Pitchfork
77
Though her soundtrack for Jonathan Glazer’s 2014 feature Under the Skin was more prominently received, Mica Levi’s tape Feeling Romantic Feeling Tropical Feeling Ill felt like her landmark release that year. The hour-long mix, with colorful, droning chapters bleeding seamlessly into one another, broke from the brash pop of her band Micachu & the Shapes, offering instead an elastic take on avant-garde composition. Loose and weird, it stomped and crackled all over the place, brimming with an impulsive sense of personality.
On this new collaboration with cellist and producer Oliver Coates, who also performed on the Under the Skin OST, Levi loops back to that unstructured sound. (Accordingly, Remain Calm has origins in a live collaboration for NTS Radio, also in 2014.) But she builds it up, too, by decluttering and introducing a more orchestral sensibility. With her songwriting for Micachu & the Shapes or her soundtracks, one gets the sense that Levi is sinking herself into a style, a set of constraints, conditions reflected in those projects’ concision. Here, as with Feeling Romantic, the field is wide open, and the results are imaginative and multi-textured.
In form, these 13 tracks, most under three minutes long, resemble sketches. This is not at all to the release’s detriment—rather, it recalls the stylistic play and emotional frankness of Arthur Russell’s World of Echo—and this unfinished quality is a crucial method of delivery. The minimal “Schoolhouse,” which lasts 43 seconds, sees Coates’ bright picked strings weighted by a teasing beat. “I’ll Keep Going” is more lush, even mournful, the titular refrain repeated in a smeary drone over piano and deep, sustained cello notes. Coates’ instrumentation is lovely but understated, folding effortlessly into the clattering productions such that prim classical connotations feel like afterthoughts. Even when the cello is brought to the fore—on “County H,” for example, which consists of just strings and a barely-tonal radio-transmitter-like sound—it’s repetitive, textural, and melodically restrained, again bringing Russell to mind.
More traditional strains of contemporary experimental music can at times be weighed down by their own history. And while Levi and Coates are clearly products of certain traditions, their influences are widespread. Tracks like the fragmentary “Xhill Stepping” or “New Wren Kitch,” which has the feel of an unraveling Actress B-side, nod to UK hip-hop and garage; scrawls of noise and vocal modulations bridge into brainy, gallery-bound sound work. The unfussy way Levi and Coates negotiate these references keeps this album from sounding like self-conscious pastiche. All the while, Remain Calm (like most of the projects Levi has been attached to) maintains a loping pace, easy and cool even as instrumental flourishes nervously flutter.
The breadth of Levi’s career offers an exciting framework for a new generation of musicians looking to uproot themselves and move—as might be most intuitive in our contemporary cultural economy—in several directions at once. We sense less a linear evolution in her sound and more a continual, varied expansion, driven by collaborations like this that are rooted in improvisation, as well as more rigid, genre-driven assignments. (Coates, too, negotiates between projects this way: he played with the London Contemporary Orchestra on Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, for one, but this year also released Upstepping, a cello-less solo LP of oddball deep house.) Remain Calm is particularly refreshing for its relative approachability, no doubt the product of sly pop and dance sensibilities that are lodged somewhere in there alongside the open-ended phrases and sonic atmospherics. Even as its mood slides from pensive to morose to quietly exuberant, this remains throughout one of the more enjoyable experimental releases this year.
Sat Dec 03 06:00:00 GMT 2016