Jorge Elbrecht Gloss Coma 002

Jorge Elbrecht is a very sick man.

Or that’s been his public image since a 2018 video teaser for Here Lies, his first album as a solo artist, told the story of a ten-year cognitive disintegration and psychic fracture into at least four distinct musical identities. This unraveling supposedly left him aged 30+ years, with scraggly gray hair and beard, sat in a wheelchair and draped in a shawl, accompanied by nurses, his music kept in a vault supervised by an estate. But for an artist in alleged decline, he’s been working at a rate unattainable by most people half his age (i.e., his actual age). After 2018 saw the release of Here Lies and the Happiness EP, both samplers of his multiple sonic personalities, he started 2019 with an excellent prog metal album by Coral Cross, bisected it with a dreamy electro doo wop single as REMYNYS, and capped it with Gloss Coma 002, a beautiful, disturbing synth wave record. It’s one of the best works yet by an artist who, despite being an industry outsider known mostly by a devoted cult of other musicians to whom he sells records directly, has already helped shape the sound of 21st century alt pop.

Elbrecht is no stranger to oblique PR. Lansing-Dreiden, his band from 2000 to 2006, presented as a faceless multimedia corporation, producing videos, graphic art, and printed material as lusciously detailed as their records, themselves seemingly designed to frustrate marketing departments. Arriving amid peak Strokes/White Stripes (and the dawn of now-permanent 80s revisionism), L-D’s debut The Incomplete Triangle started with galloping metal and ended with Miami freestyle, an assault on genre boundaries that indie “rock” would embrace through the rest of the 2000s. Follow-ups got (only slightly) more cohesive, but still found novel ways to bring classic altern80s & 90s forms into the new millennium. His next band, Violens, carried that baton forward, making one album of widescreen, impassioned post-punk (called Big Music back when made by Simple Minds, U2, and the Waterboys) a year before the Horrors claimed that M.O., then releasing a string of Byrds-jangled dream pop singles so perfect that their next album appeared on Slumberland, a birthplace label for that sort of thing.

For the next six years Elbrecht largely worked behind-the-scenes: collaborating with Ariel Pink and touring in his Haunted Graffiti; mixing for other artists (full disclosure: myself included); launching a label, Grey Market; teaching his process; affirming a goofy side (hinted at in L-D) with two albums of bonkers 80s workout kitsch as half of DRYNX; and releasing a handful of singles that served as first appearances for his various monikers, starting in 2013 with Gloss Coma 001 featuring Caroline Polachek. You know, downtime. In the meantime, thanks to vinyl reissues on Mexican Summer and the benefit of hindsight (Pitchfork upped their rating of The Incomplete Triangle from 3.7 to 7.2 [still low]), more people were beginning to understand how influential Lansing-Dreiden had been, while production and mix work for artists like Wild Nothing, Chairlift, Au Revoir Simone, Tamaryn, and No Joy meant that his lush aural aesthetic was audible everywhere.

With Gloss Coma 002, Elbrecht is back out front, appearing on cover art for the first time, albeit in decrepit state, leering out at us like a Jodorowsky of indie music. Fittingly, he’s joined by a troupe of collaborators from the weird pop community, and the record they’ve made together sounds like an occult artifact--Unholy Mountain--exaggerated by grotesque samples and the startling depth of field in his mixes.

Despite the atmosphere of dread, it also contains some of his most dance floor-ready songs yet. Gloss Coma’s contributions to Here Lies took me back to nights at Wierd [sic], the legendary New York celebration of minimal synth and cold wave, not a scene I’d have thought to associate him with but a natural and welcome development for those (me) long pining for more in the vein of Lansing-Dreiden’s clubbier tracks. Lead song “Endless Fire” was chugging electronic body music (EBM) like that of Brooklyn pre-MIDI synth wizard (and Wierd fixture) Sean McBride of Martial Canterel and Xeno & Oaklander. Gloss Coma 002 polishes that vibe further to resemble an especially dark gem unearthed by the Wierd-associated reissue label Minimal Wave. Specifically, thanks to liberal use of eerie pitch-bent vocal synths and male/female vocal antiphonies, it often evokes Martin Dupont, the French weird new wave band whose complete works Minimal Wave reissued as a 5-LP box set in 2018, so it was a pleasant surprise but little wonder to see that Veronica Vasicka, the label’s founder, is credited as Gloss Coma 002’s creative consultant.

The album begins with lapping water and a faraway voice shouting or drowning, then a flicking slide projector introduces the notes of a pummeling bass synth and loping beat that should get forward-thinking rappers calling on him. “Tired Land” picks up the tempo but maintains the terror, a gallop accented with orc grunts as Elbrecht, possessed of a pure voice like Curt Smith from Tears for Fears, sings cryptic lines like “hardly enough pain to allocate, entitled kind, time to amputate” in his typical long, searching melodies drenched in effect. I’ve always treated his inscrutable lyrics as a red herring, like David Lynch’s plots, but I’m compelled to attention as the song triangulates Tears for Fears at their bleakest, new wave cum European folk like Dead Can Dance and Opera Multi Steel, and Scott Walker’s late-period goth operas into something like the liturgical music of a religion-in-the-making. (That might not be hyperbole, given the zeal of his cult; I’ve been proselytizing to anyone who’ll listen for 15 years, and Sky Ferreira, who has a slightly larger platform than me and an upcoming album she co-executive produced with Elbrecht, said of him on Instagram, “He is the future and more,” which is much catchier than “the way and the truth and the life.”)

