Slowdive – Sugar for the Pill (Avalon Emerson’s Gilded Escalation)
Octo Octa – Adrift (Avalon Emerson’s Furiously Awake Version)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xchUUu6H3nY
Like many I suspect, I was won over to techno artist Avalon Emerson by 2016’s ruthless yet beautiful “The Frontier”, one of the most effortlessly spellbinding techno tracks in recent memory. The crush was sealed by her Beats in Space podcast from that year, and in particular her decision to kick it off with her edit of Bjork’s “I Miss You”, Emerson treating the song’s ostentatious faux latin groove as if it was a techno track. The gesture underscored the air of perversity, and in particular rhythmic perversity, that characterises Emerson’s approach: if she frequently seems to operate in epically expansive terrain, this is less because ostentation is its own reward (though it can be) and more because doing so allows her space to indulge an impressively wide and unpredictably variety of impulses whilst remaining somewhat on-brand. What sounds like Avalon Emerson? Something big and bold that refuses to stay in its lane.
In its original form, “Sugar for the Pill” is Slowdive idealised, a gentle ballad seamlessly marrying the beauty and otherworldliness that (for the most part) separately characterised the band’s disparate first incarnation highlights. But if like me your standard Slowdive go-to is Pygmalion, then the song and other recent Slowdive efforts can seem like a charming tiptoe backwards into “mere” dream-pop. For her remix, Avalon Emerson ups the ante, retaining the tune’s floating gorgeousness but recasting it as a transmission from another galaxy, its seductive allure complicated by exotic estrangement. The tune seems to spin itself out of nothing, echoes and breaths slowly coalescing into a kind of permanent-intro (or extended middle-eight), suspended tension circling, circling, circling with the hesitation of waiting for something to start or perhaps for it to finish.
Finally, the vocals arrive, punctuated by a tentative, exploratory breakbeat rhythm probing the empty spaces in the arrangement. If the track settles into a groove of sorts, it’s more by virtue of its stubborn refusal to break its own spell, the calm piano chords and spiraling synth solos and glittering guitar and shuddering dub bass holding together in the most delicate of spiderwebs. The closest precedent for the sound Emerson concocts here might be “Desire”, an early 90s breakbeat techno sob-fest from Carl Craig alter-ego 69. At a broader level, Emerson’s reimagining of Slowdive’s original strikes me as something like how Carl Craig would have approached the task, throwing out any stylistic rulebook and simply asking, “what does this tune want from me?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGrLVdc7atA
“Adrift” is less startling, but it makes for better dancing: an endless downward plunge into the mysterious heart of the groove. Where Octo Octa’s original is (like much of her work) rich and mysterious and hypnotic, Emerson’s appropriately-titled remix is wide-eyed and white-knuckled, a bumpy ride across a percussive groove so nuanced, so tactile that while listening I can’t help but experience the beats as rattling off different parts of my body. The drums here are just amazing, a complex weave of hand percussion and sharp snares all filtered through dub echo and filling up every available space in the arrangement with rhythmic detail. Halfway through “Adrift” wanders into a kind of graceful machine breakdown (dissolution?) that then continues for the balance of track, and turns out to be not a detour, but the original’s groove culmination.
In part, this is what can make Emerson seem like a techno producer even when (as here) she is technically operating in a house idiom: Emerson’s grooves frequently feel dangerous and unpredictable, complex contraptions threatening to fly apart at any moment but sustained by a commanding internal logic. On “Adrift”, that sense of danger inheres counter-intuitively within an arrangement so perfect that it’s tempting to describe it as pretty, creating in the listener and dancer the contradictory impulses of wanting to succumb to the groove but feeling no choice but to remain furiously awake.
― Tim F, Sunday, 14 January 2018 02:41 (six years ago) link
one year passes...
