Elysia Crampton - Spots y Escupitajo
Tiny Mix Tapes 80
Elysia Crampton
Spots y Escupitajo
[The Vinyl Factory; 2017]
Rating: 4/5
“To move forward is to also return.”
– Elysia Crampton
Spots
1. Spots y Escupitajo is Elysia Crampton’s third LP.
2. Seven “Spots” of only a few seconds lead side A, with one more at the beginning of side B. The opening flurry feels something like keying down a list of samples in a DAW toolbar.
3. The album is described as the hybrid inheritance of “American club culture” and “sonic miniature compositions” — anyone familiar with Crampton’s work will anticipate that very little is actually “inherited” of her perspective on either of those.
4. Some of the record’s few referential touchstones are among the “usual suspects” for Crampton, and others aren’t. The dizzying and dynamic “Spots” sound like isolated examples of the DJ tags she ordinarily peppers her tracks with, presented with the split sense of having meant to be creatively repurposed by the listener and of still pointing back to Crampton and her unmistakeable take on the radio and “mega DJ” sound of Central and South America.
5. Especially compared with the maximalist, syncretistic aesthetic of her previous work, even the Escupitajo is a little “Spot”-like in its devoted palettes. “Battle & Screams” is a bitrate-muddied pool of war sounds;
6. “Spittle (Safeway Parking Lot),” a singular development in an already-singular oeuvre, carries you for nine and a half minutes with the lone backbone of a sampled piano, meandering, hammering, sometimes playing in reverse.
7. Officially referred to varyingly as an “album,” “art project,” and “sample pack,” Spots y Escupitajo is vulnerable to the confused accusation of being nothing at all.
8. But it isn’t; it’s a vinyl record that plays like a disordered list of files.
Escupitajo
Elysia Crampton has continually exploited and undermined the feeling of discomfort accompanying the idea of an artist’s identity from the critic’s point of view. It has been generally considered a bad idea for a critic to get to know artists as people, as if the special talent of the critic consists in a kind of separating discourse that wedges itself between art and artist. Using music both to signal and to feign identification, Crampton mixes text narrative with popular forms and icons in an ongoing and complicated act of situating her own place on the lines between conventional markers of identity within the context of more universal ideas of indigineity and migration, constructed nebulously and differently through the course of her works. She scans the Americas with a discriminating eye for interesting sonic and topological features, blending what she finds into powerful statements on belonging without ever fully betraying her own coordinates. Often misidentified by music writers as Latinx, Crampton is in fact a Native American whose sensibilities, forged in the Andes and Southern California, have much to do with Spanish dance and rap music.
In an interview about this record, she remarks on the process of re-identification ongoing in “communities that used to define themselves in terms of Spanish domination” and the definition of the Native American along the lines of a contemporary presence rather than a past presumed “vanished.” Although critics have mostly been at a loss for words outside of them, the links she forges between music and identity are not clear in the frameworks of identification readymade for our language of critical reflection. A new form and understanding of identity, rather, shape themselves in the dancing reflection of Crampton’s multidirectional gestures.
Spots y Escupitajo marks her most significant stylistic change since shedding the E+E moniker in 2015, as then deconstructing and recombining elements of what came before, like in zig-zagging continuity. Spots zags most in its abandonment of the epic, collage-like structure of pieces like American Drift and Dissolution of the Sovereign: A Time Slide Into the Future; where each of those tells a single, if multi-faceted and illuminating, story, Spots has the brilliant potential to create a lot of different stories. Its biggest risk and longest period of concentration, “Spittle (Safeway Parking Lot),” is probably its biggest reward. For me, the more distinctively hers of Elysia Crampton’s sonic trademarks than “THE DARKEST HOUR”, “DJ Ocelote,” etc. has always been her persistent, controlled, and still wandering manner of playing the keys, pretty much laid bare on that track, which has more in common with 20th-century American modernist and minimalist composition than Bolivian radio. Here, Crampton has managed to both arrange all of her old tools in a new way and challenge an already imaginative audience.
