Let’s bow our heads for the phrase “going pop,” a now-archaic term meant to note an underground artist compromising themselves to make gobs of money and perch themselves on top of the charts. “Gobs of money” no longer applies to industry hopefuls, in a splintered post-monoculture there’s nobody to compromise to, and with postmodern retromaniacal flailing still a top priority, anything that might otherwise skew “trendy” still sounds like a future that’s dragging its ass on actually getting here. Travis Stewart’s had one of the more typical internet-era careers in that context: as Machinedrum, he spent nearly ten years being underrated for working in the margins of glitch-hop, then was pulled into the post-dubstep orbit to find a cult audience that felt bigger than it actually was. He went on to find equal renown (and more resilient praise) in a team-up with Praveen Sharma as Sepalcure. And then, because this is what happens now, he started putting out the amount of work one typically needs to do to support himself, only to find out that people expect you to keep reinventing yourself, which, whoops.
But maybe what passes for “going pop” now is the very thing that’s actually snapped Machinedrum’s style into sharper focus. And it all clicks once you hear how geeked about contemporary R&B and dance music *Human Energy *is. This is the record where the guest features start pouring in, the scattered and shattered sampled-vocal loops receding in favor of live voices. There’s also some personal-life conceptual thinking about Stewart’s New Age holistic healing and meditation that went into this somewhere, and you can hear some signs of spiritually renewed energy in the music if you listen close enough. However, that could just be the arpeggios lining up in just the right sequence to hit that emotional/physical connection in that super crowd-pleasing way.
Those guest voices mesh well with Machinedrum’s enlightenment through repetition, bringing a bit more flexibility and unpredictability than your traditional diva loop. The neo-junglist rhythms of “Do It 4 U” might not sound as fresh as they did in 2011, but all it takes is Dawn Richard’s voice descending from the clouds to reintroduce the hazy uplift that makes the best of this stuff breathe. Like her best work with the similarly future-bass-inclined Kingdom, D∆WN’s voice gets pretty altered here—rebuilt into staccato waviness, flanged, and muffled—only to have it resonate high above the chattering melodies and give the track a weight before its weightlessness burns it up in the atmosphere. And both MeLo-X (growling “let the trumpets hit”-declarations on the Diplo-one-upping, dancehall-in-space anthem “Angel Speak”) and Jesse Boykins III (finding bliss in the crystalline glitch-soul cut “Celestial Levels”), earn the gravity they give to tracks that approach the boundaries of feel-too-happy euphoria.
There’s never been a sense in Machinedrum’s work, especially from Room(s)* *onwards, that this music is just a basic distillation of trends. I’m grateful that the drive-thru speaker fidelity and impenetrable wall of pre-drop clap buildups on “Dos Puertas” at least partially muffles Kevin Hussein’s disconnected art-but-not rap. But Stewart sounds renewed in channeling his posi-vibe mindstate into making the rest of his instruments soar. The glassy bells on “Morphogen” and the ’87 mall-pop distortions of “Isometrix” capture the idealized yet unfamiliar retro vibe that eludes most vaporwave composers, and he commands his dynamics to sequence a pixellated sugar rush (“White Crown”) right before an isolation-tank meditation (“Ocean of Thought”). Even the interlude-length sketches—the breathtaking “Lapis,” the organ-driven trance of “Etheric Body Temple,” the Boards of Canada-in-a-pastel-palm-tree-t-shirt zone-out of “Surfed Out”—fill in the blanks that the threats of diminishing returns left open. Maybe this is the album where Machinedrum breaks big. If it is, there’s even less to the glitch/pop divide than we ever suspected.
