Spaces of Grey: An Ode to Miraculous Collisions in Music

Through the colors of Kelela, Fred again.., Brian Eno, Björk.

Jun 04, 2023

“Through all the labor, a raven is reborn” Kelela croons in the opening verse of the title song to her sophomore record— her long-awaited return, six years after a stunning, career-defining debut— over a naked, distorted synth tirelessly sliding up and down, progressively more prominent until almost muted and buried under piano notes and ambient background vocals, as her delivery escalates; “Over the line”, there is abrupt movement, an immersive house beat embellished with low-doubled, distant echoes of Kelela’s words, soon moving to the dancefloor with four 808s a bar planted steady to the ground, and endless— one could say mindless— repetition of every last phrase. In a different universe, or a different Raven, this track could exist as an alter ego to another, filed under “club remixes”, or take up its first place in the world on the tracklist of the album’s confirmed, upcoming sequel: a reinterpretation of the original, meant to showcase all the ways in which the marginalized, underrecognized producers invited by the electronic-R&B experimentalist to leave their mark on the project can repurpose and recreate the material provided— on par with the work’s core sentiment of providing a menu of Black-originated sounds. But Kelela seems to, quite unapologetically, hold a distaste for the monolithic and one-dimensional in all ways applicable regarding her artistry.

Leaving, or “separating” becomes the act that offers the entirety of Raven its fluid sense of motion; recurrent “far away”’s; a back-and-forth of tension and hesitation between Kelela and a lover on the run; waves crashing against shore, coming and going under panting exhales; melodies propulsive, unresolved, liminal. Water signals rebirth as the record closes with a reprise of its opener and first appetizer, Washed Away, in the last few seconds of which the enigmatic cover art quickly comes to be unraveled; submersion— no better synonym for desire— might as well symbolize the inevitable, if not required, state of the listener while engaging with the opus. Muffled bass, drums pulsating through ocean-dark depths, vocals commanding in their gentleness, siren-like, close to the ear, at the back of the head and seeping into veins, rendering the body a vessel; Raven shuts out a world, inviting in another; a psychopomp traversing between realms.

The search for escape in the face of trauma, exhaustion, or a reality challenging to reckon with isn’t unfamiliar to most. When documentaries or video essays make reference to the concept of “escapism”, screens typically flood with fragments of wild nightlife; clubs, strobe lights, bodies dancing, sweaty and touching all over, people making out, grabbing each other frantically, expressions of ecstasy and lust, eyes closed, laughter, smoke, drugs. Oblivion fills the distance illustrated in the music video for Happy Ending, margined by Kelela’s luxurious, crystalline beauty shots, and low-definition clips of nightclub shenanigans sporting the look of classic ‘90s camcorder material; nostalgia evoked in the most realistic fashion under the fervent sound of jungle drums and staccato bass, courtesy of LSDXOXO— an ode to the notorious rave scene of three decades ago. Here, the double entendre of Raven is evidently at play, the rave a space for leaving something behind, forgetting and letting go; for catharsis, absolution, purification and regeneration. A baptism, of sorts. A passage.

“Labor” takes on its emotional sense, and thus, a suggestion is painted; that the very act of raving, too, is reborn through this lens— submerged in sea, and revealed anew.

According to Kelela, the “far away”’s dually speak to safety, and isolation. The space is expansive, vast, cosmic; suited to contain a feeling too big. A newfound place which does not present as a circumstance overtly happy or sad; where freedom and fear are equally inclined to manifest. A world that is, at first sight of recognition, an oasis of vitality, and at second, likely a vacuum; an abyss; dune of sand turned whirlpool.

via Teen Vogue:

One of the things that I want my music to do is help people get into their feelings, get into what's really going on rather than as a way to get out of or avoid what's really happening, [...] I know that there's certain music that helps us forget, and I think that maybe that's useful sometimes, but I know it's not sustainable. It can help us through a moment, but it doesn't necessarily help us keep going.

