Gendel, Sam: DRM LP

DRM recreates a sound akin to contemporary R&B using vintage synths and acoustic instruments. It is futuristic electronica made using antiques; space-age soul music created on wobbly guitars, and 1970s drum machines: a post-apocalyptic blip-hop reconstructed by the last man on earth using whatever wreckage Sam Gendel could find. DRM features just one cover version: Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" is transformed into a delicate, aqueous instrumental, with Gendel playing the melody on an old German analogue synthesizer, using a pitch wheel to bend notes as he would on the saxophone. On other tracks he taps into the experimental spirit of latter-day R&B using a forty-year-old Electro Harmonix DRM32 drum machine, two antique synthesizers, and a sixty-year-old nylon-string guitar – all the time singing or chanting rhythmically, sometimes interpreting barely audible lyrics written by his friend Scott. On slow-motion ballads like "Times Like This" and "Wolves is Back" you can hear Gendel play bass lines and neo-soul progressions on his heavily detuned nylon-strung guitar, pitch-shifted through an octave pedal. "It's tuned so low and falling apart – and playing so heavily behind the beat – that it sounds like it's on its last breath," he says. On "Oowee" that same wrecked instrument plays spacey jazz chords over a fidgety breakbeat. On "FFLLYYDADA" you can hear him chanting over wobbly chords played on a thirty-year-old Japanese keyboard called a Suzuki Waraku III. ("It's this electronic koto that I picked up in a second-hand shop in Tokyo," he says. "You hear it a lot on this album"). "WAA" features Gendel singing a haunting melody in a disjointed falsetto voice over a breakbeat that sounds like it's been assembled by glitchy systems noises. The final track, "Walt's", takes a heart-wrenching Brazilian-style melody and sets it to waltz time, slowing down towards the song's conclusion, as if every instrument has melted in the 120-degree heat of Death Valley. Started not long after the release of Satin Doll – at a time when Gendel should have been promoting that album with an international tour, if the world hadn't gone into lockdown – DRM was recorded in one, feverish sixteen-hour session. It was then manipulated by Gendel with the electronic percussionist from Satin Doll, Philippe Melanson, mixed by his friend and collaborator Blake Mills, and mastered by Grammy-nominated engineer Mike Bozzi.