Despite its haunting, eerie tones and the project’s prophetic moniker, ‘Elements’ is not certainly evil. Far from it. While its aural boundaries are soaked in gripping, noisy textures and dark harmonic work, the record itself is a child of wonder, a slice of committed, authentic artistry delivered by the creative minds of Dave Wirth and Jorge Martinez. Collectively known as Evil Gima, the pair threads the fine line between dystopian melancholia and chaotic, gritty industrial euphoria. 

What follows are four tracks steeped in escapism and abstraction, four pieces that challenge listeners on a personal level. We suspect not everyone will manage to even understand Evil Gima’s complex musical endeavour. One has to be courageous, ready to perhaps deal with negative and uncomfortable emotions. Yet, the final award is freedom – from oneself, from a troubled consciousness.

A celebrated and award-winning film composer, Dave Wirth originally founded the project in 2015, then extended a collaborative invite to critically acclaimed musician and artist Jorge Martinez. The formula behind ‘Elements’ sees the two heroes making good use of an Eurorack modular synthesizer, embracing rare musical idioms such as quarter tones and atypical scales. It all then converges into a decadent, dissonant stream of aural goodness. 

Avec Elements, Evil Gima signe un tournant audacieux dans sa discographie. Né d’un week-end créatif en mai 2024, cet EP de quatre titres utilise les synthétiseurs Eurorack pour explorer des territoires harmoniques inédits. Entre quarts de ton, modes atypiques et textures sonores inquiétantes, le duo pousse l’expérimentation jusqu’à ses limites, offrant une expérience auditive qui bouscule l’oreille et les repères.

L’ouverture avec « Enthalpy » installe immédiatement une atmosphère étrange : nappes granuleuses, pulsations sourdes et glitchs erratiques créent l’impression d’un laboratoire hanté où chaque fréquence semble chargée d’une mémoire thermique. Vient ensuite « Boiling Point Transfusion », où le bruit blanc, les distorsions liquides et les éclats métalliques évoquent une transfusion d’urgence, un corps sonore en surchauffe, prêt à exploser.

Avec « Nuclear Charge », l’EP gagne en intensité : synthés saturés, pulsations atomiques et échos radioactifs donnent une sensation presque martiale, où l’énergie se transforme en menace et la beauté devient toxique. Le final, « Exthalpy », plonge l’auditeur dans des drones glacés, des réverbérations fantomatiques et des silences suspendus, comme une chambre de cryogénie émotionnelle, offrant un instant de contemplation glaciale après l’ouragan sonore.

En moins de vingt minutes, Elements trace une cartographie sonore singulière, à la fois dérangeante et fascinante. Ce projet n’est pas là pour séduire immédiatement : il exige de l’écoute, de la patience et une immersion totale. Evil Gima confirme ainsi son goût pour l’exploration des marges du son, là où la musique devient expérience, presque physique, et laisse son empreinte longtemps après la dernière note.

At first, there doesn't seem to be a sound signal. Silence, therefore, shapes the initial landscape, intriguing the viewer. However, gradually and shyly, a shrill detail begins to emerge, breaking with the state of torpor. Between a sometimes hollow, sometimes sharp-looking shuttle, this texture ends up reaching its apex amid a sound that not only borders, but flirts gently with the dark. Entitled to echoing rhythmic pulses and an offering of sensory associated with loneliness, Enthalpy highlights the chaos of an initial dissonance, while making the listener plunge into a world of vulnerability and insecurity.

Contrary to what has been experienced in the previous composition, here the atmosphere is already presented in the midst of sonic silhouettes that bring with them the amazement, the suspense, the tense. By taking the viewer into a dark ecosystem of dark nuances, the song manages to cause fear in the face of pure darkness. In fact, there is no concrete, the tactile, but what Boling Point Transfusion does is put the viewer in a scenario as dense, hazy and sticky as the threshold. After all, their beehold-like sounds and strident whispers give the impression of feathered souls asking for help.

The stridency is already offered at its peak. From its haughty posture, the senses of urgency and immediacy shape the ecosystem in order to create a principle of tension in the sensoriality acquired by the listener. Of an acidic nature, the sound that shapes the landscape of the song brings with it the idea of an incendiary, but gradually combustion. The curious thing, in this process, is to realize that, even in the face of a principle of aggressiveness, the sound of Nuclear Charge even flirts, even if timidly, with the theme of synth-pop. Dangerous in its essence, the track clearly defends the idea of the impending, of the inevitable.

