Filipino production wunderkind uses budget software to darkly ravishing effect
Hometown: Quezon City, Manila, the Philippines.
The lineup: Idris Vicuña (music, production).
The background: Talk about beauty and the beastly. The video for Nature Trips, the lead track from the forthcoming debut EP by Filipino boy wonder Idris Vicuña, alias Eyedress, is grim, ghastly. Directed by local artist Julius Valledor and edited by Eyedress, it opens with a skull mask-wearing malchick in a pentagram hoodie and proceeds to follow him and his cronies through Manila, from one dim-lit scenario to another, including a urinal and a bathroom in which they get stoned and plot their next move. This involves them breaking and entering an apartment and strangling someone within menace aforethought. There's an Odd Futureism – as opposed to odd futurism – to the action and an ambience which is creepily comical.
Vicuña's music, by contrast, is eerily pretty, but maybe that eeriness is what lends itself to such a gruesome application. The tracks on Supernatural, that debut EP, issued by Abeano, were recorded using Fruity Loops in Eyedress's bedroom on a PC laptop handed down to him by his dad. As a consequence, the music has the feel of the laptop-lavish but darkly alluring "witch house" of a few years back, a chilling, crepuscular take on chillwave, which makes us happy because that was the start of a period of bounty and expansion the likes of which we haven't experienced for aeons. Biolumine is all synth arpeggios and choral-pure singing that is surely a female unless Vicuña has a bit of software that can transform his voice into so much feminised ether. It's Grimes-gorgeous, with the sepulchral solemnity of How to Dress Well, two artists with whom he shares a vision and has shared stages.
Reading on mobile? Click here to listen
Nature Trips features a low-end, ominously buzzing synth-bass reminiscent of John Carpenter when he wants to connote violent dread and Japanese-sounding high coos – not to be confused with haikus, although the lyrics are object lessons in compression and concision. "Come back to me and just be by my side … I know I'm wrong and I'm sorry I made you cry," "she" sings, the triteness of the sentiment subverted somewhat by the content of that accompanying video. No Competition is an 8bit ballad, or hellish house, synth sounds ricocheting around the empty spaces of the song. It's cold in here, but somehow you're compelled to stay. Tokyo Ghost features a voice that could reasonably be argued is male, but it's not one that you'd want to enter for The Voice: over torturously slow music, Vicuña – presuming it's him – sounds enervated, drained, pallid, washed out, all our favourites. There's another track online, Everything We Touch Turns Into Gold, which might top the lot. This is our kind of sweetly sinister slow-dragging screwgaze, with its softly smothered Autotuned vocals, muggy beats and hazily sumptuous synths. Time to party like it's 2009.
The buzz: "It's an intriguing introduction to his hazily evocative songwriting style." - Dazed Digital.
The truth: It's music for droogs to unwind to.
Most likely to: Gently disturb.
Least likely to: Appeal to readers of the Beano.
What to buy: The debut EP Supernatural is released on December 2 by Abeano.
File next to: FKA Twigs, oOoOO, Salem, Balam Acab.
Links: soundcloud.com/eyedress.
Tuesday's new band: Laura Wilde.
by Paul Lester via Music: Electronic music | theguardian.com
No comments:
Post a Comment