Rogue Introducer, Soul Enhancer is an almost uncomfortably gorgeous piece of work. “Clumsy,” the second single from the Stockholm producer Oli XL’s striking debut LP, is a good distillation of the record’s most memorable qualities. Working with a sound palette that recalls humorless glitch recordings, it offers a demented version of bliss that a listener could live with for a very long time. The melancholy yet weirdly fun track is built around a pair of freeze-dried chords and features a pitched-up rendition of the iconic chorus from Beck’s 1993 single “Loser.” Where the original hook sounds like Sappho on whippets, Oli XL makes the words mean something else. Now they’re not just about a guy in a disorienting historical moment, but about everything, somehow. “Soy un perdedor. I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?” Next to Oli XL’s angelic sound design, this comically profane request starts to feel sacred.
Rogue Intruder, Soul Enhancer recalls aughts electronica, jungle, and Basement Jaxx, but Oli XL’s approach is thrillingly his own. It follows the producer’s standout contributions to PAN and Posh Isolation compilations, arriving on his own Bloom imprint, a subsidiary of Stockholm's YEAR0001. The record is both gloomy and joyful, and its pop-adjacent tracks are produced with severe attention to detail. “Liquid Love” sounds like a cosmic turntablism exercise, and you get the sense that it might help astronauts in a lonely space station unwind after a long day of arguing with the computer. The heavy drum patterns on “Orchid Itch” make it one of the more DJ-friendly tunes on the album, while the EQ and compression settings are warped to create a sense of disorienting atmospheric pressure. The specter of dub hangs heavy over the LP as a whole: Sonic space is stretched out, pulverized, and uncannily flattened. Even in its most depressive moments, the album is playful.
The album would (probably?) sound fine as background music in an H&M, and it would sound great in a playlist alongside heady compositions by Iannis Xenakis and Kara-Lis Coverdale. Rogue Introducer, Soul Enhancer is heavy on breakbeats, and while many club producers have explored that rhythmic world in the last few years, Oli XL is in his own orbit. “I think about music in a pretty ‘theoretical’ way, but it’s my own completely made up rules I try to follow, often with silly analogies,” he said in a recent interview. “Like judging the rhythmic vibe—it’s some dude walking a wire between two skyscrapers… No one wants to see someone just walk flawlessly back and forth, dude needs to look like he just might fall!” The producer suggests that we might think about his music as sleight of hand: a kind of cunning performance.
While there isn’t any linear narrative tying Rogue Introducer, Soul Enhancer together, it tells a compelling story on its own terms. There are recurring themes of failure and self-doubt in track titles such as “Hesitation,” “Imposter,” and “Clumsy,” while “dnL” features a funny robotic voice doing some abstract chastising: “Boring… lame!” The album’s less-than-optimistic subject matter has a certain tragicomic effect alongside its borderline effervescent sound. A number of songs feature lyrics, but they’re often hard to parse, which itself feels like a form of self-obfuscation. The final track, called “Sniper Baby”—a very surreal and funny title—does feature some legible verses over its introspective beat. “I don’t go outside/I’m losing my friends/How you gonna fill the void and make it end.” After about a minute his voice coos a little, then trails off as the take comes to a close, breaking the recording’s fourth wall. Just before the song ends, there’s a sound that could either be a muffled sob or a microphone being moved—it’s genuinely hard to tell.
