Igloo Magazine :: You Us We Them :: memoryleaks (([||])) (CONDU||T)

A brainstorming session that stays comfortable in its own incompleteness

CONDUIT—stylized as CONDU||T—is a Los Angeles-based creative collective and label operating under the ethos “how we shape the world is what the world becomes.” Since at least 2022, the collective has been releasing electronic, experimental, ambient, and downtempo music across a roster that includes Left/Right, canary yellow, Scaefa, and You Us We Them, donating a portion of proceeds from compilation releases to causes including Doctors Without Borders and hunger relief in Palestine. It’s a label with genuine community intent, and memoryleaks arrives as its most ambitious and personal release yet, a debut full-length from You Us We Them, the LA composer and visual artist whose previous work appeared scattered across CONDUIT compilation releases.

31 tracks. The first thing to establish is what to call them, not tracks in the conventional sense, but mini excerpts, ideas, fragments. Some are interludes, some are fully formed concepts, and others sound like good ideas that could have been built into something larger but weren’t. That’s not a criticism so much as an observation about intent. This is what it sounds like when a producer has a large collection of morning keyboard improvisations, a practice the artist calls “Chaos Works,” recorded daily as a meditative exercise, and decides to present them honestly rather than sculpting them into something more conventionally structured. Some of them could have expanded into larger compositions. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe they’re comfortable exactly where they sit.

The melodies are the strongest element throughout and the clearest standout across all 31 pieces. The synth selection and mild effects being applied make this a beauty to listen to, bending toward ambient and experimental throughout. Comparisons to Geogaddi by Boards of Canada surface naturally, that album specifically, minus the drum work. Pure melodic bliss without rhythmic infrastructure, which leaves the melodic ideas fully exposed and either beautiful or insufficient depending on what’s underneath them. Here, what’s underneath is personal, real audio recordings collaged from childhood films, tape, and cell phone videos. A marriage proposal. Voicemails. Conversations with people no longer here. That material is embedded throughout and when it surfaces it changes the weight of everything surrounding it. Some of the darker melodic compositions and bass synth selections carry traces of Lorn‘s specific brand of dark, heavy note choices, that same gravity applied to what might otherwise float away into pure ambience.

A fragment of a memory plot executed with genuine intent ::

The track naming deserves attention because it rewards close reading. Usually when producers name tracks abstractly you expect the connection between title and content to be decorative rather than meaningful. Here the intent is visible. “memoryleak_non-duality”—27 seconds, is a mixture of recordings and field recordings ending with what sounds like a voicemail of a child saying “I love you.” The piece feels like someone accessing a series of memories rapidly and landing on one specific moment. The connection between title and content clicks immediately and the impact of that 27-second piece lands harder than many tracks ten times its length. “down below” applies a bouncing effect to melodies that are slowly fading and dying in sound, you can hear what sounds like seagulls or a beach setting beneath it, at least that’s what surfaces in the listening. The “memoryleak” prefixed tracks function as a distinct subcategory throughout the album, strange glimpses of something not supposed to be accessed, each one a fragment of a memory plot executed with genuine intent.

A technical note worth making: a lot of the melodic structures on this album are heavily compressed. In experimental and ambient music, compression applied aggressively to melodic content does something specific, it reduces the dynamic range, bringing the quieter moments up and pushing the louder moments down until everything sits at a similar level. The effect can create a dreamlike, smeared quality where notes seem to float without natural attack and decay, which suits the memory-as-medium concept of this album perfectly. What sounds like a technical limitation is actually a compositional choice that reinforces the album’s core idea, memories don’t have natural dynamic range either. They arrive at whatever volume your mind decides, flattened or amplified by emotional association rather than actual acoustic level.

“memoryleak_harbinger” is the favorite of that batch, a build that makes it feel like something epic is about to happen, then never delivers it. A woman humming, building, connecting her melodic humming to what sounds like an orchestral swell, only for it to fade and disintegrate in bitrate at the end. It is pure sound design work and a wonderful 30 seconds of listening.

The album closes with “Give It Time (Life Theme)” and “rebmemeR (end is the beginning),” teasing, strange, unfinished feeling. But that’s what this album is supposed to be: an intentionally unfinished process of raw and pure melodies, a brainstorming session that stays comfortable in its own incompleteness. One thought that kept surfacing while listening: this material would make an extraordinary remix album. The melodic DNA here is strong enough that handing these fragments to other artists, from inside the CONDUIT roster or outside it, and letting them build full compositions around them feels like an obvious and genuinely exciting next step. Whether that ever happens or not, memoryleaks works exactly as it is—raw, personal, and comfortable in its own incompleteness in a way that takes real confidence to pull off.

memoryleaks is a 31-track collection of short vignettes woven together with actual memories: real audio recordings from childhood films, tape recordings, and cell phone videos. His proposal to his wife, conversations with family no longer here, and voicemails from friends are all layered within. It is deeply personal.

memoryleaks (([||])) is available on CONDUIT. [Bandcamp]