“Don’t believe the hype”, Public Enemy warned back in 1988. That rule still applies, even when reviewing a mysterious underground album like “Wino-E”, just released on Dublin’s Wah Wah Wino, the label that gave us the cyber-dub freshness of Gombeen & Doygen. This anonymous V.A. record has sparked a quiet buzz among collectors and diggers. Who’s behind it remains unknown, though judging by the sound, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to suspect the hand of Morgan Buckley, one of the label’s co-owners. In the underground, hype still holds meaning, or maybe it’s just a pretext for those rare bursts of collective excitement that grow slowly, deep among a handful of devoted listeners.
But let’s move on and talk music. The offering here is… unusual, even magical. It’s somewhere between dreamy outsider house and minimalist wonky techno, as if SW. and DJ Sotofett, tripping hard, were writing an alphabet book for drunk synthesizers, whose ultimate goal is to drift through our deepest dreams. It’s lo-fi and raw in its saturations, yet elegant and deliberate in its structures and evolutions, all orbiting the same concept: the unexpected. “Wino-E” is a fresh release, the kind we haven’t heard in a while. It’s leftfield techno, but touched by synths and arpeggios: imagine Legowelt diving first into kosmische musik, then straight into a bottle (“twnety2”).
Exotic and unconventional, it’s one of those records you’d hear in a boutique shop that only sells rare vinyl, and find yourself thinking “what the hell is this? it’s brilliant!”. You could just as easily hear it in a proper, tasteful, party-ready club. The loops are organic structures filled with warps and misalignments (“Bud”), where it almost sounds like a jazz ensemble devoted to synthetic tribalism. Quantization, here, is a distant memory. A point of reference might be Bookworms, but packed with so many details it’d put any seasoned percussionist to shame (“Cc”).
In short, “Wino-E” isn’t easy to pin down, thanks to the variety of moods and atmospheres it explores, all while staying rooted in a clear aesthetic. Basically, it feels like club music beamed in from another world. “004” brushes against introspective dub techno (buried under layers upon layers of saturation), “Funny Ha” seems lifted from a Martian’s electro catalog, and “Bigsaus” samples a saxophone to conjure a vibe somewhere between Balearic clubbing and Jon Hassell. “Ggokok” fuses the pulse of nu-disco, the grain of lo-fi house, and the shimmer of gamelan. The hype, as we said, feels justified here, even if within that niche inhabited by Discogs diggers and crate-diving heads. And just to make sure we’re not missing anything, the record isn’t available in digital format: credit goes to the kind souls who decided to upload it to YouTube.
Because really: how else are we supposed to feed the hype?
