Upop by Undiddley

Transvection Ltd. 023

Undiddley - Upop

Undiddley is a weird, absurd little toy planet that poet and filmmaker Eduardo Padilla enjoys visiting to take a break from comparatively sober and serious endeavors like the guitar-based Molloy and his bike and writing books and screenplays. To get away from Molloy as far as possible, Undiddley evades guitars, minimalist country-blues and folk patterns and slow-burning pastoral atmospherics and soundscapes, and instead embraces surreal sci-fi, twisted electronics, dissonance, chance-based compositional methods, collage, dub, nonsense, noise, abstraction, trash aesthetics and kosmische musik.

Upop is made of 6 tracks, each a little diorama enclosed in its own singular vision, rules and style. The title Upop was produced by accident by the A.I. in charge of the album cover. When asked to create an image of a nuclear mushroom cloud represented inside a postal stamp, the image came back with the word UPOP. This seemed to make sense at the time.

‘Amber pictures a paleolake’ starts the album with a tense, slow groove that takes inspiration from John Carpenter’s 70’s film soundtracks before mutating into a dense fever dream of intersecting mirages and odd, brittle harmonies.

Broken Mirror Therapy takes a Lou Donaldson drum pattern and builds an eerie puppet show on top. A playful tune made disquieting by each increasingly sullen iteration.

Tichy is a glitchy sci-fi miniature with a moody bridge on the middle.
Rubber Duck Factory is probably the weirdest track in here. Spastic techno-dub made from trash-compacted fragments and samples (is that a slide guitar in there?), a broken jazz synth lead and a spine-tingling, guttural and mangled voice. It barely holds together, yet manages to be hypnotic. You can even dance to it... sort of.

Kusudama sounds just like Upop, if Upop was actually a thing. It’s a meticulous affair, an intricate electro-pop jingle for an otherworldly product of unknown purpose.

Cat Cabal might be the album’s most ambitious composition. It is also quite absurd. It starts as something barely musical, perhaps a pastiche of early electronic music experiments. It later adds some metal coin samples and builds a dada-groove with that, and before you know it, you’re in kosmische musik land. This is Eduardo’s favorite track, which is why he put the word Cat on the title.

Tracklist

1.	Amber Pictures a Paleolake	6:33

2.	Broken Mirror Therapy	2:55

3.	Tichy	2:47

4.	Rubber Duck Factory	4:00

5.	Kusudama	2:16

6.	Cat Cabal	8:27

Credits

released July 4, 2023

Written & Recorded by Eduardo Padilla.
2023, Guanajuato, Mexico.

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