A significant part of the allure in the experience Kelela crafts in Raven lies in a piercing resonance among, perhaps, the ultimate forms of “music that helps us forget”; the cathartic, fast-paced drums of moving on, of train engines, looking out the window with determination, and leaving situations behind; the dreamy, immersive ambience of a pre-sleep state, psychedelic reverb and notes adjacent to hazy cloud rap soundscapes; nightly house drops with their pulsating, dancefloor heartbeat calling for the giving up of control and the stepping into the twilight zone. Up until “a pause”; up until “now you’re thinking / that everything’s fine, but you know it’s a lie”, or “you think you’re escaping / excused for the pain, but we all feel the same”; a contrast of lyricism that seeks confrontation and answers, that demands attention and doesn’t shy away from reality down on earth. The signature R&B quality to Kelela’s vocals lets on a confident directness, amidst soulfulness and unrestrained sensuality— that, too, a necessary component to escapism’s affinity for mindless behavior and its lustful nature, speaking to desire as predominantly a work of the unconscious mind. Across stories of seduction, conflict and healing, in Raven, two parallel narratives, one instrumental and one lyrical, clash, giving birth to their own lovechild; something stronger than oblivion and deeper than meditation.

Interested in the seamless relationship between varying sounds and the discovery that can surface through blending, mixing and transitions, reflected in the DJ set-like flow of the album’s tracklist, Kelela cites 1996 hybrid documentary and fictional narrative film The Last Angel of History as a source of inspiration in her creative process: a crash course in Afrofuturism that places focus on the drum as the "first Afrofuturistic technology", which could "communicate both across the African diaspora and across time."1 In a video by Tate YouTube, director John Akomfrah discusses his commitment to the “philosophy of montage”:

Everyone who helped popularize their philosophy of montage was interested in one thing: deferred meaning. That, somehow, when things collide- two opposites collide- in this dialectical way, some sort of synthesis is engineered or brought about and in that, a new form, a new meaning or a new way emerges which you can chase ad infinitum. And that’s the philosophy, it’s a dialectical philosophy.

The beauty of a dialectical collision partially owes itself to the merge of novelty and the perpetuity of meaning; contradiction carries both the shock of the wave and the endlessness of blue; an ocean’s simultaneous mystery and familiarity, and a fallen planet’s forced innovation when operating against its nature; the repurposing of a limited amount of tools which generates culture.2

There is an elephant at a corner of this room we are sitting in, that, if you have kept an eye on waves in not even specifically dance music, but the pop culture space for the last couple of years— or even the last month— I am sure you can sense the presence of. Against the state of the world from the beginning of 2020 onwards felt the idea of clubbing and raving among hundreds of other people; when Fred again..’s Marea (we’ve lost dancing) hit the scene in early 2021, condensing the heartache of dispirited audiences into a sound capsule that thousands of electronic music lovers yearning for the dancefloor “found solace and comfort in,” the UK producer began to slowly garner the world’s attention, eventually being catapulted into the hot center of dance music after a viral Boiler Room set in the summer of 2022.

Today, it looks like everyone wants the Fred again.. live experience, tickets priced in the hundreds selling out in barely minutes, and fans’ extreme reactions to the agonizing process of securing a spot at the DJ’s gigs going on to become a meme across social media. Beyond big name and rare-chance event regularities, the object of longing seems to be a feeling show attendees describe as a shared euphoria in empathy; materialized in the presence of similarly uneased individuals navigating personal changes from the pandemic through to the post-Covid ban era, connected under the distinctive idiosyncrasy of Fred’s approach to his sound; phone-recorded, lo-fi snippets of everyday conversations with friends, acapella singing or recited poetry, bites of crowd noise and all over left-in contextual clues in the form of “uncleanliness” make up the producer’s samples of choice, which become the centerpieces of his, as his mentor, none other than the ever-influential Brian Eno, puts it, “non-linear” production. And thus; actual life. “Despite the albums being called Actual Life, Fred’s work seemingly enables you to believe that you can experience life in its truest form again." a fan says.34

In a time defined by tangible, inconsolable distance between life lived and unlived, the memoiristic leading tone of Fred again..’s projects struck a chord that managed to connect thousands through emotional resonance. These production choices utilize the power of documentation, yet ultimately tread the line between it and memory: reality marred— changed, embellished, and preserved all at once, to paraphrase Ocean Vuong in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous— just as with all reconstructive art, created through a lens of later knowledge, motivation, imagination. At the live set, it is memory that triggers the tears; an echo of life at its most regular, mundane and profound as ever, sounds and screen-projected visuals broken up in pieces, woven together, a little real and a little made up, and laced with a sense of hopefulness through revision— one found in the longing for normalcy, or healing, or simply the continuation of life by a reckoning with loss and reverie for the granted.

