On ‘Crisis Make Up!’ the long awaited second album from Slaylor Moon, we draw deeper into the intimate sonic world of Canadian musician Sydney Koke (Tristwch Y Fenywod, The Courtneys, Two Form a Click, Shearing Pinx). This time, her sensual minimalism and disjointed abstraction is even more striking as she addresses one of the most fundamental quandaries of electronic music - that of the human agent and its presence in the synthetic world of the machine. The choice to eschew computerised arrangements in favour of physical gestures - be it pushing keys, buttons, pads, or wheels - coupled with recordings of rare modular synths from her 2024 residency at Marseille’s GMEM - gives the music an uncanny and implacable quality; cyborg, outside of time, neither wholly discrete nor continuous. Her strange rhythms have a corporeal and seductive quality, boldly queer and experimental in their denial of quantitative logic in favour of something more tactile and intuitive in their psychedelia.
Sydney’s background as a neuroscientist is a useful context for these songs, which evoke the musicality of bio-machinery: spike trains, action potentials, and voltage fluctuations accumulate in waves of excitation and inhibition, flowing in web-like concertinas of bioluminous hysteresis that contract and expand. Her vocals shift from almost claustrophobically intimate directness to abrupt electronic mutations that dissolve into abstract digital polymorphia, further adding to the uneasy feeling of instability in the boundary between the real and imaginary - hard contrasts interpolating dissonant microcosms create a totality that is weird as it is sexy, viscerally human in an alien world of bizarre sonic fictions.
This symbiosis of the abstract and concrete is in the tradition of pioneers like Anne Gillis and Todd Dockstader, while the “primitivism” and shunning of the conventional and over-produced showcases Sydney’s position as a student of No Wave and early Industrial music, operating on a principle of sound as material used to induce sensory and emotional reactions that cannot be merely analysed but must be felt and experienced. Particularly on tracks like 'Assign', a study in pure dissonant abrasion for guitar and effects processor, the sonic shapes hit like raw qualia. These aspects situate the music alongside other outlier personal-microcosm builders like Drainolith and Metalux; the dimension of the immediate and almost confessional voice and bodily gesture reconfigured through technology to create an assimilated Hybrid, mercurial and full of strange eroticism, a queasy synthesis of forms that is nonetheless arrestingly honest and compelling.
Sydney’s background as a neuroscientist is a useful context for these songs, which evoke the musicality of bio-machinery: spike trains, action potentials, and voltage fluctuations accumulate in waves of excitation and inhibition, flowing in web-like concertinas of bioluminous hysteresis that contract and expand. Her vocals shift from almost claustrophobically intimate directness to abrupt electronic mutations that dissolve into abstract digital polymorphia, further adding to the uneasy feeling of instability in the boundary between the real and imaginary - hard contrasts interpolating dissonant microcosms create a totality that is weird as it is sexy, viscerally human in an alien world of bizarre sonic fictions.
This symbiosis of the abstract and concrete is in the tradition of pioneers like Anne Gillis and Todd Dockstader, while the “primitivism” and shunning of the conventional and over-produced showcases Sydney’s position as a student of No Wave and early Industrial music, operating on a principle of sound as material used to induce sensory and emotional reactions that cannot be merely analysed but must be felt and experienced. Particularly on tracks like 'Assign', a study in pure dissonant abrasion for guitar and effects processor, the sonic shapes hit like raw qualia. These aspects situate the music alongside other outlier personal-microcosm builders like Drainolith and Metalux; the dimension of the immediate and almost confessional voice and bodily gesture reconfigured through technology to create an assimilated Hybrid, mercurial and full of strange eroticism, a queasy synthesis of forms that is nonetheless arrestingly honest and compelling.
TRACK LISTING
1. Human
2. Smash
3. Your Collection
4. Assign
5. Your Number
6. Phagocytosis
7. One Love (Pt. 1)
8. One Love (Pt. 2)
9. River Swirl
10. Reso
11. Ischia Dream
