The title of Jessica Smurphy's new album came from a sentence that the Mexico City producer stumbled across in J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan: "If you shut your eyes and are a lucky one, you may see at times a shapeless pool of lovely pale colors suspended in the darkness." That description, which sounds a bit like a compositional prompt Yoko Ono or John Cage might have come up with, happened to correspond with her image of love. But not just romantic love, and definitely not Hallmark Cards' definition—more like love as a cosmic thing, boundless and electric; love as the connective tissue of the universe. "Love is not only pink ribbons and sugar, it is a living thing, it is sudden, it is insane," she says.
Smurphy's synaesthesia game must be strong, because Shapeless Pool sounds, in fact, like all those things at once—a squirmy living being, writhing, twitching, sticky sweet. Smurphy comes from Mexico's NAAFI crew, which made its name by putting an idiosyncratic spin on jagged, avowedly marginal styles, from moombahton to tribal guarachero to Jersey-inspired club. But she makes a good fit on Leaving, an L.A. label, run by Matthewdavid, that specializes in outer-limits music from artists like Ras G, M. Geddes Gengras, Knxwledge, and even Julia Holter. She is a psychedelic artist at heart, with an approach that goes to the marrow of the mind/body dichotomy.
There are two main facets to her music: hazy ambient and machinelike footwork. The rhythms, played out on high-pitched electronic toms and leathery hand-drum samples, move so fast that they seem almost to stand still. And the haze, meanwhile, works in the opposite way: as a nearly static, gelatinous mass that gradually yields a wealth of detail, the longer you look at it. It all seems simple, lo-fi, even a little bit crude, but it turns out to be wildly complex, and impossible to take in all at once: Every time one thing is revealed, something else is hidden. It's the mountaineer's dilemma: you can focus on the sparkling mineral in the rock face or the overwhelming bulk of the mountain itself, but you can't appreciate both at once.
Whatever the track markers might indicate, these aren't so much discrete songs as passages that flow together into long, seamless movements. (The album's only physical release is on cassette, which feels appropriate.) Chiming guitars and whirring drums create a bridge from the opener into the sketch-like "Sunset", in which birds chirp in time to the high-frequency hiccup of cell-phone interference, and on into "Aquarius Risinn", a breakbeat cut that sounds like a fusion of DJ Shadow, Cocteau Twins, and Tujiko Noriko, with a nod to Sounds of North American Frogs. At the end of side one, "Le Doppe Shoppe" offers time-stretched trance arpeggios over haywire son-clave rhythms and drunken bumblebee buzz; karate-flick gongs ease the transition into "PyramiDUB", in which the bees persist, but the rhythm morphs into a pattern reminiscent of grime, only hammered out on a tin roof.
The B-side opens with more gongs and bells and bowls, watery invocations, and streaks of white noise. Her voice rarely takes the fore, but its presence never feels far from the action, like a benevolent ghost. She sings as though no one ever told her the bars on the stave are supposed to cleave notes into discrete units, but it's not a disagreeable sensation; the way she slides around the pitch fits the general slipperiness of her music. "Alexander.Technique" gives us shaker-heavy footwork patterns, chants through a broken microphone, and Woody Woodpecker on military-grade amphetamines. It all drops 40 beats per minute for "Lean&Mean", a woozy coda that rides a skronking sax/bass line. Then she lets it fly for the closing "Pisces": doorbell-buzz keyboards, Morse-code kick drums, and all manner of incidental clatter, including something that sounds like a typewriter attacking a milkshake. To drive home the title, there is even the sound of splashing water.
It is welcoming and bewildering in equal measure, and the same could be said for "J A R D Í N", an A-side highlight, and one of the few things here that would make sense on its own, or dropped into another context, like a DJ mix. Where most of the album is as hazy as the skies over Mexico City, this one's all empty space punctuated by small, slivery sounds: woody hand drums, thimblefuls of sampled voice, crystalline trumpets, a hi-hat played by a drummer with restless-leg syndrome. A record scratches back and forth, less hip-hop than a cartoon approximation of hip-hop. Jerking and throbbing, the track evokes a kind of rubbery pointillism, a surrealistic meeting of mallet and gummy bear. It dissolves into a pitched-down snippet of movie dialogue, and then, with "Wicked", we're back into more familiar terrain: Rhodes riffing, Smurphy's own watery coos, a child's voice gibbering "The wicked!" It's the Brainfeeder wheelhouse, and for a moment, it feels almost like solid ground. Then the loops speed up, handclaps scatter like a flock of pigeons, and we're back in Smurphy's own incomparable world, living and sudden and sugary, our perception stretched taut between the forest and the trees.
