Welt Discos Release: Bowyer
This week has been quite busy over here but I’d like to give due space to Rory Bowyer’s new EP on my label Welt Discos, which will be coming out mid January. It’s available for pre-order now on Bandcamp and other online shops.
You can listen to clips of the Bob’s Your Uncle EP here:
I first heard of Rory through his own Rube Goldberg Series label - he sent me a promo of Volume Five and I promptly played Antoine Sy’s ‘Dj Keleur’ at most of my gigs. I even put it in my Mix For Tracy. I then got a lot of mileage out of Rory’s own track ‘Big Beat Manifesto’, and when he sent me the promo of his Friends Of Gravity EP I finally made a pitch for Welt.
What appeals to me most about Rory’s tracks is the mix of happy and sad emotions he manages to imbue them with. His melodies are usually sunny, but then they are tempered by harmonies that are often unresolved or melancholy. It makes for a bittersweet feeling, with the emphasis on the sweet. There’s also a classic house formality to his arrangements and his sound choices tend to the warm side, which in my opinion makes his tracks stand out from today’s overly-tooled, often quite sterile-sounding crowd.
Rory’s EP for Welt Discos is split between two 4/4 grooves on the A side and three broken/downtempo exercises on the B.
A1 Crunching Numbers
This leads the EP off with a really refreshing house sound full of little details - my favourite being the dog barking. The harmonies seem to be ever so slightly off in a way that gives it a (very light) edge. You can hear it in full towards the end of my set for The Lot Radio in New York back in June.
A2 Bob’s Your Uncle
The title track is a more conventional Bowyer groove to my ears, but I think it has something about it that demands attention from the DJ: it has a patient kind of energy that needs careful framing in a set.
B1 Horizontal Horizon
The B leads off with growly breaks. The harmonies and sound design in the breakdown of this one really make me think of Discovery-era Daft Punk, which was an unexpected but welcome reference for me on first listen.
B2 Steaming Dish
This is another quirky groove with an IDM lilt to it both rhythmically and harmonically. I’m curious about the dancefloors this one might find its way to.
B3 How We Got Where We’re Going
And then the EP closes with this downtempo vignette, which rolls along with its head in the clouds, each phrase resolving in a highly satisfying way. You can hear it near the start of my recent set on Operator Radio in Rotterdam.
I’ve written previously about the challenges of putting out vinyl these days, the delays and the shortages, and the financial, emotional and creative inputs that demand significant resilience from the artist, the label and anyone else involved.
The process with Rory began in January 2021 and we had a really nice back-and-forth over the tracks for a few months. That for me is the really satisfying part of running a label, sharing ideas with the producers about the tracks and seeing how it all comes together. The EP was agreed and the pre-masters finalised by July 2021. At that time, I was waiting for 003 and 004 to be pressed, and 005 was also in the pipeline. We were also applying for government funding that had been made available thanks to Covid, as a means of keeping Carpet distro going while the shop was closed, so there was a bit of a delay until early 2022 when everything was fixed and the mastering and artwork could be completed. We ordered the record at the start of April 2022 and got TPs in late October, and now we have the final record - a two-year process in total.
It’s tough to wait so long for an object that expresses a particular moment in time for the artist and for me, but I feel that these tracks have stood the test of time so far and will do so into the future. That’s the thing about the label so far: through all the frustration and waiting, the tunes themselves remain vividly alive and make me want to carry on playing them. Taken together these records are something to feel proud of.
Another important component of the records taking on this life is the design by Márton, the mastering by Jorge and the distro efforts by Rui and Liam. So thank you to all of them, and of course to Rory for sharing his music!