Vinyl LP
“My foundations—I keep demolishing them and building again,” ZULI told critic Angus Finlayson in 2020. At the time he was talking about his transient lifestyle, but there have been repercussions of this on his music, too: all his samples and sounds were stolen while traveling, forcing him to make 2022’s All Caps by ripping samples on the fly. ZULI’s music has literally been shaped by his unsettled life, and so on Lambda, his latest album and first for James Ginzburg’s Subtext Recordings, the theme of movement is the record’s raison d’etre. It’s an ambient album that’s multifaceted depiction of moving through time comes across universal as much as it does deeply personal to ZULI.
Time is malleable on Lambda like it is in the hands of a good DJ. The hip-hop plod in the background of “Fahsil Qusseer” speeds up and slows down like someone playing with the RPM of a vinyl turntable. The scattered warbling on “The Horn” sounds as though someone is searching through FM channels only to find they’re all the same. And the blown-out organ sample of “Myth //” dances about like fingers leafing through papers. It’s an effect Ableton’s Simpler tool can give you and ZULI admitted Simpler and CDJs were a crucial part in his setup. In the past, these jittery samples gave his IDM a dynamic thrust but here without any beat to hold onto, they embody a life without firm foundations.
There are glimpses of rhythm—like the wide trap percussion that eventually emerges from “Trachea”—but most of the music is beatless. Instead of rhythm, ZULI uses texture to bring out a gaping distance between sounds. You can practically see dust flying off the strings on “Plateau” because of how fractured and dry every pluck is. Abdullah Miniawy’s cries feel distant on the other hand because ZULI makes them echo in and out of the track. “Lambda, to me, is the space between two extreme states where you’re uncertain which way you’re about to go.” ZULI told As If No Way. His overlap of harsh and soft textures means he either places the sound right there in front of you or miles away, out of reach, so you’re left caught somewhere in between.
Lambda’s guest vocalist’s try to make sense of this uncertainty. “Have you done much with your life?” MICHAELBRAILEY wonders on “10,000 (Papercuts pt. 1).” The brass synths that roar beneath are the closest the record comes to a Hans Zimmer-esque romanticism but the way MICHAELBRAILEY swoops down from a cracking falsetto to the baritone of “life” grounds the mood in something more imperfect and human. Coby Sey’s clipped verses are equally humble. “The sky seems to be in sync/ With things beyond reach/ And elements we don’t yet know/ But still I can enjoy the view/ Of this midnight galaxy glows.” The sudden switch in subject to make “galaxy” the subject of “glows” (instead of the object of “enjoy”) neatly mirrors Lambda’s constant yo-yoing between personal and universal perspectives.
Lambda’s illustration of time and the uncertainty that surrounds it is rich with detail. ZULI’s neat sampling and turntablist tricks balance the tactile and the immediate with the ethereal and the distant to express all the pushes and pulls of traveling from one place to the next. You might feel lost along the way but, to borrow a line from The Phantom Tollbooth, “the most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what’s in between.”