In case you need some help deciding what to vote for in this year’s ILM poll, I wrote about some of my favourite songs of last year on Facebook (nb. each of this songs or otherwise the excellent album whence they came is nominated):
Blick Bassy - Ngwa
Bassy’s latest release 1958 (a concept album about Ruben Um Nyobe, the 1950s Cameroonian anti-colonial leader who addressed the United Nations seeking independence for Cameroon only to be killed by the French army) is excellent throughout, but I nevertheless frequently struggle to make it past this first track, a stunning collision of Bassy’s tremulously soulful voice and a synthetic string/horn throb reminiscent of Phillip Glass (or, for a closer analogy both stylistically and chronologically, last year’s masterful Djarimirri from the sadly departed Gurrumul). “Ngwa” is as perfect an opener as I can imagine, at once hushed and serene and incredibly tense, embodying a restraint that whispers of impossible violence if the arrangement were somehow to let go of itself. Instead the arrangement revels in its own suspension, leading into a wordless, elegiac, horn-assisted chorus, and then to a second verse whose arrangement barely rises above a dull thud like a broken computer fan, the sound of erasure and repression literalised.
Kelsey Lu - Rebel
Both ghostly and studied, “Rebel” could not be a more perfect evocation of Kelsey’s pretension. I mean, how is this for an opening verse: “Rebel was your middle name / When you were a young girl / Living free in the '60s / Black boots, mini-skirt, blonde curls / Then when you went to art school / Breaking hearts and all the rules / You met the man of your dreams / To society, he was unconventional / But you didn't mind being outside.” It’s ripe for pillorying. But Kelsey conquers through… not conviction, but a certain self-belief that seems always to carry her through to the other side of her own Hail Mary passes; Kate Bush would be proud. Between pizzicato cello and sighing violin, Kelsey’s vocal delivery is both precise and generous, unspooling the tale of her parents’ relationship with a delicate refusal to frame their lives or choices as good or bad or, really, anything other than just things that happened. It’s that portentous blankness that makes “Rebel” thrilling to me, invested with resonance but not staking a position, as if Kelsey is content to observe from the sidelines and allow her parents to pronounce a verdict on themselves.
Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah ft. Saul Williams - I Own The Night
Almost impossible to extract a song from the year’s most astonishing and by-far-best album, but this track felt most like a single, so here we are. Nominally a jazz song (like Scott is, nominally, a jazz artist), “I Own The Night” is part multitiered percussive frenzy, part slam poetry, part eerie aurora borealis of synth cloud, part striated cloud of trumpet, and most of all the most alchemically unique music since (and this was the very first reference point that sprang to mind when I first listened) David Bowie’s Blackstar. In a year replete with fascinating and satisfying modern jazz fusionism, Scott’s seemingly idiosyncratic realisation was that there is a space beyond the mere cross-hatching of jazz instrumentation and several decades of rhythmic innovation in dance music, that these two stylistic dynamics could instead be creatively set against each other, could warp each other beyond recognition. Listening to this, it’s as if the arrangement itself is being transported into the future by hyperdrive.
Ciara - Thinkin Bout You
“Thinkin Bout You” basically exhausts its small quota of ideas within the first 25 seconds: a winsome synth-disco riff over which Ciara sighs with her trademark breathy (haters will say low-energy) understatement, and uh, that’s it? From that point onwards there is nothing new, just further reiterations of the original idea subjected to various levels of EQ and volume adjustment. So, of course, therein lies its genius. Not since “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” has a pop song so fully understood the absolute emotional coincidence of the earworm (that refrain that keeps you up in your bed at night) and that one hook-up whose hooks on the brain are unexpectedly resilient; not since Electrik Red’s “So Good” has a pop song calibrated so precisely the sense of desperation and slight resentment that situation induces.
