We™ – As Is.

In the late ’90s, a shadowy, bass-heavy strain of electronic music boomed to life in the warehouses, art lofts, and back rooms of downtown New York and Brooklyn. Atmospheric moods with ambient drift, hip hop’s skeletal rhythms, and dub’s sense of vastness, the new sound would eventually be coined illbient, somewhat as a joke. One of the defining acts of this sound, We™ — Gregor Asch (aka DJ Olive), Lloop, and Once11 — approached illbient not as a genre but as a process: layer, erode, repeat. These weren’t club tracks so much as sedimentary forms, built from dub pulses, broken vinyl loops, and incidental noise. “By combining samples that sounded cool to us,” Asch said, “we achieved something greater than the sum of its parts.” The trio drew from hip-hop, acid, musique concrète, and stray artifacts — Varèse, King Tubby, early Air Liquide — mixing them until things got strange. “Some people would get a kind of vertigo from it.” As Is remains one of the genre’s most refined statements: meditative but grounded, beat-based but barely tethered. Listening feels like walking through a city at 4 a.m.