Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
Taking cues from ambient pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura and Studio Ghibli filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, Seoul duo Salamanda conjure vivid fantasy worlds with richly tactile sounds: mallets striking, objects plunking, vocal cords pushing air through pursed lips. Yetsuby, one half of the duo, takes a similarly physical approach to sound in her solo work. But where Salamanda’s music often conveys a sparkling, childlike quality—call it the psychedelia of innocence—Yetsuby’s solo records have often been more chaotic. She twisted up synthetic sounds on 2019’s Heptaprism and leaned toward Two Shell-style overload on last year’s shuddering My Star My Earth. Her new EP, B_B, is her most dynamic and evocative solo release yet. It sounds like a geyser of ball bearings, or a plasticine rainbow, or a marimba the size of a bridge.
Both Yetsuby and Salamanda have long displayed ambient leanings, but “Who Swallowed the Chimes at the Random Place,” which opens the EP, is the closest she’s come to crafting something that might be filed within the genre. Softly rounded synth arpeggios bubble expectantly; chimes flicker across the stereo field; jagged streaks of tone occasionally resemble Jon Hassell’s prismatic horn. Still, despite the music’s incidental feel and the absence of drums or melody, the mood is anything but chilled. The moving parts are unpredictable and the placid, new-age tones are offset by metallic bursts and an overarching air of turmoil. The piece belongs to a contemporary strain of hyper-digital music whose organizing principle is gestural in nature, as though Yetsuby had reached into the virtual space of her DAW and smeared the sounds into a shimmery blur.
At five minutes long, “Who Swallowed the Chimes” is both the longest and the most formless of the EP’s six tracks. The rest of the record zigzags between streamlined rhythmic studies and maximalist amalgamations of IDM and hyperpop. But no matter the style, a sense of mischief reigns. The brief, percussive “If I Drink This Potion” traipses along at a relatively restrained 112 beats per minute, yet everything seems designed to make it feel faster and more hectic than it is: Drums explode into effervescent clouds, and the downbeat constantly shifts, lending the impression of a frantic jog across liquefying sand. Things settle down on “1,2,3, Soleil,” a 90 BPM head-nodder whose thumping log drums and elastic, dancehall-inspired syncopations could easily pass for a Salamanda track. But Yetsuby can’t resist her habitual impishness: Dappled flute accents soon cede the way to garish splotches of synth, and 32nd-note arps take off like a runaway train, tipping the groove toward singeli’s breakneck gait.
Yetsuby is at her most dulcet on “Maxilogue: Potion, Materials,” a sculptural assemblage of chiming synths and sing-song vocoder that gently swells to a full-spectrum climax—dissonant, but somehow soothingly so. She’s at her most intense on “Poly Juice,” piling tiny slivers of sound onto a snapping electro rhythm reminiscent of the early-’00s IDM of labels like Schematic, and topping it all off with sweetly robotic vocal processing. But ultimately, both tracks feel like two sides of the same iridescent coin. On both—and the same goes for the dreamy, Blade Runner-inspired closer, “The Sublime Embrace”—every iota of the stereo field teems with microtonal detail. In Yetsuby’s universe, categories like ambient and club music are largely a question of perspective. At the root of it all is a riot of motion, she seems to suggest: Zoom in far enough on even the most seemingly static object, and you’ll find a field of atoms whirling like dervishes.
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When she was still in high school, the artist known as Merce Lemon legally changed her surname to Lemon. That potentially audacious move tells you everything you need to know about the Pittsburgh native’s ear for poetry and absolute confidence in her own vision. That’s “Lemon,” as in the fruit. Go ahead, say it back; run it between your teeth a few times. Even before you hear a single note of her music, you have the sense that she’s only going to do things her way.
That current of surety runs through her folk- and country-tinged new album, Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, which is warm, rustic, and fundamentally big-hearted—as indebted to softies like Lomelda as to rockers like Neil Young, with Lemon’s unhurried vocals as an anchor. Lemon pulled the title from a (maybe apocryphal) story about an old singer howling at a pack of dogs through his living room window, and wrote the album’s closing track around that idea: a Frank Lloyd Wright-ish melding of indoor and outdoor space, domestic scenes rubbing right up against the wilderness. Here, “lime zest on a bed of leaves” and “thoughts of a husband”—a slow, loping refrain that lends the song its center of gravity—are on equal footing. Lemon is as comfortable writing about frozen creeks and blueberry-laden branches as she is contemplating days spent alone and aimless in her room, staring at a wilting houseplant or tending to her cat, Moldy.
Lemon’s last album, Moonth, tapped into a similar dichotomy but kept things a little livelier, a little more playful. Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild is a profoundly sad album. Lemon grew up in a musical household and has said she was influenced from an early age by Kimya Dawson, who even ended up staying on her couch when she came through Pittsburgh. But this new album is less Moldy Peaches or Frankie Cosmos than Hand Habits and Ethel Cain; you’ll find no miniatures here. Lemon is grasping at something big and resonant, something unconstrained by detail. To wit: The songs on Moonth had titles like “Hysterical Clavicle,” “Golden Lady Sauerkraut,” and “Chili Packet.” The tracks on Dogs are called things like “Rain,” “Window,” and “Crow,” and often sprawl out toward the five-minute mark.
Maybe that’s just part of growing up; the vocabulary of whimsy can start to get old when it no longer speaks to your experience. Still, Lemon hasn’t lost her sense of humor. “Rain,” adapted from a friend’s poem about processing flax into linen, opens with a funny juxtaposition of direct and meta imagery:
This sounds like a song
I barfed out in the drought
A love song for the rain
I miss you like the wind hugs wings
It’s one of the album’s least structured songs, and the production is spare under these lilting lines—just a hint of strummed acoustic guitar—but you’d be hard-pressed to find another instance of the word “barf” expressed as sweetly as here.
“Backyard Lover,” a smoldering highlight, builds to one of the album’s purest moments of emotional catharsis, and encapsulates many of its disparate threads. The song peaks with genuine shredding: the ecstatic moment when, over peals of electric guitar, Lemon calls out, “You fucking liar.” This is a track about grief and self-loathing, a reflection on the death of a friend, and there’s an extraordinary depth to the sadness she’s describing. Lemon is angry, but she’s ultimately also resigned. She wants to be alone, but she needs her friends. She’s struggling, but she’s trooping through it. She sounds like a lot of things—which is to say, she sounds like herself.
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