London-based electronic artist and self-taught pianist Tourist, whose real name is William Phillips, first surfaced on Myspace in 2010 as Little Loud. He had a baby-faced selfie profile picture and a few tracks to his name: an 80s-tinged Balearic remix of Ariel Pink’s “Round and Round”, an Acéphale-commissioned rework of Memory Tapes’ “Bicycle”, and another version of HEALTH’s “Nice Girls” as part of a companion remix album to their Disco2. His remixes were pretty standard—add a 4/4 beat and chopped-up vocals to any song, sit back, and watch it go to number one on Hype Machine—but an artistic sensibility, however indefinable, began to emerge.
In 2012, Phillips released his first EP under the new moniker Tourist: Placid Acid, four songs of sun-dazed beats and melodies that shifted and sparkled like the equatorial sun on a calm sea. It was a pleasant debut, if not very distinctive from other blissed-out jams with cutesy names, like Slow Magic’s “Corvette Cassette”, which made similar Soundcloud rounds the year before. Six months later, Phillips changed approaches with a remix of Sharon Van Etten’s chronicle of a panic attack, “We Are Fine”. He replaced Van Etten’s ukulele with throbbing, haunted synths and skittering percussion, hinting at a developing emotional and musical complexity that in turn foreshadowed Tourist’s 2013 Tonight EP.
“You know a Venn diagram," Phillips told Billboard earlier this year. "My left circle would be electronic music and the right circle would be emotions, atmosphere, honesty.” It’s not the most unique thought—you’d be hard-pressed to find an artist, electronic or otherwise, claiming not to care about those things—but the idea gets at something he started doing very well in the beginning of last year. There’s a newfound sense of longing and urgency in the minor chords and driving pulse of an elegant banger like “Never Stop”, which undoubtedly helped get him signed to Disclosure’s Method label last summer. Tourist then released a string of higher-profile indie remixes (Haim, Chvrches, Sam Smith) in the lead-up to his Patterns EP, which was steadily pushed back from a December release date to give Tourist more time to reinvent himself on the tour circuit as well.
The most immediately noticeable difference between the Disclosure-affiliated Tourist and the Tourist formerly known as Little Loud is guest vocalists. Album closer “I Can’t Keep Up” features singer and occasional saxophonist Will Heard, who most notably appeared on Klangkarussell’s soulful UK hit “Sonnentanz”. With Tourist at the helm, Heard takes a darker turn, asking, “Won’t somebody give a fuck?” as the producer ramps up tension with a quickening pulse that rockets to 130 BPM before just as suddenly slowing down again. “I refuse to fall,” Heard sings, the last word echoing as if he’s already tumbling into the abyss. The title track, which opens with scattershot ping-pong synths straight out of SBTRKT’s playbook, is led by Lianne La Havas. Phillips doesn’t seem to know quite what to do with her here, supplementing her buttery voice with a background chorus that’s ultimately more distracting than anthemic.
“Trust in You” eases into Patterns with cascading vocal samples and judicious xylophones, its clickety-split backing track setting the EP’s overall urgent tone that finds full expression in “Together”, Tourist’s most ambitious effort to date. His first release after signing to Method (and Patterns’ lead single) is something of a coming-out party, Phillips busting through any preconceived notions of him as an artist with a hi-NRG gallop riding the irresistibly universal refrain “We should be together.” It’s masterfully crafted, from the restrained fade-in and exhausted fade-out to the arpeggiated synths that take it to the bridge, quietly bow out, and then resurface for the final sprint to the finish line.
For the first time, it sounds like Tourist has something to lose: in that same interview with Billboard, he said, “There’s something dangerous about getting big because you make your success on certain defining records.” With “Together”—and Patterns in general, which sets a promising tone for Tourist's continued artistic development—he may have found that record.
