In a postmodern reenvisagement of Barbra Streisand being discovered at Village gay mecca The Lion after a fluke performance on the cusp of the 1960s—apparently the London broil was like buttah—the hermetically plangent soundscapes of lotto winner Adaledge Williams were first discovered by executives from Triple Down Records at a bar tended by a fellow partial to playing his friend's tapes; after an initial offer was met with recalcitrance, the independently wealthy auteur relented and handed them a forty-minute album, initially released gratis at adaledge.com.
These salient facts, coupled with a PR legend that evinces the pedigrees of such obstinate mavericks as Arthur Russell and Russian animator Yuriy Norshteyn (one also senses a tinge of the earlier oeuvre of Aphex Twin), have left Adaledge with a formidable buzz in the pertinent circles, in a year where the heterodoxy of post-banger blogosphere electronica and its myriad forms—encompassing everything from the hip-hop mutations of Gonjasufi and Flying Lotus to the dubstep/funky beats explosion and the retro MaW-style disco house of Still Going's “Spaghetti Circus”—threaten to upheave the stodginess of the legions of Pabst-fueled strummers for a long time to come. In other words, this emergent fellow couldn't ask for a better zeitgeist.
But when all is said and done, Vintage Feelings is hardly as audacious as its imprimatur would suggest, even as its title readily alludes to the album's obvious antecedents; this is an album that wears its blatant indebtedness to the minimalist stylists of past decades on its sleeve, even as it points (however timorously) to the newly exigent spaces of the post-genre, post-ideological age. The pulsating syncopation of Manuel Göttsching's techno manifesto E2-E4 is reverberant in the strains of the opening, “Lionest,” which melds lambent piano figures that evoke the formalist considerations of Steve Reich at his mid-seventies peak and the inherent extemporaneity of the home studio to lapidary synths awash in the aether of some faraway world—to invoke late Factory Records impresario Tony Wilson's famous description of Vini Reilly, the track immediately establishes itself as “good music to chill out to.” Indeed, the specter of the neglected, ethereal Mancunian avant guitarist looms heavily (and, perhaps, unwittingly) over parts of the album—particularly “Computer Kaki,” which could easily pass on a mixtape as late ’80s Durutti Column with its mordant IDM beats and vertiginous guitar—while other tracks (namely the allusive “Make it in Metaphors”) evoke the circuitous, urbane introspection of Arthur Russell in his Rough Trade/Calling Out of Context phase or John Martyn's more outré forays.
Taken as a whole, Vintage Feelings transcends the soporific pastiche that has glutted so much of popular electronic music since the brief heyday of electroclash nearly a decade ago; that said, the striking ingenuousness behind Adaledge's vision—the post-Dilla via Byrds-era David Crosby meets Philip Glass and Cornelius free-for-all of “Dance, Aliens,” for instance—congeals on precious few tracks to warrant any sort of enduring status beyond the requisite footnotes of music publications to come. But even in the heady, “intelligent” milieu that this album inhabits, electronica has traditionally been, and remains, a game of singles and remixes, and it is in this realm that Adaledge will likely find his niche, translating chords and breaks into munificent worlds unto themselves. And it will always be good music to chill out to, after all. |