The scenario is graced by the adoption of the fade effect in. Like a kind of sound-narrative looping, the present song features the same introductory structure as Enthalpy. Of gradual sound awakening, but without hiding its shrill and acidic essence, the stripe makes the dark its safe harbor. Your comfort zone. Sensorily dense and tense, the band still draws attention for experiencing an exploration before the dark before a lens that borders the guttural. When sound reaches its apex of presence, it becomes linear and sequential, but does not diminish the purposeful nuisance offered to the viewer. Exthalpy is a track that still stands out for bringing the torpor amid a kind of dramatic, dark chaos.

Elements is an EP that simply gives wings to the imagination. However, not by a disneyresque, colorful and cheerful optic. Here, there is the dense, the tense. The chaos. Here, the shadows whisper and the silence murmurs. Darkness presents itself as the majority setting of all its sonic narratives.

It is precisely before them that the listener has to deal with his own weaknesses. Insecurity, fear, a sense of disprotection. Loneliness as proof of weakness associated with the perception of trust. Even if the tears run out at certain times, the drama Elements offers is fleeting and almost ludibriant. Here is an EP in which acid, synthetic and lo-fi unite in a dark and noisy aesthetic-structural rawness.

There’s something magnetic about music that doesn’t ask for your approval, it simply exists, raw and unfiltered, challenging you to feel something. With Elements, the latest EP from Evil Gima, that challenge becomes a reward in the long run. The duo made up of film composer Dave Wirth and sound artist Jorge Martinez have built a four-song collection that’s as haunting as it is hypnotic, a meticulously crafted descent into the dark corners of sound itself.

Created over a single weekend in May 2024, Elements captures the rare kind of creative alchemy that only happens when two artists surrender completely to experimentation. Wirth and Martinez, armed with a Eurorack setup and the borrowed magic of a Roland Space Echo, turn minimal equipment into a sprawling sonic world. Every drone, feedback loop, or distortion feels deliberate yet unhinged, as if the machines themselves were gasping for air. The result is music that sounds alive.

Evil Gima aren’t interested in comfort. The duo leans fully into the unsettling frequencies that might make most producers flinch. However, within that chaos lies an extraordinary sense of control. The drones stretch and morph, melodies twist just beyond recognition, and subtle textures rise and fall like voices that aren’t actually there. It’s experimental music that feels cinematic, born from Wirth’s background in film composition but stripped of narrative safety nets. For us, Elements legitimately opened our world into what music can be and the imagination behind it.

Across its roughly twenty-minute runtime, the EP conjures an emotional spectrum that few lyric-driven projects achieve. One moment, you’re caught in the throes of an anxious pulse like on the opener “Enthalpy” and the next you’re suspended in an ambient void towards the midway point with “Nuclear Charge”. With all the music we consume on a daily basis, it’s become difficult to grasp our attention, but this managed to do it a little too easily.

We’ll make it clear that this is music that chases commercial appeal, but honestly, who cares. It embraces imperfection as art, an idea that feels increasingly radical in an era of pristine production. You can hear the physicality of tape, the hum of electricity, the imperfections that make each sound unique. We’ll say it once again, but it’s that alive feeling that drew us to listen to the rest.

Evil Gima have created something rare, a record that exists completely in its own space. It’s dark but not despairing, yet still accessible to anyone willing to listen with open ears. Put it on in the dark, let it fill the room, and surrender. Even better, we’ve got a feeling it was released just in time for Halloween.

Reading Notes

1-3 Minute Read | Laptop or Tablet Recommended

Topics and Themes

Introducing Elements, a new ambient & experimental record from Evil Gima.

Over the years of working with Jorge Martinez on Evil Gima releases (and many more recordings as well), I've found it’s extraordinarily rewarding and challenging to make experimental music that means something.

The same is true for the opposite.

It’s easy to make experimental music that means absolutely nothing at all and lacks any merit. To make that kind of experimental music, all we really need to do is to make noise and layer it. In other words, find a sound, layer another sound on top, and voila: Mediocre experimental music.

Jorge and I constantly riff off each other to make something a little bit more inviting. There’s intention behind the sounds, a symmetry that pushes us (and hopefully the listener) into a weirder and weirder place.

We long for a consistency and symmetry in good music and we try to bring it into Evil Gima.

Similarly, we long for a piece of music to force us to sit back in our chairs and whistle, if not bristle, at the scope of it, not unlike the pause after getting a much needed punch to the face. I take particular pride in the fact that one person took the time to write of our previous album Alluvion, that “this is music for an emotionally intense fuck.”

