GELBART - Liquids & Flesh
For his first full-length album in nine years, multi-instrumentalist Adi Gelbart returns with Liquids & Flesh, the inaugural release on his new label, Egglike Records.
Known for transforming simple elements into intricate experimental pieces, Gelbart is a one-man ensemble, blending traditional and electronic means, with an unwavering focus on strong, imaginative melodies. His signature sound—drawing on influences from film scores, BBC Radiophonics, Library Music, abstract jazz, esoteric exotica, and musique concrète— ventures into new sonic territory on Liquids & Flesh. Gelbart layers synthetic voices—speech synthesis, algorithmic voice models, and vocoders—on top of his familiar arsenal of analog machines and acoustic instruments. The result is an unsettling yet deeply expressive fusion of the human and the artificial.
The album covers a wide musical terrain. The opener I.M. offers hypnotic modal orchestrations and tape manipulations reminiscent of late Beatles psychedelia. Nubachi (It Who Is Alive) presents a stark contrast: a choral piece performed entirely by artificial voices, evoking both Renaissance polyphony and Ligeti-like clusters in a haunting synthesis of the sublime and the uncanny. Time (And Yet I Say) marks the album’s most song-like moment, channeling a skewed, fragmented echo of Herbie Hancock’s Sunlight-era vocoder experiments.
Following previous releases on Gagarin Records and Joyful Noise Recordings, Liquids & Flesh marks a bold new chapter. In the years since his last LP, Gelbart has published the novel Egglike, created the experimental film VISIONS, and composed two large-scale works for instruments and electronics—one of which, a work for big band, harp, and electronics, will be released as a double LP later this year.
Biography
Ever since landing in Berlin’s electronic scene in 2005, Gelbart has become one of the city’s best-kept secrets. Gelbart’s concerts are a one-man tour de force—a DIY extravaganza that blends bizarre electropop with surreal visuals, seamlessly synchronized to create an immersive, multidimensional experience.
Gelbart is a self-taught multi-instrumentalist, composer, filmmaker, and author. His lifelong devotion to innovation has so far resulted in more than 20 LPs and EPs (on Joyful Noise, Gagarin Records, and Lo Recordings among others), compositions for live ensembles, numerous award-winning works of vegetable and/or bunny animation, and a sci-fi novel.
A dive into Gelbart’s body of work uncovers a bizarre yet wholly consistent world—an absurdist mirror-universe of sound and imagery that fuses the high-brow with the low, and the accessible with the complex.
To sidestep the clichéd knob-tweaking of electronica and infuse his shows with band-like energy, Gelbart has developed a signature performance method. He combines synthesizers with guitar, bass clarinet, vocoder, and a self-built blipping machine—often juggling them all at once.
Gelbart’s music has been a fixture on WFMU, while his animations graced festivals from London to Japan, and his sci-fi film Vermin was screened at the US Library of Congress. In recent years, Gelbart composed a large-scale, 70-minute work commissioned for a live ensemble at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (set for release as a double LP in late 2025), as well as a long-form piece for string quartet and electronic voice, performed in both Casa del Lago, Mexico and Berghain. Gelbart’s upcoming solo LP, Liquids and Flesh, will be released on Egglike Records in April 2025.
