When Slug Wife enters the conversation, it's usually in reference to their razor-edged sound design and audible fierceness; the experimental label is home to a number of top flight producers and engineers working synergistically to craft bass music designed for pure bludgeoning. Amidst the seemingly endless output of monstrous tracks and high octane EPs, there's remarkable compositional work being done under the surface. Seppa, one of the labels co-founders, and the Executive-in-Chief of Gastropodia Prime, has a particular strength for branching off of the archetypical tropes involved with brutish bass music. His latest release, Split, tops off the rest of his catalog with the most shapeshifting, amorphous album out of Slug Wife yet.

Seppa is far from a stranger to malleable composition or narrative releases. From Homunculus to Stress, his stapled solo material builds on constantly evolving phrasing, arrangement, note relationships, and distorted textures. Pairing well with his original music, Bright Spots, a collaborative LP with Chalky, puts his instrumental and music theory skills on full display, accentuating the allure of an already highly sought-after producer. Split feels like a matured combination of his original musings and collaborative longform compositions, showcasing an evolution in songwriting that can be harder to find once an artist settles into their role and fame.

From the jump, Split brings emotional turbulence to the forefront, with "Elk" setting the tone for a subtle masquerade of low end frequencies and tonal suggestions. There's a tension that feels all at once dark, eary, and especially curious. Immediately jettisoning into "OLVO", shuffled hi-hats and reverberant pulses of melody echo across the song's stereo space, with warped, undulating bass lines shredding in and out of the mix. It's the kind of one-two punch that pierces listeners with excitement from the very start of the journey, guiding the attention into each new track.

Bringing the album to a vicious full circle, the title track "Split" is a boisterous monster of complexity and pure rhythm. Mottled breaks flex in and out of focus, bouncing off of raucous bass stabs. The arrangement is hairbrained madness meeting total sonic domination, pushing resampled synthesis to it's absolute musical maximum. The force of the track is a combination of it's exhilarating delivery and synaptic impact, and it's the pairing of these precise attributes that makes both the song and the album an undeniable step up in Seppa's ongoing musical journey.

Contemporary bass music production has evolved to encompass a massive swath of music real estate, and the number of interpretations and genre diasporas seems to multiply weekly. The constant, guiding focus of this musical evolution tends to be composition, and Seppa is firmly planted in the upper echelons of forward thinking songwriting and eclectic production. Each release has diversified his personal palette, and the unveiling of Split reinforces the Seppa project as an audio experiment with few parallels and fewer boundaries.

FOLLOW Seppa: SoundCloud / Bandcamp / Spotify / Facebook