Seventeen months ago, Laura “Lulu” Callier—aka solo electronic musician Gel Set—packed up her things and moved from Chicago to Los Angeles with her steadfast canine companion, Dixie.
As Callier rode out that loneliness, she began noticing doppelgängers everywhere she went: on sidewalks, at gas stations, at supermarkets, and at shows, she saw people who looked almost but not exactly like the friends and acquaintances she’d left behind. She calls them “body copies”—and they’re also why she titled the new Gel Set record Body Copy. If albums document a specific time and place in the life of the artist, then Body Copy is a snapshot of Callier neither here nor there, living in that disorienting mix of past, present, and future that so often occurs during transition.
The 11 songs on Body Copy demonstrate her drive, focus, and evolving talents. She draws on deep knowledge of a wide spectrum of electronic music—house, techno, synth-heavy 80s movie soundtracks, synth-pop past and present—but a distinctive avant-ooze also seeps into every corner of the album, keeping it weird for the weirdos who just wanna get fucking weird.
But a light-hearted “fuck it, let’s dance” attitude has also been part of Gel Set since the beginning, informing what Callier self-deprecatingly refers to as her “vapid pop songs.”
“I heard somebody refer to 69 once as the ‘sex numeral,’ and that stuck with me,” Callier says. “Because we know why it’s called ’69.’ But what about all the other numbers?”
While the loneliness of Callier’s new life in LA helped inspire her to write the songs on Body Copy, it was a scare she got in the city’s notoriously horrible traffic that pushed her to get the album done quickly.
