Ten minutes per track, drifting between cybernetic dub and sound design in the spirit of Rhythm & Sound. Gombeen & Doygen is the alias of vocalist James Grünfeld and producer Morgan Buckley: the latter already known for the mesmerizing 2014 release Shout Out To All The Weirdos In Rathmines, where lo-fi house textures were blended with krautrock echoes in a kind of sonic alchemy. Think of the German seventies lineage led by Can and Neu!, driven by a psychedelic avant-garde with deep electronic roots. Krautrock is often seen as one of the forefathers of club culture: hypnotic, ritualistic, music for meditative trances. With those four early tracks merging Germanic rock and hypnagogic house, no one could’ve predicted a project like Gombeen & Doygen.
Here, instead of lo-fi grit, we get razor-sharp sound design, majestic low-end, carefully sculpted hiss and crackle, and a masterful control of texture. Between swirling delays and subterranean sequences, the strongest reference point is clearly Rhythm & Sound: Gombeen & Doygen offer a seamless fusion of techno and Jamaican dub, soaked in the ghostly trails of the Boss Space Echo Re-201, a delay unit that helped shape the sound of modern electronic music. And yet, against this mystic haze of dub fumes, Grünfeld’s voice stands out: a chant processed through a mechanical vocoder, transforming him into a kind of quantum shaman, more machine than man, a spectral entity made of code and circuitry, leaving only a faint human trace. Prada, with its ten winding minutes, feels like a rightful heir to the legacy of Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus.
On the flip side, Sequel offers another nod to ‘90s dub techno. The beat alone recalls the slow-burning pulse of the Maurizio project, but it’s paired with an arpeggio that flows with the same fluid grace as Presence by Cyrus, another Basic Channel offshoot. But Gombeen & Doygen aren’t copycats: this is a deeply personal tribute to the genre’s pioneers. Their sound feels fresh, even visionary. Sequel leans into a faint new age shimmer, and the vocals, whether guttural and earthy or robotic and abstract: give it a strange, otherworldly charm. If this EP casts a spell on you, good news: in 2021, the duo released D’Americana / Auto-Lies, perhaps even more inspired. A brief discography, but one charged with ritual power.
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