Furry Worried Ape

Description

Furry Worried Ape (TER130) is the second album by Badge Epoch - the solo project of Maximilian "Twig" Turnbull - and the first in his discography created almost entirely alone. After Scroll (2021), a sprawling double album that WIRE described as "an attempt to condense an entire universe onto two vinyl records," this one is surgically precise: six tracks, less than half an hour, produced and mixed with meticulous patience by Turnbull at Clyde's Temple, his home studio set up in his garage. Built measure by measure through MIDI programming - using drum sounds from The Cloud Sound, a sample bank sourced from the Badge Époque Ensemble sessions - the rhythms warp the grid according to their own logic, evolving in a singular register, at the boundary between performance and programming. From this blur emerges a language steeped in the sumptuous elegance of the Mizell brothers' productions and the symphonic jazz-funk of Love Unlimited, refracted through a modern "hauntological" prism; the cosmopolitan heights of 1970s studio arrangements, readapted for the age of automation. Throughout the album, the multiple meanings of the term "funk" are explored: a syncopated and groovy mood construction; a singular strangeness; the unique "smell" of a personal vision appropriating the language of a live band.