Then the fun starts. Spastic EBM arpeggios make “Perish,” co-produced by Geneva Jacuzzi, comparatively chipper but for its singalong chorus of “In flames, we all shout ‘perish,’” presumably about our collective near future. The achingly beautiful, uncharacteristically sweet “The Entrance of Cold,” featuring Molina, Samantha Urbani, and SRSQ, is a sexy perfection of the hi-tech Cocteau Twins worship practiced by Ashrae Fax, then “Finale Voices” takes the suspense back out for a steamy night drive. “The Freezing,” featuring Sky Ferreira and what sounds like a man being disemboweled, is a new industrial electro classic that ought to be warming up alt nightclubs for many winters to come. “Apparition” has both the most unsettling sounds—a woman screaming, baby crying, pig squealing, or all three blended together and pitch bent into a hook—and the pumpingest beat, which by the end starts to literally push the air out of the room. “Minus Sign,” with vocals by Tim Koh, an Ariel Pink collaborator who had a near-death experience in 2018, could be from a Brian Eno, Jon Hassell, and Underworld score for Mad Max. The album’s doomiest moment, a collaboration with Drab Majesty that might have also worked on the Coral Cross album, is followed by “Corpse Flower,” which layers demon snores over a peppy beat and simple bass pattern as Elbrecht implores the listener, again and again, to “try living in the moment.”

It’s an odd sentiment on an album so otherwise concerned with death and decay. Or maybe not. If entropy is the one sure law of the universe, better live it up. If we don’t have to wait too long for the full albums from REMYNYS, which so far seems like a Balearic flip side to Gloss Coma’s gloom, and Presentable Corpse, which doubles down on Violens’ C-86 and Paisley Underground devotion, the downward spiral will be that much more bearable. It’s enough to make you hope Jorge does not get well soon.

But out of concern and just to be sure, we sent a few questions to him in Denver, where he currently lives, works, and posts photos of a terrier with a snarl straight out of an Aphex Twin video. Still as prolific in email as in music, he had answers back within an hour.

CELL VISION: This record is kind of unsettling. How’s your health? Am I conducting a seance right now, or you’re hanging in there?

JORGE ELBRECHT: The health is better. But I am usually speaking through characters when I write. So for example, the Presentable Corpse record of 60s-ish psych guitar sunshine pop I am working on right now is being written from the perspective of a deceased soldier in Vietnam, as if there were a songwriter stuck at war, missing home and cursing the missions he is on as he sees the brutal insides of it, and he wrote a bunch of songs that were found after the fact, way later. Aside from that, I am always trying to get at the potency of nightmares in a lot of what I do. Additionally, it’s a way to use fiction to exorcize my frustrations with things like mother nature being damaged, humans lacking empathy, or an almost complete lack of connection with the current culture's sense of taste.

CELL VISION: You put out three LPs and an EP in the last two years, Presentable Corpse and REMYNYS LPs are imminent, and apparently there may be other monikers down the line. Is this still just the beginning of the deluge? In other words, are you Prince?

JORGE ELBRECHT: I think I may end up happy with five or six projects, and I'll definitely have my hands full developing each of those over time. But any less than three and I would probably start to feel like I wasn't saying everything I want to say creatively as a songwriter. I also feel like most songwriters are this way--songs which present themselves can often seem to fit within or outside of the genre a songwriter is somehow tied to--so I don't find myself to be unique. I just don't know why no one else does what I am doing. Maybe they (or labels) are worried it will be bad for business.

CELL VISION: What did Veronica Vasicka’s role as creative consultant entail?

JORGE ELBRECHT: Veronica is a long-time hero of mine and I was very fortunate to have her insight. She helped tremendously in various aspects of the completion of the record--from suggestions for drum sounds or picking out certain synth patches, to helping sequence the record, to album art feedback--and she sent amazing references along the way, as well.

CELL VISION: “A Mask In the Ash” made me think that rappers, somebody like Danny Brown or a UK grime/drill artist, should consider commissioning beats from you. Would you go into that world if the call came? Or, without spoiling anything in your release calendar, are there any other styles you’d like to try to tackle to challenge yourself? How does someone with such a broad comfort zone step out of it?

JORGE ELBRECHT: The Lansing-Dreiden remix album D.I. by D.D. that we made using samples from the L-D record The Dividing Island is maybe the closest thing I can think of to what you're describing. As you say, my interests are pretty widespread already. And I'm not very enthusiastic about many things. Collaborations seem to work better for me than commissions but I'd take each one at a time and make the call as it comes.

CELL VISION: Coral Cross is pretty legit metal. Have you gotten reactions from fans who find you through that project and arrive at parts of your catalog like, say, Lansing-Dreiden’s 80s sophistipop material?

JORGE ELBRECHT: Thank you, though I'd have to credit Lev Weinstein a lot for supplying the legit rhythmic frame for it. It's been very interesting to see to what degree people do not like certain projects but then do like the ones they like. There are many who can get into all of them, too, but despite us being a post-iPod culture there are still those who identify very strongly with certain genres. It's all fine to me.

CELL VISION: Is your dog really so angry or is that just resting bitch face?

JORGE ELBRECHT: Haha, he just tries to smile like a human and it looks like that, but he's never angry.