If you wonder what it feels like to be trapped in a haunted arcade machine from the late 80s, the new LUMBERJVCK & Narkoleptik song Come Again is the kind of dark Trap / Dubstep hybrid that can give you some ideas. With drunken rhythm-sections, atonal bleep-melodies, and distorted synths, the Californian producers introduce you to the unforeseen sides of the digital uncanny.
Eeriness combined with infectious grooves of Trap music is a hazardous concept. Yet, LUMBERJVCK & Narkoleptik’s exploration of it is full of discoveries. The haunted-tech aesthetics have received all kinds of visual interpretations during the last couple of years thanks to the Internet culture. However, the attempts to bring this into music have always been limited in their popularity and commercial performance. The main reason, one would argue, is that most of the artists focus so much on bringing the eerie atmosphere of a Ghost In The Machine, that sometimes they forget about the musicality. The new LUMBERJVCK & Narkoleptik song is an exemplary piece in this regard.
It’s a disorienting track, but in completely new ways that are only possible with the variety of Trap / Dubstep hybrid flavors that LUMBERJVCK & Narkoleptik bring to the table. As atonal as the melodies on the track are, they still manage to sound somehow catchy and danceable. During the build-ups this is especially obvious. The arpeggios and overly saturated leads guide you to the drop with their orchestra-style melodies in minor-key, giving you a pretty good hint that this is not your average chillwave track to study/relax to.
During the drop itself the bass starts going in parallel with a spooky chiptune melody, that, in contrast to the drums, has a floating, “ghostlike” motion. It sounds like something supernatural is moving in a dark room full of abandoned tech, covered in dust, mold, and rust. And the only way to avoid an existential dread in this environment, is to relax and join the unidentifiable forces in an uncontrollable episode of a dancing plague.
