SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: УВБ-76 – LEAN INTO THE SORROW

УВБ-76
LEAN INTO THE SORROW
HITACHI HOME VIDEO/INDEPENDENT

Michael Mitchell, who records music under the name УВБ-76, describes Lean Into The Sorrow, his latest album, released on physical formats by the Hitachi Home Video label, as his “opus magnum”. The 40-minute piece, divided into 20 unnamed tracks, is a captivating blend of ‘broken transmission’-style vaporwave, dark ambient, noise and musique concrète, significantly shaped by a life that has oscillated between an immersion in outsider music and severe mental health issues.

Mitchell’s artist name is the Cyrillic spelling of UVB-76, the name of a mysterious shortwave signal known as ‘The Buzzer’, which has been broadcast – allegedly by the Russian military – since the 1970s. The producer is a shortwave radio fanatic and record collector based in Wilmington, Delaware, who grew up on a diet of punk, gothic and industrial music in the 1980s and 1990s. Dabbling in the local musical underground as an adolescent and young adult, he left music-making behind for a long time. Upon discovering the signalwave scene in 2025, he found back into a regular creative practice routine, channeling his decades-long struggles with depression, PTSD and autism into uncanny soundscapes made from sampled radio signals and other secret sources.

Signalwave is a DIY-oriented subgenre of vaporwave that centers around snippets of old radio and television transmissions. In just a few ultra-productive months since late 2025, Mitchell has been able to solidify his status as one of the most interesting newcomers in the scene, unleashing a bunch of captivating works in quick succession through various labels and garnering accolades from fellow producers and collectors. He’s been experimenting with original synth music in a dark ambient style, as well as exploring samples of traditional East Asian folk music or Gregorian chant. A decades-deep collection of weird experimental records comes in handy when you’re making strange sound collages.

Mitchell’s growing discography is now crowned by Lean Into The Sorrow, an album on which you will hear haunting synth melodies over eerie static, dissonant strings and ballroom-style piano over uncanny shortwave noise. The material seems to draw on influences from a deep history of outsider music in the ambient sphere, from Nurse With Wound to Tangerine Dream, from Vangelis to Xenakis. It’s also firmly rooted in the contemporary signalwave underground, a lively and innovative, digitally connected global scene.

This is dark and unsettling music, for sure, but there’s a certain sense of humour baked into it as well. “To me it’s kind of funny that people say the music is so dark,” Mitchell says, “because it’s just an extension of my head.”

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