Pitchfork 72
The first identifiable sound you hear on Spots y Escupitajo, the beguiling new album by producer Elysia Crampton, is a flushing toilet. The next is a creepy, Chucky-style laugh set against a revving motor, screeching tires, crashing metal, and the tinkle of broken glass. Crampton’s in a nihilistic mood, it seems—but if you’re not careful, you might miss her cues. After a mere 19 seconds, the album has already reached track three—or in this case, “Spot 3.”
Spots y Escupitajo is a set of blink-and-you-missed-them miniatures. “Spot 1” through “Spot 8” occupy only the opening minutes of the collection, and they function like a recap of Crampton’s output to date, flagging a number of her hallmark sounds in a flurry of activity before pushing outward into strange new territory. It’s a dizzying run, each over before it really registers, each dense with chaos yet familiar. Crampton may have a side hustle in the works—these spinback-laden bridges could function convincingly well between chart toppers on an adventurous Latin American radio station. The rest of the album builds on this hyper-conceptual premise, with knotty, uneasy explorations of Crampton’s emerging sound.
Spots is a difficult listen, though—a record that will surely finds more fellow-feeling in the gallery world than among casual fans. On “Battle & Screams,” thunderous destruction and cries of agony are scrambled into a grotesque shimmer via a comically low bitrate. Later, “Sombra Blanca Misteriosa (y Rara)” reads like an traveler’s audio diary overdubbed with a plunky single digit piano figure. Stark and disorienting, it raises plenty of questions about what’s being heard while remaining emotionally at arm’s length; it practically demands an artist statement.
Of course, Crampton has proven to be comfortable giving artist statements. A 2015 feature by Resident Advisor was peppered with dense quotes that swam happily in the seas of cultural theory. For example, “To go further and consider ourselves on a geological level ruptures hierarchies and taxonomical divides as we find ourselves already deeply enmeshed in the strangeness and vast timescales of the lithic.” If the rhetoric risked confounding some thinkers, the music itself—2015’s American Drift—was entrancing and accessible, dealing in tapestries of melody set against drowsy halftime rhythms. The chuckles, sound effects, and radio announcer voices (which return on Spots) floated through the EP, a fever dream of cultural identity, post-colonial trauma, late capitalism, gender, race, class.
The new album’s apt title, meanwhile, itself offers a clue into Crampton’s thinking: the self-identified “spots” are situated at the front while the Escupitajo—spittle—fills out the rest. An unsettling film of disgust covers these pieces, refusing to coalesce. Crampton coats her works with possible meanings and interpretations, but with few hooks. Near the end, two songs serve as the record’s spiritual apex. “Chuqi Chinchay” is built around an ode to a dual-gendered god, performed in a voice reminiscent of a video game monologue. Chintzy strings emote in the background, softening ambient gunfire and a steady stream of disheveled audio. Inspired partially by Transformers, the song evokes a potent intersection between the banality of mass entertainment and the enduring power of myths. Crampton’s explorations of our spiritual nature, tethered inextricably to our bodies, our material world, and our histories, teases out remarkable subtext from pop culture dreck, illuminating the ways ancient themes seem to manifest in even our most disposable products.
“Spittle” follows with the opposite. For nine and half minutes, Crampton wanders around a piano, sketching dreamy and dissonant figures. No voices jut in. There are no synthesizers, no samples, though some of her harmonies harken back to American Drift’s most stunning passages. Occasionally aimless, it’s nonetheless a moment of unvarnished, concept-free vulnerability amid a deluge of high-concept rigor, and it works.
Crampton’s music always feels so suffused with context, subtext, citations, and inverted meanings that it’s tempting to assume Spots has a puzzle to solve, or ever more meaning to be dug up. But Spots is an intriguing subversion that doesn’t quite stick; as with much conceptual art, the concepts often eclipse the art. Maybe they strike a chord in you that you barely knew was there. Maybe they leave you coldly comprehending, without a way in. Regardless, Spots is the type of sounds-good-on-paper work you really ought to check out once.
Thu Jun 01 05:00:00 GMT 2017