Gloorp makes electronic music that's in a constant state of flux. Producer and drummer Garrett Burke has honed a distinct approach to sound design through an emphasis on texture, distortion, and movement. Burke's self-titled debut meshes the sensibilities of dub, experimental ambient, club, and noise. The result is singular, tactile dance music.

The Philadelphia-based artist is involved in a multitude of projects as a drummer, such as Kristine Leschper (fka Mothers), and as a sound engineer in venues all over the city. He began working on Gloorp during the summer of 2020 when he briefly moved to Chapin, a small town in his home state of South Carolina. Equipped with a kick drum, snare, cymbals, and a mic, Burke began experimenting with drum loops, recording them acoustically and then spending hours tinkering with them electronically. He’d quantize and cut up loops in Ableton, pitching parts up and down and running them through a modular synth effect rack repeatedly until the sounds became totally obscured from their acoustic sources. It’s through these experimentations that the fluid, playful nature of Gloorp began to take shape.

Made mostly by Lake Murray in the depths of humid summer, it feels fitting that the sounds in Gloorp take on a viscous quality. Like Oobleck the music fluctuates between solid and liquid states. Lead single “Musty” takes on water-like properties. Beats are entangled and blurred, accented by a crackling, bright snare – a light refracting and sizzling above the surface. In “Lusty” metallic, twinkling polyrhythms punctuate a sample that squirms and oozes from left to right. The songs on Gloorp are deftly mixed with brain-scratching, massage-like precision. Beats are distorted and swirled, flipped upside down and inside out. Ambient iPhone recordings also emerge from and melt into these moments: a lifeguard at a pool in the suburbs barking out instructions to kids, Burke’s car starting up, and a laundry card machine. These parts of the music are brief glimpses of concreteness before diving back into slipperier spaces. It’s this uniquely sensorial quality that defines Gloorp.