Fatima Yahama - Araya EP

Pitchfork 68

Fatima Yamaha’s new Araya EP would not exist without persistent cheerleading from a few impressively dedicated followers. The Dutch producer Bas Bron released a record as Yamaha in 2004 and then appeared done with the name. He continued to put out records under other pseudonyms—Bastian, Seymour Bits—and run his Magnetron label. The results of the Yamaha experiment, a four-track EP titled A Girl Between Two Worlds, seemed like a one-off curio.

But over time, those who heard the EP became smitten. In particular, they swooned over “What's a Girl to Do?,” with its sprightly synthesizers and existential-crisis dialog sampled from Lost In Translation. Two labels, D1 Recordings and Dekmantel, eventually released the song; another devotee, producer Hudson Mohawke, included Yamaha's tune in an Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1 in 2009 and used it as the basis for “Resistance,” a new track featuring Jhené Aiko, in 2015.

This put Bron in a strange spot: a Def Jam vocalist with Top 40 cred was singing one of Yamaha’s melodies, but Yamaha barely existed. So Bron pulled the moniker out of mothballs and released the LP Imaginary Lines in 2015. He could have done anything he wanted—he was hardly constrained by precedent—but he decided to stay faithful to his most hardcore fans. Imaginary Lines mostly picked up where A Girl Between Two Worlds left off, maintaining a handsome balance between fluffy and driving. Movie-score atmospheres sit easily next to songs like “Love Invaders,” with its resistance-is-futile grip recalling crackerjack pop songs.

In contrast, the three tracks on Araya represent a swivel away from the accessibility that earned Yamaha ardent admirers. Though “Piayes Beach Bar and Grill” has plenty of dinky electric snap, it avoids any head-rush moments: the synths never achieve peak friskiness, there’s no sample lying in wait to ambush the listener and suddenly transform the song's final quarter. The track ends during the middle of a showy solo, so you get the annoyance of indulgence without the triumphant, ascend-the-scale payoff.

“Romantic Bureaucracy” maintains distance in a different way; it has the exclusive feel of an inside joke. The song plays like a response to “Love's Got Me High,” a ’90s floor-wrecker produced by Detroit stalwart Terrence Parker. As one piano lays out a simple groove similar to the one that carried Parker’s track, Bron adds criss-crossing clusters of keyboard notes—sonic paperwork—on top. A beat never arrives to cut through all the red tape.

Still, Bron can't help but make something hard to shake—that quality, after all, is what kept the Yamaha spark alive for all these years. In that vein, Araya’s title track is crisp and chipper, with a commanding melody ricocheting playfully across a stern, ’80s-pop low-end. It's not much of a leap from here to the work of a more mainstream producer like Eric Prydz. There's a pair of especially pleasing moments around the song’s four-minute mark: a light drum beats out a military rat-a-tat behind the primary melody just as it finishes one strafing run and prepares to begin another pass. This is a great trick for stakes-raising that you can also find in hits like Maxwell’s “Ascension (Don't Ever Wonder).”

Bron needs these overtly gratifying tracks—without them, Yamaha wouldn’t have picked up boosters, and the project would have remained a quirky singularity. But even with “Araya,” this EP makes you wonder about Yamaha’s status. First the persona inspired a minor cult; then it stormed back as a small-scale dancefloor hero. What is Yamaha now? Araya offers a few possibilities, but no answers.