TSVI’s music is ruthlessly efficient. It wasn’t always that way; eight years ago, the Italian-born, London-based artist (Guglielmo Barzacchini, aka Anunaku) was making chrome-plated electro funk indebted to the sound of Bok Bok’s Night Slugs label, with fluorescent-hued chords swimming in humid reverb. But in recent years, his music has gotten steelier and more unforgiving. The drums have sharpened; the tone colors have leached out. His most recent solo release, last year’s Sogno EP, fused dancehall and tech-step with military precision; the drums were so dry, there might have been silica gel packs in the mix.
The British experimental electronic musician Loraine James, on the other hand, trades in barely controlled chaos: hair-trigger beats, jittery vocal samples, little twisters of white noise. Like a bull in a semiconductor factory, her drums lurch dangerously, threatening to shatter the groove with every syncopation; her chords spill over the grid like inkblots on graph paper. And on recent releases—particularly the self-titled album under her new alias Whatever the Weather—a sentimental ambient sensibility has settled in like a pastel haze. So what happens when two such diametrically opposed styles come together? Rather than matter annihilating antimatter, they establish an uneasy kind of symbiosis, with TSVI’s tough, armor-plated drums punching through James’ architecture of unpredictability.
Some tracks are more balanced than others. On “Awaiting,” it would be easy to miss Barzacchini’s fingerprints entirely. The song begins with a ruminative string of piano notes, like Harold Budd sitting absentmindedly at a waterlogged upright. It could be an outtake from Whatever the Weather, at least until a muted kick drum sullenly sidles into view, tracing circles like a hungry shark. Two opposing drum tracks compete for control: One’s a spartan snare that does little more than keep time; the other’s a periodic eruption of breakbeats that seems hellbent on obliterating it. High above, an angel choir coos wordlessly, as though mourning the destruction below. Those voices return on the EP’s final track, “Trust,” the only one without drums; again, you might easily assume its reverberant piano and gauzy pads were James’ work alone.
Other tracks offer a more integrated fusion of the two musicians’ styles. They recorded the EP while sharing a studio during London’s last lockdown period, and you can sense their presence in the room together, hands at the controls, feeling out each others’ instincts. “Gloom” molds the same basic elements from “Awaiting” into a tougher, more propulsive form. “Eternal” rises gradually, like a machine assembling itself from a scrap heap; battered, haphazard percussion is shaped into a slow, muscular groove haloed with a silvery synth melody. And “Observe” represents the apotheosis of their creative union, drawing out great, sweeping, melancholy synths over spring-loaded drum’n’bass cadences. Despite its greater rhythmic focus, no two bars sound quite the same. It flows like a conversation. At a moment when the smart money in dance music is on big, boisterous club anthems, this tangled, detuned, introspective EP is refreshing: an intimate picture of two friends shutting out the world and seeking a common language.