Roisin Murphy - Incapable
Compared to her arch-rival Alison Goldfrapp, Roisin’s stylistic shifts are less wild mood swing and more the graceful tracing of a constellation around a central idea that itself remains incompletely articulated. Is there a perfect Roisin (or Moloko) song? You could make a case for “Forever More”, perhaps, or “Dear Diary”, or “You Know Me Better”, but each nomination somewhat cancels out the others. Whatever the case, I’d like to nominate “Incapable” as the most Roisin of her efforts. The hypnotically gentle deep house groove is an excellent but thematically lesser part of this equation, its main purpose being to not distract from the song’s central purpose, which is to explore more directly than ever before the essential paradox of Roisin’s persona, that impossible mixture of coy intimacy and icy reserve emulsified through camp glamour. “Never had a broken heart / Am I incapable of love?” she declares and asks, and it’s part-diagnosis, part-warning, part-challenge: the unspoken corollary is that you or I might be the one that succeeds, but in the more likely case that we fail utterly, we can enjoy the hell out of trying. Ideal deployment: flirtation on the dancefloor.
Erika De Casier - Intimate (Club Mix)
Erika’s album Essentials is maybe my favourite R&B album of the year, a gentle and luxurious exploration of the spaces between Sade, g-funk and Aaliyah, all artfully-artless understatement and pillowy sounds. This though, is something else, something I had concluded I might never actually receive on this planet and in this lifetime: the perfect jungle ballad (give or take Janet Jackson’s “Empty”, but for me that’s more the apotheosis of Miami Bass). Featuring the most thrillingly tactile d&b drums since Roni Size’s “Share The Fall”, “Intimate (Club Mix)” also recalls that amazing mid-nineties moment of ambient-jungle: Neil Trix’s “Gesture Without Motion”, Foul Play’s “Being With You”, E-Z Rollers’ “Rolled Into 1”; Adam F’s “Circles”. As the beat ratatats underneath, gaseous clouds of synths float towards the ceiling and windchime riffs run up and down your spine, while the nearly imperceptible sub-sub-sub-bass gestures towards continental shelfs very slowly making love beneath your feet. But it would all be for nothing without Erika’s incestuously intimate (trust: the song title is not fucking around) vocals. “Just us, up to no good” she whispers, making it all sound so irresistible, so inevitable that resistance would just be rude.
Busy Signal - Balloon
“Balloon, balloon, balloon, balloon.” When I’m not listening to “Balloon” (and I had to turn it off to write this sentence) I feel like its unexpected offering of Busy singing about the multitude of balloons at (it seems) a wedding is personally very relatable, gesturing towards that vague sense that maybe you’re focusing on the wrong things; taking pleasure in the surface ephemera rather than forging deeper connections. But once I turn the music back on, this idea falls away, because this song is the furthest thing from elegiac: Busy is really fucking excited about all these balloons. I’ve mostly struggled to strongly connect with dancehall these past few years, hoping its obsession with sickly sweet “summery” synth work-outs (too much current actual-dancehall sounds like an imitation of Ellie Goulding’s fake-dancehall 2013 non-hit “Burn”) would work itself out of Jamaica’s system, to no avail, but there’s always the odd exception that proves the rule; “Balloon”, compulsive and silly and joyous and bug-eyed and irresistible, couldn’t be more exactly what I wanted.
Yola - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Yola’s basic idea - a climactic fusion of country and soul - is not original per se, given it doesn’t really stray too far from its largely-familiar Patsy Cline blueprint. Nevertheless, her full-bodied sound somehow felt novel last year, and she made the most of it by performing the hell out of a series of songs whose grandeur and compositional neatness turned them into instant standards (see especially the charming “Shady Grove” and “Ride Out In The Country”). In that context, covering an existing standard should be a redundant manoeuvre, and mostly it is: Yola is the last performer who’s gonna transform “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” into something utterly different to what it already is, but that in itself is a blessing of sorts. Largely faithful to the original’s piano strut, Yola simply leans hard into the wearied grain of her massive voice, giving lines like “You can't plant me in your penthouse / I’m going back to my plough” a kind of lived-in resonance that Elton didn’t even attempt (not that I have any issues with the original’s ghostly smoothness). And where Elton unveiled a camp choir of overdubbed vocals for those vertiginous jumps to the “BLU-U-U-UES! AH-AH-AH-AHHH!”, Yolo walks that astral pathway all by herself with an assuredness that makes the original’s extremities less jolting and more inevitable, as if Kansas and Oz were always already on the same side of the rainbow.
