Alan Duggan-Borges, working under the moniker The Null Club and known to many as the guitarist of Gilla Band, has released a self-titled debut EP that clocks in at a modest 11 and-a-half minutes, but says and accomplishes more than most do in 30.
The experience of listening to the EP feels simultaneously dystopian and retro-futuristic. Like being transported into a pulsating, impossible 4D shape, caught in the center of an organism that is very much alive, and awakening. Frankenstein’s Monster twitching to life, all three tracks pulsate with a spinning, disorienting urgency.
The first track, “Frameshift” (feat. ELUCID of Armand Hammer), begins with a strong industrial percussion, followed quickly by sped-up electronic distortion that opens into a vast open space that the song occupies. The track, sounding like an exasperated printer, pants and gallops as it races to keep up with itself. Spinning and sentient, it hurtles into a rap that echoes the poetic intensity of clipping. alongside the quickfire onslaught of Death Grips’ sound.
The second track, “14 Hours” (feat. Faris Badwan – familiar as the vocalist from The Horrors), is a collaboration we didn’t know we needed. Expressing itself as an immersive nightmare, it engulfs you in a flickering light and pulsating waves of alarm. Similar to the catchy distortion in Thom Yorke’s “Hearing Damage”, it consumes you in static surround sound, like an organism twitching to life, shifting you from side to side in its own contemplation as it attempts to experience itself in its own awakening. With visceral lyricism, “your eyes are growing wild by the day”, it orchestrates your experience in a sing-song voice over a distorted electronic blur anchored by a steady beat. It feels haunting, despairing, and empty, a voice booming over speakers in a vacant post-apocalyptic landscape in a deserted and concrete world.
The third and final track, “Slip Angle” (feat Valentine Caulfield of Mandy, Indiana) opens with reverse ramblings and urgent, monotone French vocals. About two-thirds in, the track bleeds into chaos but persists with a desperate, repetitive concentration beneath a bed of droning and whirring. Stuttering and hyper-focused, it conspires in the same tone and flesh as the first two songs, bringing the album to a close.
With shades of experimentation found on Xiu Xiu’s Girl with a Basket of Fruit and the best elements of Gilla Band, Alan injects his own voice with the immediacy of an Intravenous drip. Most of the EP was recorded by Alan in his home and recording studio in Dublin, Ireland, and mixed by his Gilla Band bandmate Daniel Fox and mastered by Jamie Hyland of fellow Irish rockers M(h)aol.
There’s an undeniable catharsis in listening to this release. It feels like being chewed up and processed by some semi-organic, semi-robotic being. Repetitive, hyperfixated, and compulsive, Alan Duggan Borges has created a very alive beast, pieced together from samples and noise-makers, and an array of vocal contributions, all fused by his collage-like production.
