One thing secret is going on in JR Seaton’s work as Name Tremendous. During the last decade, they’ve developed a personal language for his or her largely instrumental digital music, which skirts the sides of the dancefloor like a small woodland creature slinking by the underbrush. Take note of the observe titles, and bizarre patterns and semi-rhymes emerge—obvious sequence like “Okko Ink,” “Ekko Ink,” and “Ekkles,” or Arpo and “Arpo Sunk”; vowel-heavy names like Suzi Ecto, “Sulu Sekou,” “Fluenka Mitsu”; the aliases Elmo Crumb and Ondo Fudd. These mysterious, staccato phrases and phrases, often nodding playfully to Harpo Marx or Elmer Fudd, recommend a code that may unlock the secrets and techniques of the UK musician’s invented universe, if solely we may crack it.
On Name Tremendous’s fourth album, Eulo Cramps—there’s one other a type of cryptic titles—this path of breadcrumbs leads not out of the woods however deeper into it. Seaton began out within the early 2010s making stern, barnstorming membership tracks, and so they’ve by no means fully deserted their dancefloor tendencies—simply see the plush, quick-stepping “Swallow Me,” from final 12 months, or the glowing floor-fillers of 2021’s Cherry Drops I and II. However Name Tremendous’s three earlier albums have often strayed removed from membership conference, swapping four-on-the-floor beats and crowd-moving riffs for serpentine clarinet melodies and crinkly textures of tin foil and bubble wrap. These motifs, indebted to each Jon Hassell’s ambient jazz and the electric-typewriter rhythms of early IDM, have turn out to be signature parts of Name Tremendous’s music. On Eulo Cramps, they render their most holistic and beguiling imaginative and prescient but.
The brand new album is a part of a broader multimedia undertaking, Inform Me I Didn’t Select This, that can mix textual content, portray, and music. However even skilled in isolation, Eulo Cramps seems like a end result of concepts which were effervescent in Name Tremendous’s work for years. It’s shot by with acoustic or acoustic-sounding devices: piano, congas, drums, bells, and harp strings. Melancholy clarinet melodies—performed by Seaton’s father, then multi-tracked into eerie harmonic clouds, or twisted and pitch-shifted into surreal, artificial ribbons—type the tonal middle of many tracks. Sounds jostle collectively, collide, and typically fuse, endowed with an unusually tactile heft. In some moments, it feels as if Seaton has daubed on keys with a sponge or putty knife, yielding thick, gloopy streaks; the excessive finish bristles with metallic shards and wood splinters. It’s probably the most vivid sound design of the producer’s profession.