Emily King - Teach You
As an overarching aesthetic principle, politeness rarely wins anyone critical plaudits (except, if you’re exceptionally commercially successful, in the form of Grammy Awards), perhaps precisely because it appears to cost nothing: it seems perverse to devote the effort to observe and appreciate the skill and discipline with which the best polite artists must marshal restraint, poise and calibration to make everything appear so easy, so unexcitingly pleasant. King’s Scenery is like a version of k. d. lang’s Ingenue that didn’t set the world on fire: sumptuous and refined, with every edge carefully sanded away until the songs seem to swell naturally but also imperceptibly, matching the singer’s breathy gentility and offering the kind of enjoyment you might get from watching plants grow. “Teach You” was the year’s sweetest confection, its gently-syncopated cello thrum, stuttering drum machine and faintest flicker of mandolin tiptoeing toward a kind of Jamaican lilt, as King ever-so-thoughtfully takes an inattentive lover to task. It’s the loveliest sort of lesson, and it bears repeating a lot.
Octo Octa - I Need You
Octo Octa’s 2019 album Resonant Bodies is a riot, a cheerfully brazen throwback to energetic early nineties house that can make sampling Ya Kid K seem like a noble statement of purpose. But this earlier single from the beginning of the year was something quite different and rather more serious, capturing the producer (and, incidentally, truly excellent DJ) at her most grandiose and awe-filled. The combination of flooding tides of synth strings and cooing vocals with a seemingly winded, slowed-down stop-start breakbeat rhythm recalls the starry-eyed optimism of Orbital’s “Halcyon (& On & On)” or Future Sound of London’s “Papua New Guinea” without ever succumbing to nostalgia, perhaps because, like those tunes, it feels pre-engaged with the fleeting nature of its own joy. “Dance now,” it seems to say, “because you may never feel this way again.”
Roy Kinsey - Fetish
Kinsey’s Blackie was my favourite rap album of 2018: like prior fellow travellers such as Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city or Vince Staples’ Summertime ’06, it felt simultaneously knotty and mysterious on the one hand while irresistibly enjoyable on the other, even as it unflinchingly examined the hypocrisies of a society that places (often tragic) conflicting demands on young black men. What the album did not do was openly reckon with Kinsey’s queerness, a topic that by contrast is so frequently front and centre on the rapper’s 2019 singles that it almost suggests some sort of personality transformation in the interim. But “Fetish” is very much of a piece with the Kinsey’s prior work: minor key and melancholy, an undercurrent of slyness almost suffocated by an unrelentingly grim honesty. And there’s continuity in subject matter, too: here Kinsey raps about white gay male objectification of black gay men, and the psychic wounds it inflicts at levels both cultural and personal (“Showed up to the apartment / participated in nonsense / soon as my drawers dropped / heard ‘ooh I love big black cock’ / my body kept going / even when my heart stopped”), with the same wry awareness and self-awareness that he brought to stories of police brutality such as “Great Aggin”. Here, as always, Kinsey refuses to spare himself; he knows that gay culture will let him down, and presents his compulsive (re)engagement with it as near as fetishistic as the desires of the white men who sleep with him.
Sir Babygirl - Haunted House
Shrill and panicky, “Haunted House” viscerally imagines adolescent socialising as a kind of Groundhog Day, where one is repeatedly confronted with one’s social awkwardness and isolation, watching as if from outside yourself the same faux pas, the same crushing embarrassments. “I’m running to just hide and I’m hiding just to breathe / and around every corner is the same night on repeat”: Sir Babygirl’s singing over an indecently extroverted string-riff assisted synth pop arrangement is breathless and shallow, as if she’s observing and reporting (but powerlessly) from the state she describes, then turns almost ugly as she wails “I can’t wait to lose all my friends in one night!” Almost as stressful to listen to as it is compulsive, “Haunted House” forecloses the possibility of a past or future - all the song is prepared to allow is an endless now observed in painfully sharp detail, so suck it up and act pretty if you can.
― Tim F, Monday, 13 January 2020 07:05 (four years ago) link