PUPA - Lies (Ujikaji)

PUPA - Lies (Ujikaji) Here lies Lies, a cassette release by PUPA (pronounced “Poo-PAH”, which rhymes with DADA, SAMPAH and OOMPA LOOMPA), where meaning comes not from rational workings but by intuitive associations and onomatopoeic mispronunciations. 

PUPA is a cooperative of two: JUN and ZEEK, names to place in action bubbles in a hypnagogic, homoerotic episode of Batman (and his Boy Wonder) starring Adam West; boys with their toys electronic, ringing the body electric. 

Put on the cassette. What lies here? What? Lies here? What lies here!

The music on Lies has a fuzzy temporality, conjuring an electronica that could have come from 1998 as it could 2018. But if '90s electronica – growing alongside the early days of the  internet – was a dream of the future rife with utopian possibilities, the music in Lies seems instead to commemorate a laundry list of unrealised dreams. In sound and mood, Pupa are fellow travellers with artists like Boards of Canada, The Caretaker and William Basinski. Lies moves at a ponderous pace, as if surveying the wreckage of time caused by everything that has prevented the promised technological utopia. Tape loops underscore the passing of time as uncluttered elements build with the subtlest of shifts. Tape loops re-released on tape, the Basinsking of the Titanic, repeat a lie enough times and it becomes…