R B E L’s music takes the listener to a realm where power shapeshifts into many different audio animals! The production you will encounter on Lur Hezea morphs and weaves into sonic storms that will awaken your inner being plus point you to your future! So the deal is that O R B E L is having their album reworked by eight artists ranging from noise to dance. Today we want to share with y’all DROWSE’s rework of O R B E L’s “Ufada,” and I can’t front, the visual is rad! I must say it’s an honor to feature projects like O R B E L on CVLT Nation.
Orbel’s “Ufada” showcases these unique short and menacing vocalizations that I wanted to highlight in my remix, sounds like “eeyah, ahh ahh, uuuh etc…” Perhaps I hyper-fixated on the timbre of these voices because I could not understand the lyrics. The vocal patterns in the original song were very rhythmic, a feature that lent itself to further sampling and sequencing those vocal fragments to create new syncopated patterns. This sort of vocal sampling––handling the voice as raw sound material––can be found all over my work as Drowse. It was at least partially inspired by Koreless’s EP Yugen, which was released in 2013, the same year that I started my project. I also treated the song w/ one of my favorite production techniques: running sounds out through RAT pedals for beautiful distortion colors. Orbel are experts at blending electronics with noisey/heavy rock sounds, I hope this remix helps emphasize the textural pleasures of this combination.
Drowse (Kyle Bates)
