ALBUM OF THE DAY
Album of the Day: Iglooghost, “Clear Tamei/Steel Mogu”
By Joe Muggs · August 16, 2018

Only barely out of his teens, Seamus Malliagh, aka Iglooghost, calls his style “messed-up ADHD-addled environments with hella drums and sound design,” which is kind of accurate but doesn’t even begin to do justice to his sonic ambition. His dual-EP release Clear Tamei/Steel Mogu are full of the kind of fidgety micro-edit finesse and grandiose mind-pummeling you might be familiar with from electronica big shots like Amon Tobin, Squarepusher, or Eprom—but there’s also a particular kind of mischievous humor, weaving memories of J-pop, dancehall, trap, and ultra-cheesy happy hardcore rave in and out of the crazed structures at a molecular level.

The title track of Clear Tamei sets out the stall: alien voices rap in a made-up language and romantic string refrains cut without warning into Aphex Twin rave mania. (In the official music video for “Clear Tamei,” Malliagh appears to get beaten up by a DMT elf.) Elsewhere, there are opera singers getting stretched like chewing gum (“Black Light Ultra”), what sounds like a Prince guitar solo turned into some sort of Starfighter aircraft engaging in a laser battle with yet more elves (“Namā”), and a dubstep rave as imagined by an AI (“Niteracer”). And on it goes. No sound exists for more than a microsecond before dissipating into thousands more or mutating into something freakish or foolish. It’s harrowingly brilliant.

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