FKA twigs

haven't heard the full album yet, but i think "water me" is my favorite single track so far. "two weeks" is close.

Amazing gif Grady

hat tip to goon tie

really feeling dumb for skipping her pitchfork set but she was playing at the same time as st. vincent

She'll be in the US for a month:

November 6th 930 Club, Washington, D.C.
November 7th Union Transfer, Philadelphia, PA
November 8th Terminal 5, New York, NY
November 11th Brighton Music Hall, Boston, MA
November 13th Metro, Chicago, IL
November 14th Fine Line, Minneapolis, MN
November 17th Commodore, Vancouver, Canada
November 18th Showbox, Seattle, WA
November 20th Regency, San Francisco, CA
November 21st Regent, Los Angeles, CA
November 26th Parish, Austin, TX
November 28th Trees, Dallas, TX
November 29th Republic, New Orleans, LA
December 1st Mercy Lounge, Nashville, TN
December 2nd Terminal West, Atlanta, GA
December 3rd The Social, Orlando, FL

http://i.imgur.com/ySPZcO9.gif

Happy that cybergoth is finally influencing others

nice clip above of FKA twigs (not the lol-goths) is pretty much a catalogue of moves taken directly from voguing/the ball scene

she's doing handwork, spinning into a death drop, and then ends with some duckwalking

and doing it very well, obviously

yeah when i saw her at pitchfork she said she was learning how to vogue

I feel like if this was the exact same album but had Karin Dreijer Andersson on the cover, it would unambiguously be ILX's album of the year

― Star Gentle Uterus (DJP), Tuesday, August 12, 2014 10:26 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was gonna talk about how i don't like this as much as the grimes album but now i feel lke a racist

See this is the album I wanted Visions to be. Not of knock on Visions at all, just that LP1 is more my cup of tea.

I love Grimes but 'Two Weeks' is objectively better than Grimes' entire catalog

crazy talk

like this a million times more than grimes

maybe i'm not at the right point in my life for this unrelenting crystalline dourness. i wish there were anger like a Knife album or joy like a Grimes album, but after a few listens i'm finding this stifling rather than cathartic. i think "kicks" does this album's thing best though

i dunno about the knife so much as like watery bjork, which is to say modern bjork

I love Grimes but 'Two Weeks' is objectively better than Grimes' entire catalog

― 龜, Tuesday, August 12, 2014 6:13 PM (1 hour ago)

yeah no. both good, quite different. objectively bullshit.

objecterizer

i wish there were anger like a Knife album or joy like a Grimes album, but after a few listens i'm finding this stifling rather than cathartic.

Think "stifling" is the point.

Happy that cybergoth is finally influencing others

― 龜, Tuesday, August 12, 2014 2:04 PM Bookmark

uh

really feeling dumb for skipping her pitchfork set but she was playing at the same time as st. vincent

― ╲╱\/╲/\╱╲╱\/\ (gr8080), Tuesday, August 12, 2014 4:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Let's go see her @ Metro.

Her live show looks amazing - the dancing O_O

btw anyone have production credits for this?

― festival culture (Jordan), Wednesday, August 13, 2014 12:21 AM (16 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've read this on another board but not sure of its source:

Preface produced by FKA twigs
Lights On produced by Arca
Two Weeks produced by Emile Haynie and FKA twigs
Hours produced by Emile Hayie, Dev Hynes, Class Casino and Arca
Pendulum produced by Paul Epworth and FKA twigs
Video Girl produced by Emile Haynie
Numbers produced by FKA twigs and Sampha
Closer produced by FKA twigs, Cy An and Tic.
Give Up produced by Emile Haynie and Arca
Kicks produced by FKA twigs and Cy An
One Time produced by inc. And FKA twigs

Guess if someone actually owns the album they should be able to verify. I've ordered the deluxe vinyl, despite the groans of my hip pocket.

Grimes sounds (deliberately) cheap as hell while this is lush and expansive and perfectly produced. I don't understand why anyone is comparing them.

have you heard "go"?

Her first Ep, which i only heard for the first time a few weeks ago, definitely had an early Tricky vibe

OK, so a few weeks ago, I was wandering around Dawson's Heights (massive Mayan Temple-inspired Brutalist housing estate that hangs over South London like a battleship) sketching, and there was this song blasting out of someone's window, echoing off the concrete, which was the perfect soundtrack, all ghostly echoing Liz Fraser vocals with booming hollow trip-hop beats underneath. And I was asking around on Twitter, what the hell was this song I heard?

Bought the album and turns out it was indeed this.

But guys. C'mon. R&B? This is straight-up 4AD!

Seriously, on the first track, (and also on stuff like Closer) those vocal harmonies, I almost started giggling because it reminded me so much (in a good way) of medieval chant-based goth like Dead Can Dance / Miranda Sex Garden! (I have no idea if she's ~influenced~ by those artists, but to me, it sounds like she is mining the seams of early Baroque, the place where plainsong turns into polyphony, very early classical and "churchy" music.) Those kind of vocal swoops and "oh-oh!"s in an echo chamber totally remind me of early Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, His Name Is Alive, that kind of thing. But with South London beats bolted on underneath, in a really compelling and alien fusion that still totally works.

The other artist I can think of making this kind of music is Julianna Barwick. That kind of huge, cavernous, churchy polyphony with lots of airy, floaty space. Like, if you're approaching this thinking "R&B" you are going to be hugely disappointed and come out fuming like The Lex. That is not the slightest bit what this is. But if you come into this thinking "Julianna Barwick" or "Cocteau Twins with Night Bus beats" that's a heck of a lot closer to what's going on.

