Sometimes the future is best located in the past, and here the snag-free rayon of Kim Anh’s voice teams up with helpings of classic house and jungle to make a sound that’s as user-friendly as it’s delightfully hard to place throughout new “After Dark” EP on her own record label, Can U Not Talk.
Mainstream music and the more underground styles of electronic music tend to move through ten or twenty year cycles, much like fashion, in which the two sides of the fence seem to understand each other and either share characteristics and techniques or operate on completely different wavelengths. Heavy kicks and cascades of high hats flew with reckless abandon in pop music, from RuPaul to Kylie Minogue in the ‘90s, but the two roads diverged again, leaving in their wake a lot of similar sounding corporate-committed pop music produced as though by template and a perilously dense techno scene primarily self-interested in the extent to which it remained unheard by the “uncultured” masses.
With the emergence of hyperpop and a slew of DJ’s producing music with their own voice, phylogenetically located somewhere outside of strict techno-house genre rules (see Nina Kraviz), the energies of the pop-vocal and electronic worlds seem to be once again in conversation, to the benefit of both.
This latest release by LA club queen Kim Anh is a great example of this revival. “After Dark” EP is packed with enough nods to eighties house and electro production as well as layers of percussion to make this vocal-heavy release delightfully hard to place.
Especially evident on the title track, “After Dark”, Kim Anh’s strangely soothing voice overtops sharp kicks and groovy bongo drums (“the intensity is in my head, when you call me after dark”) before fading to an echo, leaving only the ghostly loop of the title words and a murmur of acid growling underneath. The contrast hits like a sonic speedball as her voice immediately quells the surfeit of energy generated by the drums and synths.
The 303 sounds are emboldened on the next track, “House of Virgo”, with a nod of piano house and slinky vocals, made friendly and fun by borrowing that long forgotten ‘90s-era technique of speaking lyrics into a telephone receiver, creating a jubilant blast from the past. It’s the kind of track that would have been on repeat in the opulent, genre-agnostic night clubs of the ‘90s era, when barriers between house, disco, pop, and techno were as unimportant in nightlife as those between gay and straight or casual weekend warrior and nightlife celebrity. In a sense, the scene today seems more conservative and more divisive, with rigid lines between genres of music and genres of person, self-enforced by our highly identitarian climate.
A groovy, piano-meets-jungle breakbeat drives the final track, “Recovering”. Icy hats pair with Kim Anh’s wintergreen delivery on an ultraslick dance floor update of Erykah Badu’s “Recovering”. It’s then given a Chicago House twist with a remix by Alinka, revealing how music can slip between genres with simply the addition of a funky bassline and emphasis placed on certain elements.
Again, sometimes the future is best located in the past, and Kim Anh understands creating music that just does not care who’s listening, or where, or why. The resulting productions are far more dynamic and interesting than something designed with a specific kind of audience in mind.
-Winston Mann
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