“Fred againia”’s timely factor raises some doubt as to whether the phenomenon could last past the peak of its realization in the current post-trauma stage of the pandemic, where nostalgia still holds several reins of our collective media consumption. The rapid success, however, seems to be quite closely tied to the popularity of Fred’s unorthodox public persona for an “underground” act suddenly acquainted with worldwide acclaim; a guy-next-door look, down-to-earth, modest demeanor, and fan-focused, characteristically interactive approach to releases and gigs. It should be noted here that Fred is just a guy who could be your friend when you consciously disregard the recently spotlit information about his family’s aristocratic history, underlining a rise to fame from a, contrary to surface-level perception, highly privileged background. Nathan Evans writes for New Wave Magazine, “There’s no pretending that Fred Again.. is talented at making inventive UK garage and bass, but that talent was born from the freedom of not having to worry about working to make ends meet or find connections in the industry.”, citing RA’s feature piece on the working class being shut out of electronic music as a study that could clue someone into the inner-workings of opportunity bias within the scene.

Add to that Mixmag’s feature on how the dance music industry failed Black artists, as well as Chicago DJ and producer Honey Dijon’s “Dance music has been colonised” statement, and Fred again..’s name admittedly paints an awkward picture next to Kelela’s here, especially when the Ethiopian-American artist has been explicitly positioning herself against the rigidity of the “white gaze” in dance music spaces throughout her latest album’s rollout, while honoring a mission statement with the work itself; of a need for acknowledgement of the seeds planted by Black creatives at the roots of the genre which they often go uncredited for, as well as inclusivity in the scene. The plot first thickened just about a year ago when a key collaborator on Raven as of recently, Toronto-based DJ BAMBII posted an exposé about the dismissive treatment she received at a booking alongside Fred again.. and The Blessed Madonna on her Instagram story, leading to conclusions about the British producer and voice sampled in the aforementioned Marea (we’ve lost dancing) living up to stereotypes associated with entitled white artists in the electronic sphere.

To ignore the underlying context murking the waters at this mention would be a disservice to Kelela’s character and work– artistic, as well as verbal– as the source of inspiration for this piece. Nonetheless, on a purely creative level, this very occasion of Eno’s mentorship rings meta based on the core facet of miraculous opposition intertwined with Fred’s artistic essence as paralleled to Kelela’s here. While The Guardian’s review says pretty much all there needs to be said about their massively underwhelming latest collaborative album effort, Secret Life— a take on club deconstruction that reads more as anachronistic and uninspired than two highly praised names in their respective niches laying their individual genius out on a common ambient electronic table— it’d be interesting to take a cue from the ethos of Eno’s earlier work in order to dive deeper into implications found amidst a clash of the known and unknown. “Everything about him is a contradiction”, writes Lester Bangs in his 1979 profile of the “non-musician”, “a man who (artistically speaking) goes to bed with machines and lets chance processes shape his creations, yet dismisses most other modern experimental composers as lacking heart”:

His compositional method is entirely dependent upon tape recorders, as he neither reads nor writes music, and has occasionally complained about getting an idea for something when he's out somewhere and being unable to write it down; except that, as he has also noted, some of his finest pieces (say, "St. Elmo's Fire") are impossible to write out.

Eno likes to believe that his music has a life of its own [...].

He recognizes that leaving at least part of the creative input up to chance processes and machines is asking for a certain otherness in your music, as if an outside entity were codefining it with you, and that one of the hazards of working this way is the loss of some of the more intensely passionate edges. "On the one hand the music sounds to me very emotional," he says, "but the emotions are confused, they're not straightforward: in things that are very uptempo and frenzied there's nearly always a melancholy edge somehow. What people call unemotional just doesn't have a single overriding emotion to it. Certainly the things that I like best are the ones that are the most sort of ambiguous on the emotional level.
"Also, one or two of the pieces I've made have been attempts to trigger that sort of unnervous stillness where you don't feel that for the world to be interesting you have to be manipulating it all the time.”

From a recording-centric approach, to the largely unadulterated existence of life, or the world as it is within the pieces, to the ambiguous emotion shaped by a prominent element of chance, the word is about music which thrives off an instinctive quality; music carried by interjections of its own history, and walking the tightrope between manipulation and natural state, blurring the lines of innate and artificial— the human untied to either, intrinsically dually aligned with both, and always searching for a place.

For a young Björk dancing for six hours a night at raves in early ‘90s London, while in the process of crafting her debut solo album (following the disbandment of alternative rock band, The Sugarcubes, where she served as lead singer), the rigid, introverted, yet novel and trailblazing atmosphere of the era’s electronic music landscape proved to be the perfect ground for exploration.

