Exhaust

‘Exhaust’ is the hyper, nervy second part of Lee Gamble’s head-rinsing triptych ‘Flush Real Pharynx’, following from the giddy rushes of his first volume; ‘In A Paraventral Scale’.
Continuing Gamble’s pursuit of a modern ambient zeitgeist - as in the dictionary sense, relating to both immediate surroundings and forms of advertising, as well as an extension of ‘90s ambient techno (weirdo dance musick) - ‘Exhaust’ expands his current album cycle album with an incisive exploration of “the three stages of the Semioblitz - the aggressive onslaught of visual and sonic stimuli of contemporary cities and virtual spaces.” Parsing the shrapnel of everyday ephemera, both physical and emulated, via reconstituted memories of original ‘90s rave - jungle, techno, avant electronics - and modernist updates of trancehall and deco-dance styles, Gamble acts as a fleshy conduit for an intense, restless flux of ideas perhaps relatable to anyone who lives in a big city or indeed the modern world, including its viral parallels.
Working within a style he’s developed over the past decade, in a transition from pure computer musique of his 2009 debut LP to the deconstructed jungle of ‘Diversions 1994-1996’ and the concept-driven ‘Mnestic Pressure’, his current sound consolidates all that came before it in a super lucid yet fluidly mercurial style that distinguishes him from the crowd and speaks to his close personal relationship with UK dance music and avant electronics.
Throughout the 8 tracks of ‘Exhaust’ Gamble pulls myriad aspects of real and virtual worlds into buckled chromatic reflections and polymetric rhythms that describe and suppose a hypermodernist sense of chaos and digitally-divined immanence with shamanistic vision. Between the introductory detonation of ‘CREAM’, with its synth voice flogging Paco Rabanne, to the way he clearly evokes the eye-flickering intensity of data overload in the rushing jungle snares and head-spinning doppler revs of ‘Saccades’, the album typically finds a brilliant tension between making you dance and spanking your grey matter, resulting in a strong highlight in the rug-pulling rave madness of ‘Glue’, a pitching footwork zinger in ‘Naja’, and 2050AD styles in ‘Shards.’