NO FEAR OF THE NEW: svn4vr, Car Culture, The Soft Pink Truth
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.
svn4vr - postgrad
What are they putting in the drinking water in UK schools these days? The easiest way to explain svn4vr is early Jim Legxacy but make it Christian, which is actually not as big of a twist as it reads on paper. (Unsurprisingly, they're already collaborating.) For those who haven't been taught to DJ, what we're dealing with here is basically midwest emo guitar riffs, pinwheelingly fast melodic rapping and Dijon-esque room-mic harmonies. It's so pretty, and the overloaded DIY recording job is so detailed and charmingly homespun that you almost forget that outside of a few clicks on single "stop talking to AI talk to God," none of the songs on postgrad have discernible beats or percussion.
RE: “make it Christian,” while this guy did put out a project this year titled Amen, it's not like he's aiming to proselytize - if anything, the evangelical vibe in svn4vr's music comes out in the relationship with the listener. Whereas jim legxcy's music can feel like peering in on a stranger flipping through a journal, svn4vr invites you right in so he can complain to you about how hard it is to get a job or even a date with ChatGPTs milling about. His songs are impressively, effortlessly human, and postgrad is brilliantly easy to slip into.
GET IN BEFORE YOU’RE LATE!
Car Culture - Rest Here
You might remember Daniel Fisher from his varied club-ready releases as Physical Therapy since the 2010s (I'm partial to 2012's sampledelic Safety Net EP for Hippos In Tanks), but I've come to prefer the music he makes on the softer, moodier end of electronica as Car Culture. After a steady string of singles over the last few months - including the excellently mistitled quasi-chillwave jam "Nothingburger," which I've been bumping incessantly this year - I'm happy to confirm that Fisher's 2nd album Rest Here is just as blissed out as a whole and among the best electronic albums of the year.
Similarly to the Ben Bondy album XO Salt Llif3 I wrote about last month, there's a calming easiness to Rest Here's demeanor, but whereas XO enjoyed sightseeing between disparate styles, Rest Here's consistent strain of dreamy hypnogogia makes it a particularly cozy listen. Aesthetically, you could say that Rest Here is doing to late-90s sample-friendly downtempo and folktronica what last year's remarkable Total Blue record did to spacy smooth jazz and new age; it's giving Bibio and Campfire Headphase-era Boards of Canada, but with an escapist, anachronistic sensibility that feels very of the moment. It's hypnotizing stuff, and definitely my favorite project Fisher has released to date.
The Soft Pink Truth - “Time Inside the Violet”
You gotta feel for Drew Daniel, The Soft Pink Truth mastermind and 1/2 of experimental-electronic found sound superheroes Matmos - it can't be fun to unveil a classical music-tinged concept album the same week avant-pop superstar Rosalía (with the London Symphony Orchestra in tow) makes a full-court music press push to reintroduce orchestral music to the masses. As a fan of both, I obviously listened to LUX at 9pm PST on the dot on release day, and I'm equally intrigued by how next January's Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever? might twist the same kinds of inspirations into more knotty, but equally high-concept directions with a more select group of contributors (apparently Bill Orcutt plays guitar on this thing??).
As for first single "Time Inside the Violet," it's the contours of Daniel's arrangement that grab me most, like how the gradually deformed strings ending the song's first third evoke vaporwave or the artificiality of FFT processing, yet bring about a strange pathos. Daniel's blurring more than a few fine lines here, as if he's asking what it is about traditionally "acoustic" sounds that elicits the emotions they do, or perhaps how to reclaim those feelings in the face of creeping technofascism. Of course, we've seen our best and brightest electronic producers take academic leans into the tension between traditionally acoustic and electronic sounds in the past, but it's the modernity of the execution here that bends my ear. It's also a beguilingly inward-looking piece of music, especially for someone whose last record I remember for beckoningly dance-floor-ready deep house. Maybe I'm getting the aim of this new project completely wrong, but I'll be excited to find out how next January.
