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Music

Junus Orca crafts blood-pumping, glacial beauty on his singular debut EP

Junus Orca steps into an ethereal space of industrial mountains and grinding metal glaciers, all humming to a fervent, beating pulse.

On his debut EP, Christchurch DJ and producer Junus Orca crafts an immaculately dark soundworld that is well worth your time.

Crafted for denizens of the night, Junus Orca is not fabricating landscapes but remembering them. As if One Arm Pack is where he came from all along.

We first ran into Junus Orca a year ago. He was running with experimentalism, vast as the rolling landscapes and craggy distant mountains of New Zealand’s Southern plains. With no social media platforms to boot, he was an artist immersed in solitude.

His debut double sing, Bloth/Dium, drew first-hand sounds from around the globe – including a bubbling Icelandic geyser – and forged them into powerful electronic pieces. As it stands, they were only a precursor to the emotive industrial majesty of his debut EP One Arm Pack. 

Opener Posh Homes unfold in a surging collection of ambient noise. Pushing and pulling like the tide it’s easy to close and sink into its embrace. Although unlike ambient music, this is not pretty. That is not to say that the body of work is not altogether beautiful, it absolutely is. The beauty here is to be found in a lightning storm, or volcanic eruption rather than the birds chirping in the morning.

The title track picks up the pace with a frantic bassline and scratchy etherealism. This is the nucleus that the rest of the EP whirs around. Overall the production is crisp and intriguing, drenching up images of Jon Hopkins, which is in all respects a compliment.

It feels as if Junus Orca has more or less found his voice in sound and it is one of blood-pumping majesty. Strange, jagged but powerful. Elusive yet present. If there are a plethora of other artists that sound just like Junus Orca then I haven’t heard them. A marvellous debut EP and we cannot wait to see where the sound and vision takes him.