Imagine this: you’re watching an actor in his mid-fifties playing a politician—a tall white guy with a good head of hair and a crisp blue suit, who greets his adoring public after a successful rally. Think a very special episode of Scandal. People cheer, they wave signs of support. Our great nation beholds its benevolent leader. And then, entering from the side of the screen comes a scary freak dressed in dark clothes. He has a gun! Pop, pop, pop. Screams, commotion. As the camera pans out to take in the bedlam, the music enters, just as you expect. An orchestral piece scaled down to computer size, its patriotic flattening uncanny. This is the music of a real crisis in a fake nation. Will our country survive? That is the question being urgently asked by d’Eon’s imagined score. On “The President Has Been Shot,” the song with the most appropriate title of all time, the oboes are distressed, the cellos are deeply upset, and the violins pump fast enough to match the speed of our racing hearts.
Though Montreal producer Chris d’Eon always leaned toward a telegenic brand of miniaturized chamber music, at first it seemed like that predilection was an accent, not the focus itself. On 2011’s Darkbloom, a split LP with then-fellow underground Canadian producer Grimes, his sacramental trilling was blended with an instrument largely absent from his new music: drums. The use of percussion, largely owing to various forms of Chicago dance music, from house to footwork, was the least interesting part of the music, but the most prominent. Dropping the propulsion to focus on warped melodies has created a new lane, one in between the avant-garde and the heavenly, the classical and the canned. In the past decade, he’s released several volumes of fairly straight-ahead liturgical music via his Music for Keyboards series, though in the context of his much more fulsome new album Leviathan, those records seem more like a dare to see if he could do it, a mastering of mimicry along the way to truly finding his own goofier voice.
Much of the music on his new album, like “The President Has Been Shot,” is dramatic, but, importantly, self-knowing. Yes, you can love a thing and make fun of it at the same time. This is music that sits somewhere between religious and hold music, where purgatory is both subject and experience. Two other tracks, in addition to “The President,” describe an action: “Climbing the Overhang” and “Installation of the Cisterns.” The former takes a playful approach with bloopy ’80s digi-funk synths, like climbing an overhang is an accomplishment that might have happened on The Jeffersons. The latter, with digital zither and bells giving the track a MIDI-gamelan feel, is ceremonial but a little sinister. These cisterns might end up as a part of a zany plot in Oceans 14.
Elsewhere on Leviathan, d’Eon tackles, with less success, aughts-era radio R&B, the type of thing Polow Da Don or Jim Johnson trafficked in. It’s not that d’Eon doesn’t create a perfectly fine beat that Christina Milian would have gladly used, it’s that those songs, like “Heat Wave” and “Figurine”—which feels a little too indebted to the beat for TLC’s “No Scrubs” and Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine”—don’t add much to a template that was well worn a decade ago.
Leaving the immediate world of references, onscreen or otherwise, my favorite song on Leviathan is “Rhododendron pt. IV,” which shreds every one of d’Eon’s influences into a sunshiny tune. It’s a silly song, the bold and repeated organ giving way to the synthesizer woodwinds. It feels fun, curious, invigorating. It has echoes of early music’s pump-organ rigor, but it’s more whimsical than wallowing. It’s religious music if your pastor was the Rock. If d’Eon invites you to church some Sunday, you should probably go.
