Furry Worried Ape [LP]

Furry Worried Ape (TER130) is the second album by Badge Epoch - Maximilian "Twig" Turnbull's solitary variant of the Badge Époque Ensemble - and the first in his discography made almost entirely alone. Following 2021's Scroll, a 2xLP sprawl which WIRE praised as "an attempt to fit a whole world onto two slabs of vinyl," this one is all scalpel and no sprawl: six tracks, under half an hour, produced and mixed with forensic patience by Turnbull at Clyde's Temple, his garage home-studio.Built bar-by-bar on MIDI programming - using drum sounds from The Cloud Sound, a sample pack drawn from Badge Époque Ensemble sessions - the grooves bend the grid to their own logic, inhabiting an uncanny register between the performed and programmed. From this blur emerges a language steeped in the lavish elegance of Mizell Brothers productions and Love Unlimited's symphonic jazz-funk, refracted through a modern "hauntological" lens; the cosmopolitan peaks of 1970s studio arrangement, rescaled for an era of automation. Throughout, the album navigates multiple meanings of "funk": syncopated, groove-first mood building; idiosyncratic strangeness; the singular "stench" of a one-person vision commandeering a live-band idiom.