J.G. Biberkopf - The Seed, The Sinkhole, The Flower and The Flare (2024)

A state of profound abstraction has long characterized the music of J. G. Biberkopf. During a decade of post-noise experimentation, Biberkopf, aka Gediminas Žygus, explored and fabricated a hyper-mediated world. Following on from Ecologies II: Ecosystems Of Excess, this long-gestating second album, pulsing with eroticism, pushes its listener further inward. The Seed, The Sinkhole, The Flower, and The Flare is the Lithuanian artist’s most visceral release, touching on dissociation, embodiment, and grief. Žygus’s new body of work unfolds over nine interlacing compositions of intimate environmental sounds, experimental synthesizer techniques, and poetic writing built from the detritus of a life in constant flux.

Continuing to exist in a state of transience—detached and unattached within the harsh milieu of economic precarity and ecological instability, the J. G. Biberkopf project remained suspended for the past eight years. Rumbling beneath a bedrock of personal and geopolitical crises, Žygus turned toward more collaborative work with the likes of Holly Childs, Mariechen Danz, and Metahaven. Those synergies have left a mark on Žygus’s practice, with elements of the album being based on the score for the latter Amsterdam-based artist duo’s 2021 film Chaos Theory, while Childs lends her words to two tracks. A disrupted tone carries the whispers of Elliott Lauren Ryan reciting “Do You Love It?”: You are really close to my face /And it feels fine. Meanwhile, contributions from cover artist Yen Chun Lin come in the field recordings that rise out of The Seed, The Sinkhole, The Flower, and The Flare overall.

J. G. Biberkopf’s return evokes the struggle to maintain a sense of identity amidst external and internal turmoil. Also inspired by trance, the word here has less to do with its point in the rave continuum and more with the psychedelic semi-consciousness of spiritual transcendence that inspires Žygus’s approach. Their relationship to this religious revelation comes from their experience growing up in Europe’s East, encountering the dissonance between being surrounded by those striving to commune with God via catholic choir singing, and a tense and multifaceted upbringing. The Seed, The Sinkhole, The Flower, and The Flare refers to this in-between space—culturally, socially, geographically, historically—while embracing the duality of the album’s titlular reference to the furtive self-exposure of longing that permeates the everyday.