TALSOUNDS: Lovesick LP
TALsounds "Lovesick" LP (Ba Da Bing)
Street Date: Out Now!
Love Sick shifts
through a program of contrasting moods and tonal palettes, from
close-mic confessional meditations to funereal deep space ritualism.
Queasy and clipped percussion samples pop into view over live-layered
sheets of sawtooth drone. Liturgical organ chords intersect with the
fine-grain whirr of monophonic noise formants. With each live sketch
laid out over a length closer to the traditional pop format, far-flung
sonic elements arrive as momentary upheavals to animate the space Chami
allots them before falling back into the murk. Within webs of texture, TALsounds's
vocal performances sound out in her most frank mode of address yet
captured. Fragments of discernible lyrics smear into melismatic melody
lines and loop back around, intertwining into complex harmonies with her
wordless vocalizations. Her vocal style, informed as much by her
classical voice and opera training as by a lifetime of immersion in
Björk, Portishead, Aaliyah, and Sade, blends a hands-on process of
technical self-accompaniment with moments of diaristic intimacy. A more
direct recording strategy, with individual feeds of her live
performances mixed in isolation, renders every sigh, whisper, and wail
at a level of detail far from the realm of cavernous reverb
ambience. When Chami's lyrics emerge on the spot in flashes of
legibility, they draw out a fascination, or maybe a preoccupation, with
the control that raw emotions have over mind and body. The love sickness
she offers sidesteps any cutesy, wistful implications, and skirts
closer to a state of physical illness whose cause and solution can't be
identified. TALsounds captures
the stewing within these feelings, the confidence to keep them close
and use them for fuel for another fire, without letting confusion or
fear of imperfection overtake her.
Love Sick reveals TALsounds as
a remarkable anomaly in an era of bedroom producers and laptop-abetted
pop projects - capable of sculpting dense fields of sound in live takes
and channeling improvised vocal performances into emotional frameworks
that betray no defects for their process of instant conception. Quite
simply, this way of making music has become second nature for Chami.
Distinctions between genres and performance style give way to the clear
limitlessness of her musical practice, the experiments of her workaday
recording regimen. Her art floats with a body and character not quite
identical to her own, pressed into fluid and squeezed of symbolism. TALsounds paints Love Sick from
moment to moment with clouds of abstraction and ambiguity, while
understanding with some cosmic certainty that this music is the only
appropriate form through which to communicate her own depths.
Tracklist:
1. I Saw The Way
2. Grace
3. Disgrace
4. See Through
5. I Can't Sleep
6. 11:11
7. Home
8. Crossing Lines
9. You're Trying To Drive
10. My Side My Sign
11. Oceans Passed
12. Stories