For Elements, we hope to offer you songs of that same caliber, or at least in the realm of a comment like that. We reached to create experimental songs that have an underlying symmetry to them. We wanted to tell you a story. We tried very hard to capture a mood that we don’t often hear from music nowadays.

We reached for magical and at the same time intensely perverse and of a full-goblin mode…. at times incredibly unsettling…. at times completely blown out and followed by the sound of a well-deserved silence.

Jorge and I now offer you Elements, the next iteration of Evil Gima. Thank you so much for taking a moment to read this and for your consideration for listening to our challenging music. We love to make it.

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I’m still pinching myself that Bandcamp’s editors took a listen!

Chilling ambient music with mournful tones and barren textures, perfect to score and abandoned cityscape.

Queen City Sounds just gave Evil Gima a wonderful review:

One has to imagine that Evil Gima conceived of the song and video for “IT/AM” in some sort of creative tandem. The sounds themselves suggest spaciousness and texture like the snow and water droplets depicted in the video. The piano figure drifts while plinks of metallic sounds like processed windchimes or stringed instrument plucking and slowly resolving drones convey a languid atmosphere. It’s like the analog of natural processes unfolding like the accumulation of snow depicted in the video as it forms and melts into water and fills into ponds then evaporates and the cycle begins again. It’s a little like an orchestral piece Anthony Braxton might have written around the turn of the 70s if he had access to a robust electronic palette of sounds. That organic improvisational way of arranging noises in abstract, conceptual fashion that made him a rebel then and a style outside orthodox music making that ambient music and abstract free jazz aficionados appreciate now.

Pulling disparate threads of sonic traditions, Evil Gima creates a cinematic experience with the audiovisual project “IT/AM”. In the Jorge Martinez directed video for “IT/AM” the trailing melodies of Evil Gima’s forlorn piano arc across an alive sound palate of evolving drones and mechanical, almost bird-like musicbox percussion. Fans of dark ambient or deconstructed neo-classical music will find a lot in “IT/AM” and Evil Gima’s work to sink into.

(The full review)

Directed by Jorge Martinez:

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Listen to IT\AM & Evil Gima

Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple Music | Amazon | iHeartRadio | Deezer | Napster

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Preorder Alluvion by Evil Gima

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Advanced Press for Alluvion

“Listening to Evil Gima’s Alluvion is a singular experience. Its implacable currents of sound pull from two worlds. The first is a place mythic and terribly old, an ancient corridor where monsters lurk with the unknowable thing inside you. The other is an echo of our own voices, captured from some unimaginable future; deranged and waiting. It’s the only music I have ever heard that conjures the cosmic terror/wonder of the world unknown.

Evil Gima and Alluvion are a genre unto themselves, a separate universe from the familiar and predictable undulations of horror than can only speak to the surface of things. Alluvion peels you open and seizes that unfathomable reality within... then sets it churning.

Rejoice, human. Music is not dead. And you are called to obliteration.”

— Kirt Bozeman

Imagine three pianos recorded one at a time, and each of them was improvised. The pianists could only react when they heard a note. The result? This is the most ridiculously chill piano song.

To me, this record has a nice, sleepy feeling to it. Something to relax into, something to take a nice nap listening to (dare I say even on repeat?).

Evil Gima's ulu is a tour-de-force in ambient experimental sound. The songs themselves have no melody, no harmony (Aak And Quack excepted), and in many cases no sound that is recognizable. It was created using a number of different sound design modules and hyped to sound good at 85dB.

This isn't your suger-coated candy pop, feel good, I'm-the-king-of-the-world type of music. It's an adventure for those sonic searchers that are willing to listen to music with scruity and stoicism. Are you one of the few and proud?

Let’s keep this re-releases going!

Today's re-release is AES by Evil Gima. Evil Gima is a catch-all moniker for my ambient, dark, and experimental music collages. They tend to be great for staring out into space and relaxing into the textures.

After I moved to Santa Fe, NM, I was really hit hard by the epic cloud formations, the beautiful art, and also the cultural and historical amnesia. Read about the history of the city, and you'll be quietly freaked out.

Anyhow, AES always reminds me of that time of the ceaselessly changing skies of New Mexico.

I've also included the full liner notes of the record AND five Ableton Live screenshots of the projects. Perhaps you musicians would like that?

