Record Review: Digitalis
VA - Digitalis [Adult Swim, 2021]
As someone who’s been left behind by the advent of music streaming platforms etc, the concept of a various artists compilation of Very Cool Music being made available only through low-bitrate streaming on the Adult Swim website left me a little nonplussed. As it turns out, Adult Swim apparently uses a lot of stuff from Warp, Ninja Tune and the like in their programming, and has previously released compilations with Stones Throw and Ghostly International, but those at least were digital downloads. Digitalis is really only listenable to in full on a standalone page on Adult Swim - unless you hunt down the tracks that have since been released separately by the individual artists (only a couple it seems).
Regardless, this post isn’t meant to be a dissertation on the meaning of all of this. We work with what we’ve got, and since the music on this compilation is so good I’ve been faithfully clicking through the Digitalis page for the past couple of weeks, listening and relistening, thinking only occasionally how nice that artwork would look on an actual CD.
The narrative arc of the comp goes something like this.
We start with the tone-setting haunted house shimmy of DJ Haram’s ‘Hillside’ (this hillside is definitely lit by a full moon), the Giallo outro of which leads into a 1-2 punch from big hitting Hyperdub veterans Ikonika and Cooly G. The former comes with her first vocal track, ‘No Way’ melding UK funky with Ikonika’s current love, Amapiano. The vocals are pleasingly cyclical but leave me wanting an actual song - perhaps the next step? The angular 8-bit synths and drums on Cooly G’s ‘Simulation’, meanwhile, come punctured by occasional Dua-like“mwahs”, and are a welcome reminder of why Narst/Love Dub grabbed everyone’s attention back in 2009.
This is where the compilation’s sequencing comes into its own. The sparse seduction of ‘Simulation’ fades out for a silent breather before the opening convulsions of Debby Friday’s extraordinary ‘FOCUS’ drop out of nowhere.
Debby, alternating between persuading, instructing and shouting, states:
I don’t want you but I want you and I’m winning and I’m losing
Yes I want you and I’m waiting and I’m oozing and I’m bruising
Mmmmm
To me it feels closer to early no wave than anything else and it’s utterly compelling.
This early emotional peak continues with Katie Gately’s vampish ‘Howl’, a mysterious ballad that begins gently but then builds into a dense and chaotic pulse. It climaxes with the line “Howl at the moon!”, Gately’s delivery, by turns deadpan and dramatic, recalling Roisin Murphy on her collaboration with Matthew Herbert, Ruby Blue.
The rush of energy from this opening section dissipates into two ambient tracks, though the vaguely occult mood remains. Faten Kanaan’s ‘Cascando’ is dramatic soundtrack material, while you can also imagine Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore’s harp-led ‘Canyon Lights’ appearing in one of those particularly hazy and melancholic montages towards the end of a film like Drive. (This undersells it; it’s a lovely track, the out of tune voices just low enough in the mix to work without being intrusive.)
‘Kilimba’ by 33EMYBW coaxes us out of this beatless interlude, playing gently with different time signatures and phrasings in a way that challenges without disorientating. Much like her earlier single ‘Golem’ (video tip!) it mixes traditional Chinese instruments with electronic feedback and distortion to great effect. Suzi Analogue’s laid-back vocoder come-on ‘Tha Mood’ also brings together unlikely elements, especially those syncopated big-room chords.
Next, Príncipe Disco’s Nídia lifts the pace again with ‘É Como’, building tension but leaving me looking for a pay off. It’s fine but rather one-note, and I feel the same way about the following track too. Beyond the initial impact of its manipulated vocals and rapid fire beat, Jasmine Infiniti’s ‘n0 ange7’ gets stuck in the same mode for its six minute run time, the dissonant voices becoming an irritant rather than an enhancement to the breaks running underneath.
The final section is more successful. A brief vocal interlude from L’Rain leads into Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s ‘Gazella’, a Buchla synth symphony that continues where her Tides: Music For Meditation And Yoga left off. It’s a sign that we’re heading in for a soft landing, which comes in the form of another highlight, Claire Rousay’s ‘Transactional’. Again I’m drawn to the acoustic elements of the track - the guitar strumming, the ambient noise of a rehearsal space - and how these merge with the electronic elements of the vocoder and drones. I used to listen to this kind of music a lot as a student and it’s an achievement of this compilation that it sits so correctly alongside the more danceable material.
The compilation closes with ‘Stars Over Riparian Corridor (for Sage LaPena)’ by Chuquimamani-Condori aka Elysia Crampton, an eight minute ambient odyssey that perhaps conjures the most vivid mental images since ‘FOCUS’ earlier on. It’s a suitably grand finale for a compilation that manages to balance the leftfield with the accessible in an entirely coherent way. The more I’ve listened to Digitalis the more I’ve come to appreciate its clever contours, making it even more of a shame that it exists only in this limited and ephemeral format.
Here’s hoping that something more comes of this release, but for now you can get a couple of the tracks separately:
Ikonika - ‘No Way’
Debby Friday - ‘FOCUS’