Never mind the spoken word: “THIS IS NOT A SPOKEN WORD TAPE,” announce Georgie McVicar and Laurel Uziell in a note accompanying their self-titled debut as Egg Meat. Across five unsettling tracks, the London experimental musicians take recordings of radical poet and essayist Danny Hayward and slice them into slender ribbons; “Climate and Resilience” represents the EP’s thrilling, bewildering apex.
At once peak-time floor-filler and meditative mind-fuck, the track runs at two different speeds simultaneously. The atonal groove is a glassy take on Robert Hood’s Motor City minimalism, yet it surges forward with a lopsided, limping cadence; the three-against-four drum pattern lends the sense that something’s been excised from the rhythm, the beat spliced dangerously together with an uneven seam. But where the drums hurtle ahead, Hayward’s equally razored-up voice positively crawls, syllables pitched down and turned to jelly. Slowed and garbled, unintelligible phrases appear as though from the depths of a fever dream; single words surface, like rotted logs in a flood tide, and slip back beneath the murk. And then, after four minutes and change of this disorienting whirl, it simply ends mid-stride, leaving you wondering what the hell just happened.
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