Lee Gamble announces new Hyperdub album with ‘She’s Not’ video
West Midlander runs the road

Lee Gamble is to release his latest album, Models, via Hyperdub on October 20.
The first taster is the track ‘She’s Not’, which features a strange video featuring the same stretch of midlands motorway the album sleeve portrays.
The Birmingham producer, according to his accompanying press blurb, lets “sonic spectres inform a suite of illusory anthems; taking in sublimely vulnerable, half-remembered fragments of dream pop, Soundcloud rap and trance in the process” on the LP.
“It’s a technique that advances the theories behind Gamble’s 2012 album Diversions 1994-1996, when the producer vaporized interludes and breakdowns from his collection of jungle tapes into ghosted echoes. He surveys and blurs musical history in much the same way here, but swerves sampling completely and isn’t in search of passive, ambient euphoria.
“On Models Gamble instead trains his focus on the synthetic voice, an element that’s far more conspicuous. Loose phrases were fed into a series of neural networks which would attempt to mimic them and sing them back, often corrupting them into indecipherable clouds. Gamble’s role was to make sense of the chatter and twist these non-words into tight emotional coils.”

The record’s front cover is a dimly lit photograph of a West Midlands motorway, rooting Gamble’s effervescent fantasies in lived albeit flimic reality. It’s a direct link to the producer’s home turf and a conscious attempt to sidestep the visual aesthetics of contemporary digital art.
On ‘Purple, Orange’ Gamble’s process is heralded by a crooning, artificial wail. As unsettling and out-of-body as an episode of déjà vu, it’s marked with eldritch wrinkles that pitch it closer to Carnatic scales, stressing that the transhuman voice doesn’t come from a single place, but all places at once: no-one and everyone.