BRUK welcomes the daring shapes and inquisitive textures of ELLLL for her debut album, Earth
Rotation. Across 13 scuffed cuts and grubby miniatures the Irish producer shapes out a distinctive
sound world, steeped in sample science and powered by low-slung grooves.
There’s no direct message permeating Earth Rotation, but burning issues around embattled
ecosystems hang in the air as ELLLL pushes her sound palette until it bites. Extended instrumental
techniques lend the album an in-the-room tangibility, while dislocated micro-loops speak to less
grounded atmospheres. Starting from densely packed collages and diligently chipping away until
spacious, head-knocking arrangements remain, the end results of ELLLL’s process call to mind the
wayward sample acrobatics that made trip-hop and jungle so emotionally resonant and eerily alien
in the same beat. There’s rarely anything like conventional boom-bap or a cosily familiar break, but
ELLLL finds compelling rhythms in unlikely sources of funk, whether plucked, bowed, sequenced
or sculpted. Even when teetering towards techno on ‘Titan’, her particular approach is gloriously
skewed and, by extension, innovative.
No matter how serious the techniques involved, Earth Rotation is a celebration of the magic that
happens when sound gets mistreated. If there are foreboding ideas lingering in the album’s
tendency towards dissonance, ELLLL also knows how to inject her work with a necessary mischief,
making her a perfect fit amongst the maverick BRUK alumni.
