NO FEAR OF THE NEW: Blawan, Ben Bondy, zayok
By John Warlick
In today's globally connected, genre-less music world, it's a rare pleasure to discover music that feels like a genuinely new spin on things. In this column, I write about 3 new albums or songs I got into last month that I think push music in interesting directions.
My favorite discovery of the month gets a GET IN BEFORE YOU'RE LATE! emblem.
Blawan - “Rabbit Hole” (feat. Monstera Black) & “NOS”
Blawan's a producer who's never had a problem with being interesting, but on the first two singles to his forthcoming debut album for XL Recordings he's practically grown a new limb. Both tracks are built around dense, headphone-friendly noise, suggesting long chains of distortion units on overblown samplers, or like he's reverse engineering Low's glitchy, scorched final two albums into techno. That's not particularly new for Blawan - his last release for XL also consisted of dread-filled, industrial-leaning bass music-- but this is louder and punchier in a way Blawan hasn't been before, with a playful directness that recasts him in the light of producers like Gesaffelstein and Arca. It's exhilerating to see Blawan's wonky, lightly deranged aesthetic streamlined and beamed up to primetime-TV fidelity.
Both of these tracks are fascinating and dynamic for their short runtime. At its core, "NOS," my favorite of the two, feels like a song designed to give you a heart attack on the dance floor, beckoning you closer with whispered vocals just to blast you with pulverizing, menacingly syncopated synths. Meanwhile, "Rabbit Hole" takes a more slinky approach - a tussle of obelisk sinusoids spiraling into oblivion with Monstera Black's looped vocal as the anchor. If these wind up being representative of SickElixir I think we'll be seeing a lot more of Blawan over the next few years.
Ben Bondy - XO Salt Llif3
Ben Bondy's a prolific producer with a wide repertoire on the ambient side of things, someone with both Purelink collaborations to his name and his name in the credits of amazing albums like crimeboys' Very Dark Past for 3XL. Seeing him release an album on the same label that centers his voice and guitar doesn't seem too out of the question considering his diverse output, but it's still fun to see just how widely those descriptors are applied on XO Salt Llif3.
As if it's almost willing you to not shrug off the titular Uzi pun, "Bend" opens the album hinting at twitchy cloud rap, but then quickly re-assembles into melodic, dub-tinged amapiano. The next song's Nick Leon/Lovefear collaboration shifts course diametrically to nocturnal, melancholy bedroom pop, but still flows naturally here - which speaks to how well Bondy's vaporous, affective touch weaves his disparate influences together. Truly, no matter what flavor you're getting - although the pitch-perfect downtempo of "Ur Ghost Is My Shadow" might be my favorite - XO is a soothing balm of listen, and a distinct hybrid.
zayok - In elsewhere
zayok is a young, self-produced artist whose music was introduced to me by a random Japanese tweet calling him "post-digicore". Their music does tread the edges of heavily-distorted, rage-bordering side of digicore, and zayok can definitely contend with the best fn the genre's trademark brain-melting compression, but I'd say their music's most eyebrow-raising moments come when their sound palette confoundingly reaches toward more delicate orchestral timbres.
On their new album In elsewhere, zayok shows a penchant for midi grand pianos and ‘90s keyboard soft strings, and hearing them juxtaposed between jackhammer snares and meme samples in the scope of this kind of music can almost feel like a radical statement. But it's also instructive, an implicit acknowledgement that to people who make this kind of music, the cumulative effect of the insane distortion and chaos that puts some listeners off is itself beautiful, almost like a new classical music born from a world of pop-up ads and unsolicited noise. One of my favorite examples comes on "Blood and arrow, tranquilize heart", where soul choirs, Dilla-timed hi-hats, Xbox noises and (of course) omnipresent sub bass suddenly make way for a beautiful piano accompaniment and pristine vocals from an artist going by simply isobel. Though not everything on In elsewhere is this weird, there's a certain wide-eyed idealism at work throughout that belies a ton of potential. Personally, I'd bet zayok is just getting started pushing the envelope.
