Taiwanese beatmaker Oberka is back, and his redemption is in the form of a full-length album titled "Regrow Protocol." At a brisk 41 minutes and 12 stirring tracks, the album is a radical reset. Brought forth by Huang Shao Yong, who helms Oberka and runs Dark Paradise Records, Regrow Protocol is a searing love letter to the act of reinventing oneself. The title track, which also opens the album, takes no prisoners, an apocalyptic Rorschach where glitchy discord, throbbing basslines, and ghostly sound textures collide like tectonic plates. But clarity emerges from this cacophony. That is the process: destroy, grow back.
Oberka’s signature genre-blurring style is in full flourish here. He takes deep pulls from techno and bassline sounds, before tearing apart their brittle edges with tattered scraps of glitch, industrial percussion, and unexpected world instrumentation, which conjures up both ancestral memory and dystopian future. What resulted was a sound entirely of his own, raucous, unruly, and yet incredibly cohesive.
Two standouts command particular attention. ‘Frog’ is an off-kilter banger, hopping between twisted drums and a malevolent synth-work with a menacing glee that calls you out if you’re not willing to follow his erratic stride. And then there’s “Regrow Protocol” itself, perhaps the gonads of the album, an impressive depth bomb of demise and rebirth, a track that leaves you out of breath and on the ground, grateful to be alive.
On every track, he’s staring down what’s decayed and what’s possible. Oberka doesn’t provide easy answers, but his blocks of sound suggest that out of the wreckage, something wild and beautiful can arise. And this isn’t music that occupies boxy traditions; it’s music that smashes them open.
This all adds up to the "Regrow Protocol," which is a manifesto, a first step, and an invitation to accept the chaos that precedes growth. On Go, Oberka shows that electronic music has plenty of uncharted territory, and he’s busy eating up the future, one fractured beat at a time.
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