NL premiere

The productions of Manchester-based artist Sockethead create an abstract montage of colours, tones, and textures. Those familiar with his music shouldn’t be surprised by the interdisciplinary nature of his practice – working across painting, collage, and sound. His most recent cassette, Drenched Worlds Fall Apart (2023) on label YOUTH, has a painterly quality to its shuddering gestural instrumentations of quaking piano melodies; a sculptural quality to its spectral found-object sampling; and a collage-like nature due to its mutating approach to genre – moving between ambient, kraut rock, bass music, dark electro, and many yet-to-be-defined micro-genres with joyful abandon. Drawing from found internet media, live instrumentation, and field recording, his music acts as an attempt to archive through sound the murky, eerie strangeness of liminal, open-ended spaces. The productions carry a peculiar volume and weight that speaks to the chasmic emptiness of this space that Sockethead seeks to discover in his music.