Overthinker Mob Dusts Off Club Gems Hidden on Producers’ Hard Drives

On 'The Biotech Issue,' the multi-disciplinary collective presents an audiovisual "moodboard" of music that would otherwise go unheard.

Top Notes
Hybrid mechanical/organic club music, lush atmospheres, complex beats

Mid Notes
Coding music, plastics, meditation

Base Notes
A diverse range of anti-ego club tunes and somber atmospheres that benefits from stylistic change-ups

Have you ever wondered about all of the tracks that producers make outside of their recognized “sound,” that usually end up gathering dust on a forgotten hard drive, never to see the light of day? Adding to their blog Thought Cue and their mix series Culture is Fiction, multidisciplinary collective Overthinker Mob has released their first compilation with a peculiar concept: They asked artists Diessa, Eno Gata, Mordio, Niklas Bühler, Polygonia, and Porter Brook to dig up their off-cuts and hidden gems (which they’ve dubbed “overthought music”) to be put out anonymously.

While combed from the archives of geographically-disparate producers, The Biotech Issue—which the label has categorized as not an LP, not an EP, not a playlist, but a moodboard—is a meticulously crafted and cohesive narrative of forward-thinking club music. And while the term “moodboard” (which is traditionally a visually-realized collage of references, objects, and ideas that influence a creative product) may be a strange choice to describe something that, at least from the outside, looks like an album, there’s a way that the tracks relate to each other that justifies the choice of wording.

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Some share direct sonic characteristics: The clicky beats and warm melancholic synths on “Blue” effortlessly flow into the more energetic, mechanical bass of “XUNOX” and the weightless, computerized meditation of “Singing Bowl.” Others feel only tangentially connected to the rest, like disparate references that would occupy a separate corner of a physical moodboard. The sparse, granulated tones of ender “Lullaby for Blu” and the dystopic cinematic world in “Heled Gne,” which is built from clips of field recordings, plastic-y samples and sputtering synths, feel emotionally distant from the direct, mathematical precision of the club tracks. But presented as a whole, however, the release gives you a sense that you’re seeing the same, unique musical world—just from different directions at the same time—and the stylistic hard-cuts and pivots that the moodboard approach allows make it all the more enthralling to return to.

Listen to The Biotech Issue, and watch its accompanying video above.

Check out Overthinker Mob’s website here, then head to their Bandcamp to support the project here.