Listen: One Sock Placebo Releases New 'Apophenia' EP

Angad Bagga’s debut EP as One Sock Placebo (‘Hive Plot’) was an unexpectedly good release that caught us by surprise in the first half of last year with its use of unconventional sounds and beautifully bizarre melodic structures. Despite a few missteps, Bagga’s underlying potential as a producer couldn’t be ignored – we’ve kept an eye on One Sock since then and a year later, he’s finally out with his sophomore EP ‘Apophenia’.

‘Apophenia’ served as the background score for a music-theatre production based on an excerpt from ‘The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – The Devils Promise’, by David Stuart Davies. Naturally, then, this heavily atmospheric EP is based on mood and context. It’s a haunting little set of low bpm, droning tracks that have underlying tones of anxiety and suspense that would work very well with the intended visual medium. Bagga’s cleverly restrained, subtle production is spot on and employs a rare attention to detail that truly elevates the quality of this EP.

Of course, its soundtrack like structures don’t make it very accessible (though we doubt Bagga’s particularly enthusiastic about make his music “accessible”).

We asked him about ‘Apophenia’ - “Well, I went through a bit of the crazies way back when, and it turned out to be quite a formative experience. The universe is a tactile being, and communicates through patterns. Apophenia can be concisely put as something a really close friend once said, "Life becomes so fractal that everything becomes synchronistic."

One Sock Placebo also has another EP in the works – “The next EP is going to explore transients and parallels that are going to be expressed ranging from downtempo/ambient, to bass. Music can't be limited to a genre and the more I get into it the more I feel like expressing music as a singular fabric that can range from a frail child to an uncontrollable beast.”

Follow One Sock Placebo on Facebook and SoundCloud for more information and updates about the upcoming EP. You can listen to 'Apophenia' in its entirety below:

Words: Diya Gupta
Art credit: Katyayani Singh