Badge Époque Ensemble - Furry Worried Ape (2025) [Official Digital Download]

Furry Worried Ape (TER130) is the second album by Badge Epoch — Maximilian “Twig” Turnbull’s solitary variant of the Badge Époque Ensemble — and the first in his discography made almost entirely alone. Following 2021’s Scroll, a 2xLP sprawl which WIRE praised as “an attempt to fit a whole world onto two slabs of vinyl,” this one is all scalpel and no sprawl: six tracks, under half an hour, produced and mixed with forensic patience by Turnbull at Clyde’s Temple, his garage home-studio.

Built bar-by-bar on MIDI programming — using drum sounds from The Cloud Sound, a sample pack drawn from Badge Époque Ensemble sessions — the grooves bend the grid to their own logic, inhabiting an uncanny register between the performed and programmed. From this blur emerges a language steeped in the lavish elegance of Mizell Brothers productions and Love Unlimited’s symphonic jazz-funk, refracted through a modern “hauntological” lens; the cosmopolitan peaks of 1970s studio arrangement, rescaled for an era of automation. Throughout, the album navigates multiple meanings of “funk”: syncopated, groove-first mood building; idiosyncratic strangeness; the singular “stench” of a one-person vision commandeering a live-band idiom.

It’s an exhibit in paradox: harmonically expansive yet often naïve in execution; painstakingly programmed yet laced with spontaneous imperfection. Much of that naïveté comes from a flurry of bonked guitar solos — equal parts understated elegance and the frustrated desire to emit sound à la Sonny Sharrock. The centrepiece, “Red Leather Interior,” is a 10-minute unedited guitar-and-conga improvisation with BÉE percussionist Ed Squires, whose playing also underpins five of the album’s six tracks. It sits in deliberate contrast to the digital miniatures surrounding it, where Latin-jazz percussion, preset-bent VST synths, and slap-funk basslines coil around Turnbull’s own vocoded voice — his first vocal appearance since the DFA-era Slim Twig years. In Empathic Vertigo, cellos and flutes trade a playground-chant melody, darkened within a suite of moody progressive movements, and obscure vocoding; Erotic Surveillance is a prowling slice of orchestral funk, its Seinfeldian bassline snapping beneath plush strings and cartoonish clavinet; I Look Up To See My Only Sunshine is a psychologically cloistered ballad of dubbed-out drums and dreamy jazz voicings, suspended in the stillness of a fading memory. Furry Worried Ape is a compact, repeat-play object that holds its contradictions in balance — the pull of a body that can’t help but dance, and a mind that won’t stop circling its own unease.

Tracklist:
01 Empathic Vertigo
02 Erotic Surveillance
03 I Look Up To See My Only Sunshine
04 Tom Henry's Dream
05 Red Leather Interior
06 Subjective Objectives


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