So much of what I listen to comes to me like this: I’ll hit a link or see a piece about an artist, click play on whatever’s there and if I like it, I add their latest record or mittful of tracks to my main discovery playlist. It comes on when it comes on; the playlist rarely has less than 24 hours’ worth of music in it. I like to think this helps remove the music from the hype. Who knows whether or not that’s true.
Anyway, last Thursday night I had a long highway drive in front of me, and just as I was getting on the DVP, Rapstar from NEW YORK came on:
You only hear a record for the first time once. I remember the first time I heard Endtroducing… and Untrue and this was a similar feeling. The sounds all make sense, and I get it, but I’ve never heard things put together this way before. Constantly off-balance, one surprise after another. I had no context for what I was listening to.
I played the album three times in a row. I didn’t want the drive to end.
I don’t have much to say about NEW YORK: they’re based in London (of course), and they make layered, weird and unclassifiable music. Some songs almost have a structure, almost.
At first I didn’t know if the vocal was sampled or original – it’s like Siri channeling 2004 Paris Hilton, detached, not quite human, cool as hell.
The record got a good review in Pitchfork when it was released, though it struggles to say a whole lot (still more than me). I found this interview with Document more revealing:
Lawrence’s production masterfully fits the dissonance of an information-overloaded world inside of addictive grooves, listing royalty-free music—the type of thing you might hear during an ad bumper or in the background of a podcast—as spiritual inspiration for the band’s anonymous sound… NEW YORK’S live performances up the ante on their lo-fi vibe, often shunning the stage for a place to sit on the floor, Lawrence with her laptop and synthesizer and Samba with her microphone.
If the music wasn’t so inventive it’d be pretentious and preposterous. But I can’t get enough of it:
Their debut LP No Sleep Till NY is a little more structured and less experimental, but it’s just as engaging. This track is 11 minutes long, and I don’t think I even liked it for the first 4 or 5 minutes. When it ended I played it again:
That Document interview is good reading, and adds a lot of depth and context to the listening experience of both the old record and Rapstar:
We’ve always viewed rapstar* as a concept album, so we wanted the experience to be specific. We choreographed it more, we stopped doing the laptop thing. Before, we would just have an iTunes playlist playing, but now we’re trying to incorporate more like live stuff, because the music is not as dancey. So we have to find something else to do. Which is fun, which happens to be like live vocal glitching, so now we’re kind of like focusing on that.
It’s fantastic, irresistible stuff.
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