One of the unlikeliest developments in the decade’s commingling of underground electronic music and mainstream pop has been Cashmere Cat’s leap from making twinkling, daisy-chain trap to working with singers like Ariana Grande and the Weeknd. Here was that rarest of unicorns: an artist on the fringes—a Norwegian former turntablist hiccupping his way through a mutant take on of Scandinavian skweee, to be precise—who catapulted himself into the Hot 100 by trading the maximalist ethos of EDM for an aesthetic about as tough as kittens and cotton candy.
It was the Brussels label Pelican Fly that originally put Cashmere Cat’s music out into the world, and after he jumped ship for LuckyMe and then Interscope, the Belgian label soldiered on with similar, if slightly less distinctive, sounds: variations on trap, R&B, and Jersey and Baltimore club punctuated by the usual 808 skitter, trance zap, and helium spritz. Norway’s Marius is the label’s latest discovery. He makes fizzy instrumental hip-hop that’s clearly indebted to fellow Norwegians Cashmere Cat and Lido, another Pelican Fly signee. And though its four songs cumulatively clock in at under 12 minutes, his debut EP for the label suggests a fresh, promising spin on the Pelican Fly sound.
Like Cashmere Cat, the 21-year-old producer’s music is driven by whimsy: He’s fond of plinky, harp-like strumming and kazoo buzz; he likes his chords wistful and his keyboards wheezy, with long attacks suggestive of a backmasked sample. Voices drip and synths detune in mid-flight—an aesthetic influenced by wind tunnels and the Doppler effect. While his melodies have their heads in the clouds, though, his beats stay grounded with a mixture of overdriven machine hits and sampled rock drumming. “Give In” has the staggering, brawny cadence of hip-hop grooves pounded out on the MPC; “LAME” balances distorted 808 blasts with nimble hi-hats so vivid you can practically make out the Zildjian logo leaping off the cymbal. Nothing spells out his use of contrast like the guitars that compete for attention in “LAME”: One’s a winsome, clean-toned kin to Cocteau Twins or the Durutti Column, and the other’s the kind of gnarly, gut-punching prog riff, compressed to within an inch of its life, that Daft Punk have made their stock-in-trade. It’s a fun, surprising combo.
Until earlier this year, Marius went by the name Melf, and listening to the first couple of singles he put out under that alias, “Crzy” and “Guilty,” suggest how quickly he’s developing. Where “Crzy” was a fairly run-of-the-mill pop-trap tune, and “Guilty” was a little too beholden to SOPHIE’s Flubberized funk, the new material finds him coming closer to carving out his own sound. He still has some kinks to work out. The soulful falsetto hook that dominates “Existence Problem” feels like a step backward into the R&B-collage aesthetic that has been bass music’s default for years now. And as much personality as his sounds have, that’s not always enough to sustain them. “Existence Problem” treads water for the final minute of its 3:22 running time, although the longer “LAME” manages to keep you guessing until the very end, thanks to its agile dodging and feinting, building up to a big climax and then pulling the rug out. And while “Master Dope (Interlude)” is probably the EP’s least original cut—two minutes of hip-hop breaks suffused in dissonant keys and shortwave static, it’s clearly indebted to producers like DJ Shadow and the RZA—its thick, viscous frequencies are among the record’s most visceral pleasures.
