Mister Water Wet - Top Natural Drum

It was just a few weeks ago we were espousing the virtues of the second Mister Water Wet record on West Mineral and now we've another long player for Soda Gong to bend our head around. I can't speak for the frequency of output, but the shift in label makes some sense. Significant Soil operated at the edges of The New Ambient Movement West Mineral is so central to, half beatless and elegiac, the digital world collapsing into the natural. A couple of tracks displayed the more eccentric side of Iggy Romeu's muse, and it's into that which he leans with Top Natural Drum, a rhymically inventive collection that seems to suggest the cut-up nature of the early 2000s electronica of Prefuse 73 or Daedelus but without any obvious reliance on sampling. It's a smeared oil painting of jazz-time electronics and crate-digging instinct, a flurry of melodies, frequencies and time signatures that are playful in a way far removed from much of the solemnity of his ambient-adjacent work. That said, with a moniker like Mister Water Wet, it was likely that Romeu wouldn't always be playing with a straight bat.