Approaching five years on, Hyph11E’s debut album Aperture remains one of electronic music’s most evocative releases. Themes of biology and geology have remained ever-present in her discography, but Aperture provided her most coherent, fleshed-out assemblage of these motifs to date. Having released the EP Vanishing Cinema in 2017 to widespread critical acclaim, 2020’s Aperture finetunes the formula, leaving much excitement for what she chooses to release next.

Aperture is about holes. “Holes are ontologically parasitic – they are always within something else and cannot exist in isolation” – she claims. Such is apparent in Wang Nemone’s wonderfully unnerving album artwork. It’s not really something you would want people to see you looking at on the bus. Both metallic and fleshy, with a pitch-black oculus, it appears organic, yet mechanically mutated. It perhaps owes a debt to the work of H.R Giger.

The visceral artwork is compounded by a series of increasingly complex, tension-filled compositions, each track providing a lens into the unflinchingly unique soundscape she’s created.

‘Encrust’ is a noisy, glitchy opener, introducing a menace that reverberates throughout the album. Elongated, ominous strings usher us into the pulsating ‘Accretion’, in which robotic groans intertwine with frantic vocal chops. The hostility of the drones intensifies on ‘Knots’, coiling inward into a relentless undercurrent. Peppered throughout the track are jagged fragments of speech – “Yo he’s on some…“ – snapshots of interrupted thoughts or a developing dialect. The low frequencies drag a split-second beyond their quantized confines, creating an illusion of slowness, a leering hesitancy in the midst of frantic, high-speed percussion. Bursts of aggression crack and sizzle only to dissipate, then return with sharpened precision and violence.

The opening birdsong of ‘Baily’s Beads’ is a false relief from the ensnarement, as softer fleets of ambience are layered with siren-like squeals, rumbles of bass and persistent patterns of camera-shutter sounds. Nightmarish shrieks then introduce ‘Barnacles’ – maybe the most cinematic song of the album. Panning groans weave through the fabric of the track, providing a tangible sense of direction and depth. You can almost feel where the sounds are coming from and where they are going. There is a sense of unwinding, coiling, twisting and turning – not so much a downwards descent but a progression or escalation. It’s indulgently malevolent.

Yet this is quickly calmed by a buoyancy in ‘Doppelgänger’, the most percussive entry yet. More familiar breakbeats point towards a mounting tempo at the album’s halfway mark. This is carried into ‘Infiltration’, where the tempo surges with increasing momentum, enveloping breakbeats and throbbing kick-drums into a surging riptide. The bass gives way to a complex breakdown where percussion trembles and quakes before erupting into an explosion of noise. The breaks are momentarily stripped away, only to be reintroduced with intense force in a call-and-response dynamic. The quieter moments in between phrases retain the inflection of menace so distinctive to Hyph11E’s productions, but also facilitate and amplify the impact of each shuddering drop.

The journey is building towards its crescendo – the tension over-spilling into ‘Shatter’, where howling sirens give way to a murky climax of double-time footwork kick drums and rampant amen breaks fighting to keep pace. ‘Get Out From Under’ follows with frenetic energy, the pace and sharpness of the track whipping you into a breakneck-bpm array of snarling basslines and snapping breakbeats.

The violence has peaked and light has returned in the closer ‘Erosion’. Chaos turns into order. Something lively still bubbles underneath – but the aggression has dissipated; instead it throbs with vitality. The music still twists, turns, coils, thumps, but there is a newfound, wave-like regularity. The sound bubbles over, fading and fading, panting, breathing, a heartbeat, then blackness.

Album Image Credit: Wang Nemone @ SVBKVLT