"The Knife"?!?! (No. Fever Ray maybe, with the more gothy side) "Grimes"? (again, 4AD) Bjork? What, coz she wears *princess leia braids*? You guys are just grabbing at straws with the ~ladyproducers~ here.

A bit of Julia Holter about her voice too. Anyway, LP1 is fucking amazing. Wasn't into the track that charted in the '13 poll but this album is something else.

is lex is the fucking slender man now or something

'Cocteau Twins with night bus beats' is a pretty good description but ~night bus beats~ are all about mopey solipsism whereas this is all about intense intimacy.

I think you're going too far the other way though, there is loads of R&B in the mix here, I don't know how you can listen to 'Two Weeks' without thinking of Ciara for example. But it's a part of the mix along with loads of other elements.

correct

good album

But yeah, equally, you wouldn't hear those folky modal melodies in any R&B that I can think of.

Just got tickets to see her play glasgow in october :)

On the is it or isn't it r&b, she said some interesting things herself in the Guardian recently:

We're in central London, in the pretty unerotic environs of a chain restaurant, but twigs remains obviously strange, a compact arrangement of eyes, biceps and goofy teeth. Those peepers grow and flash with irritation when I mention how much of the coverage of her music has seen her boxed alongside "alt-R&B" stars such as Banks, Kelela and SZA."It's just because I'm mixed race," she interjects. "When I first released music and no one knew what I looked like, I would read comments like: 'I've never heard anything like this before, it's not in a genre.' And then my picture came out six months later, now she's an R&B singer. I share certain sonic threads with classical music; my song Preface is like a hymn. So let's talk about that. If I was white and blonde and said I went to church all the time, you'd be talking about the 'choral aspect'. But you're not talking about that because I'm a mixed-race girl from south London." She gives me a look as if I've asked her to take the restaurant's bins out.

In an attempt to placate her, I ask if she feels singular. Her face softens. "Very. I love annoying sounds, beats, clicks. Kakakakaka!" Her hands wave violently around wisps of Afro that have escaped her do. "I don't see anyone else doing that now. It's got loud noises in there, the structures aren't typical, it's relentless. It's like punk; fuck alternative R&B!"

ime everyone would prefer to be "not in a genre"; some of these songs regardless work in the traditions of r&b

Haha no, Alex has come back and said he kinda likes it now! Slender Man averted.

I share certain sonic threads with classical music; my song Preface is like a hymn.

OK, now I'm glad that I was picking up on this, if she says it's in there deliberately. I wouldn't say folky, like DC (though I suppose it's that same medieval plainsong element that comes up in both (English) church music and folk music) but churchy.

The ~sonic textures~ are Night Bus-y because that's just the technology involved. I keep hearing trip-hop comparisons coming up, but that's because it's that pairing of the beats with wispy, ethereal vocals (thinking of Massive Attack working with Liz Fraser, Tracey Thorn) and also the warmth and intimacy rather than the desolation of the more technologically similar Night Bus-y stuff.

It's funny how 2 people can listen to the same thing and hear such different comparisons. Like, just listening to Two Weeks again, and I suddenly see what you mean by Ciara on those high super-soprano cooing noises. But the echo/reverb treatment on it made me think ethereal-goth. But that comes back to the idea of what signifiers actually *make* genre. (And the technology in that, like, how much of that 4AD-ethereal-goth sound was about a super-soprano feminine-ish voice run through reverb/delay units. And that sound is all over this record, flagging up "4AD" for me.)

...and she makes a really good point as to how much of assigning people to "genre" is down to visual cues (especially race and gender) rather than musical cues... #PostsVeryMuchInCharacter

in contentiously related news is anyone else deriving regular mild amusement from BANKS having a thing out called 'beggin for thread'

this is gonna be this year's album everyone loves and I don't get?

I guess large swaths of it are functionally similar to something, oh, Nan Vernon would release, except even more crystalline and glassy and sterile. but the "it's about SEX! except it's so glassy and sterile and British!" trope is one of my least favorite. plus, I don't care for Emile Haynie or Paul Epworth much

uh excuse u, "mmm this mbv album sounds like... a bag of sand" is a critical institution without national borders

Well as twigs-love picks up critical mass (LOL) of course "huh this sucks/IDGI" is going to be the exciting new contrarian stance to pose.

...and she makes a really good point as to how much of assigning people to "genre" is down to visual cues (especially race and gender) rather than musical cues... #PostsVeryMuchInCharacter

― are we shoegaze or are we dancer? (Branwell with an N), vrijdag 15 augustus 2014 15:05 (43 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Absolutely. And I'm very pleased she adressed this so straight-forward.

Listening to this for the first time. This is fuckin amazing. Detailed rewarding completely delicious soundworld.

i am listening to it again

'two weeks'/'hours' b2b mouthsuite is a coded holla at 1975 dude right

That's between you and your LJ slashfic community dude.

Textures apply to everything I do. Even within my music, I like smooth things, and then hard and fluffy things, all giving them their place to shine.

Yessss this is what I listen for in music and hearing her say this makes me v happy

i love this album so much

It's too bad she is playing Terminal 5 (the venue where acoustical detail and filigree go to die) but damn someone please take my old broke ass to this show

When I first released music and no one knew what I looked like, I would read comments like: 'I've never heard anything like this before, it's not in a genre.' And then my picture came out six months later, now she's an R&B singer.

I see and agree with all the comments you all are making about this, but also, come on, it's not like there's no predecessor or context for this. I have trouble buying that people were really hearing this blind and being like I DON'T KNOW WHAT THIS IS?!?!? I know that's not really the point of the quote though.

I like the album a lot but there are a couple of tracks that get on my nerves. "Hours" is one, it comes back to the chorus too many times.