Upsammy - Zoom

We all know sometimes the best acts at a music festival are the ones you weren’t planning to see. As I left the beautifully cocophonous blankets of sound that Liturgy blast into the upper turbine at White Bay Power Station, I walked into Soft Centre’s main hall to hear high-end glitches and metallic but very melodic textures, not knowing who it was. The way the majority of people were taking it in were on completely different spectrums - you literally had white guys that look like me standing there with hands in pockets like they were witnessing performance art, and other people moving every single limb in their body to this music. Not sure if that’s a reflection on the strange amalgamation of music lovers that Soft Centre strung together, or if it’s a perfect snapshot of Upsammy’s music. Somewhere between those two opposite ends of the spectrum is where I feel I fit when listening to a project like Zoom. Listen to any track for a few moments and you’re hit with gorgeously-produced timbres - rattling jingly keys acting like shakers, those same jingly keys hitting like jarring snares, and those same jingly keys again probably tuned and splayed into a dazzling melody. Like the wall of green behind the melting ice of the cover, all these sonic elements, while often moving at a rapid pace, feel like they’re pulled from a luscious botanic garden - like every blip in melody is a raindrop falling off a lilypad, or high-pitched looping tweaks in percussion like a ladybug’s wings extended about to take flight. It all sounds like bullshit but listen closely and you can really sense this could’ve been what she was visualing. But importantly, all these tracks have some semblance of rhythm to them; some semblance of momentum. I caught myself bobbing my head in time to some strange beat on Subsoil yesterday but I couldn’t work out what pocket I caught. I remember Upsammy doing the same thing live; despite all the seemingly separate elements in the mix, there’s a driving beat here, and she was slowly bobbing her head along to these mutant grooves she’d created. There’s an art to crafting music rooted so purely in electronics that evokes such a human reaction, and I think Upsammy captures that here on Zoom, and in her music broadly. Maybe those dudes breakdancing in the crowd were right.