Deep, dark, and nightmarish, IT\AM is sure to enthrall you with an intense wall of sound and epic piano. Checkit!

You read that correctly... This album is not sugar-coated candy pop. It’s a full expression of the complete sonic spectrum of your listening station. I designed the music to sound excellent at 85db. Enjoy!

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Evil Gima — AES

This album consists of five songs without any rhythm but roll by like thunderstorms. I managed to capture a cloud formation in Santa Fe, NM that naturally fit the mood of this particular song on the record:

All five songs on AES are roughly the same: Ambient, without rhythm, and exactly what it feels like to lazily watch thunderstorms:

Evil Gima: AES

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Field Spectra — Austin, TX

Austin, TX by Field Spectra consists of five field recordings of nature in Austin. Recording locations included Shoal Creek in downtown Austin (the audio is posted below) and various spots in South Austin including the Golden Dome of Pure Knowledge. That's a really neat building.

If you're an Austin expatriot, this is the album to get:

Field Spectra: Austin, TX

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Read it at NoiseShaft.com
 

Flutters by Dave Wirth is an exclusively acoustic full length, divided to 13 arrangements of improvisative/super-contemplative string strumming. And there is a lot to be heard indeed, as frequencies demand full attention as they are finally given due time and real estate to claim their full share of murdered silence on.

"Technically" speaking, the artistic aim behind the disc is to showcase how awareness moves within an unrelenting type of layered existence which IT creates in the process, leaving behind traces of sounds, but now documented in larger-than-life proportions, courtesy of recording equipment entirely devoted to paint a very precise picture of audible stimuli. Read on to know more.

Wirth's music is deeply introspective, self-reflective, imperturbed, and dangerless. It has a concept of motion, even an ability to move, but it does not have any urge to do so on a constant basis. Instead, the album first and foremost is prone to invite the listener to re-discover the fundamental intimacy of the concept of sound. Wirth won't try to convince you of any special-, Mad Sk1ll LevelzZz at guitar molestation, nor he will bring forth a constant urge to discover harmonies that aren't conceived on this earth - although he will have surprises up his sleeves. With songs like "Penumbra Nadir" or the titular "Flutters", increased levels of harmonic awareness and playfulness is observable, toppled by the fact that Wirth always manages to stay away from the act of shaking his own hand - which would be very hard to do while playing "tAh" guitar while holding a coffee mug, anyway.

As mentioned, the core behaviour of the record is reflective of an artistic stance that does not seek to impress at all, as its aim is to re-discover and worship the importance of sound, and indeed this very awe-, this very fascination towards the magic of sound created out of nothing/out of mere potential, is captured and delivered on the release. As such, the disc is a necessary success. I have zero doubt that Wirth captured his soul while playing this, and it is up to the individual listener to find out if said listener is able to identify the pivotal points of soul movements/activities lingering in this deliberate self-abduction.

This agenda, to capture the movement of the player's soul, is primordial, while the anatomical structure of the respective songs is only of secondary importance. In his review request, Dave Wirth wrote to me that he had to convince the producer to not use any after-effects and highly occult sonic-wizardry through the release, let everything stay natural, as it was upon the creation of the tracks. A noble and sane goal: these precedents were recorded with a myriad of microphones, and the production values indeed are top of the foodchain, as each and every receptor of the ensuing recording apparatus is directed into capturing the full register of the acoustic guitar. And there is a lot to be heard indeed, as frequencies demand full attention as they are finally given due time and real estate to claim their full share of murdered silence on.

A deeply intimate release, which openly emerges to fetishize the timeless charm of the acoustic guitar, and said instrument won't have a single complaint in store towards this relentless dynamic. A legitimate, thorough love affair for all acoustic guitar lovers. Listen at 4:03, at the end of the "Penumbra Nadir" song: is that a sound of digestion?

http://noiseshaft.blogspot.hu/2017/01/dave-wirth-flutters-review.html

Two songs, originally created years ago and found on a random backup cd. Imagine the surprise! Two gems of droney, rain weather music.

Cover art by Jackson, William Henry, 1843-1942, photographer, Public Domain. Home of cotton picker.

Evil Gima: Cotton

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Evil Gima: Tres Pianos

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Tres Pianos is exactly what it sounds like: Three pianos that are all overdubbed without a click track. The result is fumbly, cloud-like, and feels exactly like a cool but dry Sunday morning.

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Photo courtesy of Library of Congress. Public Domain.

Soloman House interior – piano, by Bain News Service, publisher. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2006010801/