From the Björk: Sonic Symbolism - Debut podcast by Mailchimp:

A lot of ‘80s stuff, musically, was like ghost of a ghost of a ghost— the post, post, post World War II— so I think there was something about the ‘90s in London which was about “Okay, that’s finished. Let’s start a new chapter in the book”, and it’s the prequel to the 21st century.

In hindsight, Björk describes this premature vision of the future as biology and technology working together; a departure from dark, gothic, industrial, Romanticism-inherited, Baudelaire and Bukowski-adjacent sensibilities, and movement towards “quantum physics, the vibration of the atoms, going on a spaceship for the first time out of our solar system”; the discovery of larger possibilities, something infinite, a reckoning with minuscule existence; the ego death; a dethroning of the human and everything adhering to individualism or the centering of the self, similar to a Shakespearean play or a Greek tragedy, and of course down to the handiwork of the guitar solo— which Björk jokingly reminisces as “illegal” in regards to the times. Disregarding the rockstar’s kick out of a zoomed-in shot of fingers expertly working chords and the resonance of sound produced directly by skin across giant crowds, representing a kingdom for a king and an audience for the mythology of the idol, nightclub habitués of the era aimed for a state of deep, oblivion-inducing trance, the sound-makers behind them reveling in the subversion of the human scale to music by adopting the ceaseless monotones of synthesizers, looped into hypnotic motifs until the first cracks of sunlight.

This dimension which tackles the ego, or lack thereof, takes a form that resembles the Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) vs John Cage (1912-1992) debate in terms of Abstract Expressionism with a self-driven, macho temperament and experimental music composition that utilizes chance processes in order to eliminate the individual.

via HYPERALLERGIC:

While Pollock and his pals continued to express an interest in becoming the painting, Cage was more and more interested in not becoming the music.

To Cage, painters like Pollock and composers like Beethoven were fixated on creating an object, and not just any object, but one that had a narrative, made a statement, told a story. Pollock said, “It doesn’t make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said.” Cage believed Beethoven’s music was “based on a marriage of form and content involving beginnings, ends and middles, and all kinds of ideas and expressions of individual feeling that have nothing whatsoever to do with sounds.” Consulting the I-Ching, Cage found a way to eliminate his ego by inviting chance to take his place.

Another dimension nods to a question about the value of joy, opposing the cloud of criticisms against none other than Mozart, as “lacking [...] the emotional profundity of Beethoven and the Romantics, with their grief, tragedy, agony and heroic defiance”5 and ignoring the human experience through his major key compositions, evocative of feelings of serenity and positivity. Mozart seems glib and naïve in the eyes of ideals that uphold human turmoil as the greatest of all emotional experiences and dismiss joviality as anti-intellectual and shallow— as escapism.

A dichotomy that may ring a bell to those familiar with the genre, or rather scene, of hyperpop, described by Wikipedia as;

[...] a loosely defined music movement67 and microgenre8 that predominantly originated in the United Kingdom during the early-to-mid 2010s. It is characterized by a maximalist or exaggerated take on popular music, and artists within the genre typically integrate pop and avant-garde sensibilities while drawing on themes commonly found in electronic, hip hop, and dance music.9

The hyperpop branch helps contextualize escapism by pointing towards a de-physicalization in conceptual, as well as musical terms. As a movement rooted deep into online spaces and known for its communal focus, hyperpop was given its peculiar shape by the myriads of small creators sharing their music on the internet under various aliases. Whether produced totally independent or affiliated with certain crew-like teams of similarly aligned artists, there remained a unifying anonymity across these works which aptly underlined a facet of the scene’s core spirit; a decentering of the traditional pop figure and the removal of their built-in narrative from the picture. This ultimately provides a response to the commodification of the pop idol; the artist’s force is trivialized, where they are only a projection, an existence that serves entertainment; no tangible personality, no history, no drama besides that of the borderline programmatic quality to the sound itself. The drama takes place outside of the individual, doesn’t refer to the human as the source of cringiness or comedy, but to their place in the pop landscape. That, the mainstream itself, becomes the satire material from an outside perspective.

“Exaggerated”, therefore, supports the hyperreal. For, perhaps, the most commonly recognized wave under the genre’s umbrella, characterized by a plethora of two-dimensional figure personas, cartoonish sonics, and bubbly, sugary vocals, if you could taste hyperpop it would probably feel like a pink-flavored lollipop; from the sweetness to the stickiness, to the hard crunch. Vocaloid, easy pop structures and catchy melodies, unrestrained clinks and clanks— silliness galore. Something that evokes a childlike sort of bliss, a happy cluelessness, joy devoid of thought, or logic, or tribulations. Yet behind, lies purpose.

via Wikipedia:

Deriving influence from a varied range of sources, some origins of the hyperpop scene are commonly traced to the output of English musician A. G. Cook's record label and collective PC Music and its associated artists such as Sophie and Charli XCX.

