Kansas City producer Iggy Romeu’s strange, evocative second album for West Mineral feels so divorced from musical convention, there’s the thrilling sense that anything could happen.
Mister Water Wet took his triumphant place among the community he helped create when he debuted on West Mineral Ltd. in 2019. As a DJ and promoter in Kansas City, Andrés Ignacio “Iggy” Romeu brought together many artists that would define the label’s signature foggy, clubwise strain of ambient music. Romeu’s work was removed from this sound for most of the decade—he seemed more interested in making music that popped off in the club rather than delving into layers of ghostly static and white noise—but his West Mineral debut, Bought the Farm, revealed an imagination for grayscale, ’90s-style ambient no less vivid than that of associates like Huerco S., Ulla, or Pontiac Streator. His follow-up, Significant Soil, is even stranger and more evocative.
This is not music intended to soothe. If Romeu’s mentee Huerco S. leans toward the romantic gestures of Wolfgang Voigt or Basic Channel, Significant Soil is more akin to ramshackle Y2K-era records like Nobukazu Takemura’s Scope or Mika Vainio’s Olento, which feel so divorced from musical convention there’s the thrilling sense that anything could happen. On Significant Soil, one damned thing after another happens. “I Saw the Green Flash” alone throws us sawing synth strings, B-movie UFO whistles, tactile field recordings, and what sounds like a robot attempting to sing doo-wop with a mouthful of bees. “When Kennybrook Burned to the Ground” opens with a masticating sample not unlike something you’d find on Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica before a doleful, martial horn starts duetting with a chintzy reggae organ and a wet rustle of static.
Romeu’s music feels so thrown together that sounds that might not necessarily “work” contribute to the overall effect of witnessing something assembled by the proverbial tornado blowing through a scrapyard. It’s the same failsafe effect that let Phil Elverum get away with shredding on the pencil sharpener in the middle of his most ambitious rock opera. The Shinichi Atobe-like “Good Apple” sets a piano loop against a crude-sounding drum machine, and neither seems to acknowledge the other is in the room, as if they ended up together purely by chance. “Bory” opens the album by repeating a serrated synth lead for six minutes. It makes as little sense as anything else, which means it’s a great scene-setter.
Significant Soil can feel disruptive and even disturbing at first, but once you come to anticipate its twists and turns, it takes on a holistic quality independent of the spare parts it seems to be made of. Everything is in service of the atmosphere, which is mysterious, wintry, and often beautiful, especially when an “Isthmus” of hand drums and cut-up vocals connects the rest of the album to the long, bittersweet, sighing ambient closer “Losing Blood.” Most good music makes the listener ask: Who is this? Better yet is music that makes the listener ask: What is this? Significant Soil is thrilling because on top of those queries, it makes the listener ask: Why? Romeu’s answer: Why not?
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