Remember

Hailing from Georgia Gacha is a young artist who’s star is rapidly on the rise, a producer capable of pulling together various strands of electronic music heritage and stitching them artfully together to make a bewitching sound all of his own. This debut release proves to be a perfect match to the slowed down, spaced out ethos at the core of the sound with which Apollo records, the offshoot of R&S records set up and run by Renaat Vandepapeliere, are synonymous. Having learnt to play guitar at the tender age of ten, Gacha began his quest to realize his own innate fragile melodies and harmonies early on, but it wasn’t until some years later, in a eureka moment brought about by discovering Boards of Canada’s classic ambient work Geogaddi, that he began to really strive to shape his own sound and sonic environment. Adding the MPC and classic Korg synths to his arsenal, Gacha gradually, patiently developed his own signature and his early productions were quickly picked up on by various influential music blogs. Opening here with Remember, Gacha states his intention right from the get go: distorted washed out chords come underpinned with a funeral-march beat and are complemented by a yearning, distorted pitched down vocal sample which injects a sadness and deep soulfulness into the piece. After gently hypnotizing the listener, Gacha proceeds to introduce a hauntingly melodic guitar line and a switching of the beat from slow half step to a complex stutter, illustrating his love for both the rhythms of the hip hop experimentalists and the swing of early Uk garage. B -side Bowl is a heavier proposition, ramping up the distortion and giving wry admiring nods to the masters of Detroit House and the murky half-light of early dubstep. The chords are pure Detroit and the arrangement constantly defies expectation, slipping and twisting this way and that. The whole piece is enveloped in a shroud of mysterious atmosphere, with the merest presence of a vocal appearing momentari