stereophonic waterbed
tripleimg

12 TRACKS (31:39) // 30/10/2026


tripleimg, better known under the alias mousetrapping, puts out a surprisingly rich record for YellowTealPurple’s Album in a Week Challenge 4, channeling the depths of their mind to create a plunderphonics project with all sorts of rough edges to love.


A whole half-hour of music in just seven days. You don’t have to be a seasoned producer to recognize the sheer comedy that this challenge poses. Typically, projects of this scale may take a year, maybe two, perhaps just half. Fortunately for humanity, limitation breeds creativity.

Improvised, atonal, arrythmic arrangements pop up here and there all over the tracklist - very understandably, given the short production cycle. Noise, glitch, drone - all fun in its own right. While it’s pretty hard for such music to stand out as memorable, the ambience here is far from a stinker.
Following the more-or-less standard intro, more structurally defined tracks take center stage for a while. As is the hallmark of some great plunderphonics, musical ideas tend to flow freely, like water. Pretty much no sample is spared in the process - many elements go through an entire meat grinder of experimentation over the runtime of one song, and the unique arrangement decisions accomodate these phenomena well. Now, I know it sounds like I’m using some kind of pro-experimental soft-speak when I just bring in words like “unique” to describe an idea, but you’ll have to trust me on this one. Things just happen when you have to finish a track. Trying outlandish things is customary for such releases: they’re quick, but more importantly, they’re low-commitment. Paired with somebody who already does outlandish things, this results in a certain kind of experience.

With such a sample-intensive flavor of music, I think it’s important to get everybody on the same page about sampling in this kind of form.
Take it from Reddit user poeinthegutter, couldn’t have said it much better myself:

It's 100% art that requires creative vision and skill. Like any other medium, there are degrees of worth. A simple mashup that takes the vocal stems of one song and the instrumentals of another may be unimpressive skill-wise and uninspiring to listen to (or it may be a stroke of genius that is very much worthwhile despite the low still expression), but on the low end of skill and vision, you could be tempted to say it's not art, even though I would still contend that it is because it took some level of creativity. On the opposite end you could have the Avalanches or the Books who are massively skilled and make unique music that I could personally listen to on repeat, which wouldn't exist otherwise. Their skill and vision brought those pieces into the world, which is another way of saying that art was created. To define art in the reverse is a slippery slope as well.
To take it to the extreme: do painters need to mix their own pigments to have truly created their art? Or are they making a collage of the colors already designed by the paint company?


A colorful, dariacore/hyperflip-esque track like “Full Version HD” would’ve taken me a week to finish on its own; I’m personally missing this skill of getting stuff done. It seems to be based mostly in a careful amount of derivation, repetition and minimalism. Some parts are empty, some are simply “slow it down, then a little more”; “put a jersey club beat over it” and so on. You can start to take things apart by your fifth listen-through, and yet it doesn’t detract from the experience as much as you’d expect. The track “Motel Six” is evergreen in its absolute radness, for instance. That track reminds me a lot of Death Grips’ “Interview 2016” in some ways, with much more going on thanks to the freedom provided.

Those are the harder-going tracks, but there’s some very good stuff in the middle of the intensity spectrum. “language matrix” is an easy favorite: noisy, clicky, almost clipping.-like percussion style merged with watery, dynamic noise, all over some smooth as hell melodic piano and synths, complete with some less than orthodox rhythms. It’s so uniquely memorable, and perhaps one of the motifs I’ve hummed to myself the most. It’s hard for me to comprehend that people can pull this off at all.
The other highlight in this bracket, “headphone bottlerocket”, takes a more downtempo, quasi-synthwave angle. Floaty, nostalgic, longing. It’s the spacey synth riffs, the simple two-note phrase on the keys, the vocals garbled just enough to be unrecognizable… It feels kind of astronomical in a way. Profound, honestly.

“vlog” and “best mode” in particular ring like a clash of Oneohtrix Point Never’s different styles of ambient, taken to an extreme: simple, yet effective synth arpeggios somehow sharing a space with absolutely deranged sampled glitch improvisation: it’s often extremely messy, yet bits of bliss shine through. I’d liken this stuff to the sounds of an alternate-universe mother nature: it’s so ugly, so beautiful, so… existent. “0”, on the other hand, takes a deeper focus on repetition, containing less harsh noises; making for a better dissociating experience - noise you’d clock out to instead of waking up to.
In the midst of the ambient half resides the acoustic-based composition “My companion”. It’s not an absolute favorite of mine, but it’s still very, very neat, and so hard to leave out of discussion when it works well as a complement to an already vast creative palette.


I would interpret stereophonic waterbed as an unapologetic distillation of whatever was felt by its creator at the moment. It’s not a comfortable listen some of the time, it’s 50% ambient water. It might be messy, yet empty at the same time. It’s something that just, happened - from my own experience, multi-track projects with no time to marinate tend to feel like a blip on the calendar after the fact.
And yet, I still love it like this; as something that happened. It is a creative achievement, it’s surprisingly strong. (as somebody always on the lookout for more mousetrapping) It’s weirdly good, and good-ly weird. It’s albums like this that make me so hesitant to ever consider using a point-based ranking system, because what is this truly?
It’s art, by an artist. That’s all I know.


FAVORITES

  • Motel Six
  • language matrix
  • headphone bottlerocket
  • Full Version HD

AMBIENT FAVORITES

  • 0
  • My companion
  • best mode