Richard Wilkes doesn’t waste time with pleasantries. Ectospazm, his debut outing under the Myoptik alias for Zoku – Zoku, opens with drums already mid-collapse — choppy, halting, scattered across the mix — before a three-note bass figure muscles its way to the center and refuses to leave. It’s a fitting overture: eight tracks of wonky IDM that treat structure as a suggestion and coherence as an occasional courtesy. Wilkes, who has spent years cultivating his own idiosyncratic language across labels like The Centrifuge, AMPEFF, Neotantra, and his own Ping Disc imprint, arrives at Zoku – Zoku with a record that plays like the culmination of that apprenticeship: an artist who has fully metabolized the genre’s collage-based DNA and is now actively mutating it.
The album opens with “Framez v4,” a track that establishes the record’s governing logic in miniature. Halting, chopped percussion ricochets across the spectrum while a battalion of quieter background synths mutter in something like digital glossolalia — present, insistent, but never quite legible. Anchoring the chaos is a deep, unapologetic bass synth that loops a three-note phrase with almost stubborn insistence, giving the ear something to grip onto even as the drums slice the beat into unrecognizable fragments. It is fast, it is dense, and it announces early-on that this is unapologetically experimental music.
“Dirt stoP Pt2” pushes further into abstraction, alternating between drum-forward eruptions and cavernous pauses where only a stray hit or a subterranean bass rumble survives. Myoptik uses these silences architecturally, letting fragments of melody and texture bleed in and out like transmissions from another room. By its final third, the track abandons rhythm and pitch altogether, dissolving into a pure textural collage, a controlled act of demolition.
Elsewhere, the record reveals a taste for the theatrical. The “Skull Garage podcast mix” opens on slowed, ghostly vocal textures before staggering into a drunken, distorted percussive pattern — deliberately unsteady, as though the beat itself is recovering from something. It is among the album’s most atmospheric moments, a sonic gumbo, to borrow an apt descriptor, thick with echo and disorientation. The “Frames Crispy Jason Remix,” by contrast, is the closest thing here to euphoria: drums build patiently over roughly eight measures before the track vaults into a hybrid of IDM and drum’n’bass, propulsive and stab-laden, yet buoyed by a surprisingly unshadowed, almost playful energy.
“Dungeon Stalker E” and “Scott Grime” showcase Myoptik’s gift for constructing melody out of material that resists melody entirely — chimed percussion forming a dissonant, semi-intelligible pattern in the former; a metallic drone swelling like a digital klaxon in the latter, framed by stark, snare-less kick-and-click percussion and cosmic sub-bass. Both tracks demonstrate Wilkes’s patience: the payoff of coherence, when it arrives, is earned through a long, deliberately unstable buildup. “Troll Basket,” meanwhile, is the album’s most club-adjacent moment, its wobbling bass and gathering drum complexity settling into a genuine, heavily experimental drum’n’bass pocket, proof that Myoptik can groove when he chooses to.
The album’s closing statement, “Skulls pt1,” is its most ambitious. What begins as a reverb-drenched, bass-led dirge — accompanied by time-stretched spoken word — mutates across several minutes into harsh industrial territory before receding again into darker, more spectral IDM. It is a piece that resists any single identity, cycling through slow-motion menace, industrial abrasion, and spectral calm without settling, closing the record on a note of suspended animation.
Ectospazm will remain a standout addition in your record collection thanks to Wilkes‘s instinct for pacing chaos. He understands that disorientation is most effective in contrast, and he continually offsets his most frenetic passages with pockets of space, drone, or unexpected lightness. The album never curdles into noise for its own sake; even at its most collage-like, Ectospazm retains a peculiar, magnetic logic.
As a first transmission on Zoku – Zoku, Ectospazm sets a high bar: eight tracks that refuse to settle for a single mode when three or four will do, played with the confidence of someone who has spent years learning exactly how much chaos a track can hold before it collapses.
Ectospazm by Myoptik releases 7 August 2026 exclusively on Zoku – Zoku