On May 4, 2015 Pitchfork wrote in their PC Music, Vol. 1 album review:

[...] PC Music cannot be insulted by the word "contrived." PC Music is deeply contrived; it’s fake as hell, that’s the point, that’s the entire energy. But this ethos, of course, has its limits. PC Music only works when its theoretical intention lines up with its physical effect: when you listen to it and become instantly depersonalized, blissfully and bubbly, more pixel than flesh. The best route to this end naturally centers on pleasure.

Joyfulness manifests, fierce and overwhelming, in Björk’s Violently Happy, hand in hand with a climate of optimism towards the future and, of course, nightclub dancing. “An Icelander abroad” is the phrase that summarizes the occasion Björk attributes part of the urge to express the sentiment in such a forceful way to— an attempt at poking fun at the assertive compulsion true to Icelandic nature that sees holding onto happiness by the claws as the only medicine in help of surviving the long darkness of winter solstices. A wish to remember the light in the darkest moments became the motivation behind the placement of such importance on happiness, commenting on the exhaustion for bygone attachments to doom, blood and agony, aggressive as the tear of the page. Of course, this is not to say that this new chapter came devoid of any darkness; only that is “the darkness of a black hole, in space”.

Nevertheless, throughout her immersion in the electronic sphere, Björk remained a singer. And thus, the insertion of the human voice in music coating an atmosphere that called for the loss of oneself happened almost absentmindedly. The diaristic quality in Violently Happy’s story establishes a human protagonist, carving out the room required for their presence where it typically wouldn’t exist. Björk herself looks back on this decision of carrying an element as symbolic of the old system as the guitar over to this defiant territory as “intuitional”; instinct aligned with the statement of representing the female voice in particular, tied to the figures of her mother and grandmother behind her— one the “black sheep of the family” that Björk had felt compelled to defend, the other a woman of few words.

Björk met Brian Eno in a London steam room, coincidentally during the year Eno found himself in the middle of writing his book, A Year with Swollen Appendices (published in 1996)— the encounter eventually making its way in. She recalls him telling her about a realization of his; that in the music of countries that don’t have a lot of hierarchy, melodies reflect a sort of anarchy, jumping from one place to another with plenty of space between the notes, contrary to ones with stricter states— namely, England and Japan— and ranges equally restricted, held tightly together. Eno’s question of whether there is anarchy in Iceland, Björk answered with a half-minded, hungover “Yeahhhh…” back then, yet considers today in regards to her eccentric melody-making, equating that ethos to a branch on a tree; “[If] you would put other singers [who write similar melodies to me] on that same branch, you could say that it is breaking out of this kind of oppressive narrative that is western civilization for women”. This unconstrained change of direction, movement in mighty leaps, and relentless, innovative experimentation, the mouse constantly outsmarting the cat; fitting into unwelcoming corners and turning them into worlds in order to self-preserve.

“[...] How are you so mysterious and elusive but also so relatable? How can you cultivate this mysteriousness without feeling cold?” Kelela told The Cut of meeting Björk in 2015, adding “That’s the intersection I’m always interested in. I am your homegirl, at the end of the day, but I also feel very … outside. So if you’re finding solace in feeling outside with me, then we’re good to go.” For Kelela, the outside took on the scenic form of Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression in the music video for Washed Away, as a reflection of her estranged headspace akin to a vast, otherworldly universe; “I’ve got to be like some place that you don't know where I am. And I'm like, ‘I don't even know where I am.’ It has to feel like, ‘Where the hell is she?’”, she stated about the choice, echoing a similar sentiment to Björk’s “You think I'm gonna go there? I’m gonna go the opposite [way]. You think you can catch me and control me but, no you don’t.”

Perhaps that is a magic hidden at the very core of miraculous collisions; to be on the outside yet somehow in tune, mysterious but approachable, elusive but warm. A foreign world colliding with a true and tested one, like an artist to a listener, offering a hand towards escape by tugging at what lies dormant— present— rests assured and waits to be touched. In that space, where nothing is certain, these worlds dance.

In that space, they keep creating.

All embedded songs have been added to the ‘Of The Moment’ playlist:

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Of The Moment

Spaces of Grey: An Ode to Miraculous Collisions in Music

Through the colors of Kelela, Fred again.., Brian Eno, Björk.

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