Recently I was back home at my dad's house, sitting on the floor going through my CD collection. This was from the pre-writing about music professionally days, which meant that for the most part, I paid for each of those CDs. Turns out that in the mid-’00s, I spent a large amount of money on albums that blended folky guitar strums, bubbly electronics and the concept of hanging out in a nook while wearing thick socks and drinking tea. It was comforting music at worst, revelatory and gorgeous at best. Four Tet was a huge part of this movement, pushing stumbling drums against homemade guitar loops across entire albums. Predictably, it's a sound that got fairly old pretty quickly, and everyone moved on. But now that the genre is experiencing another moment in the sun, I've been revisiting some of those records. The good ones are still good, the other ones are still overwhelmingly mediocre—but it stands as a sound that hasn't yet been re-contextualized and filtered back into the stuff we're listening to now. Except—EXCEPT! Juk Juk seems to be taking the good parts from that brief moment in time and playing around with them. "Unwrap" is all plaintive guitar, cutup vocal snippets and moments of fractured beauty. It's no surprise that he got his start on Kieran Hebden bka Four Tet's Text label. "Unwrap" comes from Juk Juk's next release, which will be out March 12th on Nommos.
Stream: Juk Juk, "Unwrap"
