RAMZi - Phobiza "Noite" Vol. 2

Pitchfork 76

For the past five years, Canada’s Phoebé Guillemot has been unobtrusively building up a peculiar little soundworld as RAMZi, mostly on small batch cassettes (now available on her Bandcamp page). But over the past few years, Guillemot’s profile ticked upwards, with a release on the 1080p label, an eye-melting video, an art collaboration for RVNG Intl., and a full-length on Total Stasis (the label also responsible for Elysia Crampton’s The Light That You Gave Me to See You). She quickly follows all that up with a tantalizing EP for the buzzing Mood Hut imprint. And the more of her music we become privy to, the weirder, wormier, and more immersive that little world becomes.

Guillemot’s sound echoes trumpeter/composer Jon Hassell—who, on a 1980 collaborative album with Brian Eno, called Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics, presented his notion of a “fourth world” to listeners. A mix of Western electronics and indigenous sounds, it drifted between minimalism, jazz, world music, and ambient, preferring the ether above them all. But Hassell’s sound was exotic in much the same way as the painter Henri Rousseau’s jungle canvases were; they came not from globetrotting, but from introspective imaginings of other cultures. Guillemot is not alone in her ethnographic electronics, as a new generation of producers like Don’t DJ and Andrew Pekler (as well as Oneohtrix Point Never) concoct pretend world rhythms and then twist them into curious new shapes.

RAMZi presents her tracks as travelogues and postcards from strange realms; the sleeve designs for last year’s Phobiza Dia: Vol.1 and “Noite” Vol. 2 resembled old field recordings. Inside, Guillemot takes on aspects of Ethnic Folkways Library records—foreign voices, animals sounding in the landscape, tribal drumming patterns—and spins them through her circuitry.

As the album title playfully alludes, opener “For Vanda” might be the sound of Ibiza right after sunset. Cricket sounds mingle with spring gurgles. A synth patch mimicking a bamboo flute echoes a kilometer away and a voice (maybe Guillemot’s own) gets pitched down until it rumbles like a tribal elder. A hand drum enters, as resonant as a heavy stone splashed into a pond. As it all comes together and grows denser, it approximates the environmental moments of the Orb’s Orbus Terrarum.

RAMZi’s sounds are tangible and tactile, yet each piece feels slippery as river rocks. Guillemot’s voice slides across “Fuma” like a little cloud, and soon other altered voices arise and mix with it. With a grounding tabla pattern, “Messiah” is the most DJ-friendly track on the EP, but RAMZi still makes it feel like it’s floating four inches off the ground. Her whispered exhalations get pitched up until it wavers like a broken spider web. Equally playful is when she slows down her vocals of “Male heya” until they resemble a wobbly AutoTuned hook. She then sets it against another gently dubbed out ecosystem, suggesting what Future backpacking through Hassell’s Fourth World might sound like.