formless, gridlock’s fourth album and first full-length for hymen, is as far away from the acrid, slight world of plug-ins and software music as you could possibly get, which is rather ironic considering that gridlock’s mike wells and mike cadoo live in the would-be epicenter of laptop music, san francisco. full of lush melodies and luscious analog warmth, formless shuns the pretense of flaccid software acrobatics, instead summoning from the depths of human emotion a musical epic that touches upon the gravest recesses of memory. the overtones are clear from the opening track, “pallid:” formless reaches back to the early days of modern electronic music, sonically referencing classic works like autechre’s incunabula and aphex twin’s selected ambient works 85-92. yet in keeping with gridlock’s more aggressive mechano-industrial background, wells and cadoo situate formless firmly within the roots of metalized noise and grinding rhythms. as a result, formless feels unlike any other electronic release in recent memory, realizing raw emotion as carefully crafted sound design. while the sound of formless is a significant step beyond the harsh percussive elements on their 2001 album for unit, trace, wells and cadoo both remark that it’s all just a matter of course for gridlock, which began in 1997 with their the synthetic form lp on pendragon records. “gridlock was an idea with a specific definition as ‘heaviness in electronics,’” explains wells, “and i believe that cadoo and i have