James Holden's Border Community is a label known for its between-genre dislocation, an imprint that takes dance-music influences, warms them over on the stove, and then buries them in fuzzy pink noise. Home to artists like Nathan Fake, Luke Abbott, and, of course Holden himself, it has a habit of drenching techno in longing nostalgia and stasis, music caught in some dimensional rift between dance and pop. It seems a likely home for Swiss artist Kate Wax then, who made her name six years ago on bizarre spoken-word electronica on Mental Groove, but whose sound has slowly gelled into something more palatable, and certainly more traditionally pop. On her first album for Border Community and second overall, Aisha Devi Enz buries herself in a dark, claustrophobic world blanketed with careful textures both prickly and enticing, and tries to tunnel her way back using mostly her elastic but childlike voice.
With Dust Collision, Enz refigures herself as an alien vixen à la Karin Dreijier, her intensely smoky sensuality problematized by intense vocal processing and pitch manipulation. Vocals are Collision's key feature, its only constant and the element that haunts its darkest corners. "I Knit You"-- all chugging but suppressed arpeggios and layer after layer of tweaked vocal gasping-- makes an attractive, suitably weird opener, with lyrics about "heathen scars" and carving names into kitchen walls. The menacing verses are underlaid by a catchy falsetto chorus. Even when her vocals are the primary focus, they're still occluded, weaving in and out of each other and interrogating several different moods and states at once. By keeping her untouched cadence in tow ("Human Twin"), the manipulation only serves to emphasize her quavering vulnerability. It's gasping innocence versus jaded hostility, and this sort of dynamic push-and-pull, defines Dust Collision, an album that feels permanently at odds with itself and never quite comfortable in its own skin.
Part of that contrast manifests itself in an ongoing duel between the organic and the artificial, an unstable gradient that constantly tugs the album in opposite directions. Moving past the rubbery "Dancing on Your Scalp", Collision enters a phase of unnervingly stark sparsity. "Human Twin" and "Archetype" are driven mostly by piano, relatively simple singer-songwriter material quietly vandalized by synths, metronomic drums, or fits of distortion. It all leads toward the fantastic "Maze Rider (Live From the Cave)", an embellished live recording complete with sumptuous reverb, microphone feedback, and Enz's most riveting vocal melody. It feels uncharacteristically natural-- bar the ever-present vocal processing-- and it stands boldly naked at the center of the album, all strong, pure melody with little else to back it up. It's almost enough to make us question whether the heavy-handed effects are necessary in the first place.
But when the electronics do return, they're on the fritz-- "Echoes and the Light" sounds like it's shorting out with each brutal chord stab-- until the record strips itself down again and crawls back into its pseudo-acoustic cubbyhole, more fragile than ever. (Enz's personality begins to splinter across anxious soliloquies as she cries lyrics like "mad thinker get out of my head.") The closer "Les Djinns" is where the album's ever-edging tension finally gives way, and the uplifting but gentle melody explodes into bursts of harsh static and guitar moans before just fizzling out. It's just the kind of incongruous and torturously quick ending you'd expect from an album that feels like an hour of emotional infighting. (It's the burn-out of that album, one that exhausts itself trying to express emotions with such an odd and unintuitive palette.)
Just as it exhausts itself, Dust Collision can have a similar effect on its listeners. Breathing indulgently in and out without regard for how much space it takes up, Collision takes its sweet time to get its fraught message across, ever a rarity in an age of instant gratification. While her sound isn't quite fully developed yet-- the second half owes a lot to the Knife's Silent Shout-- she's impressively ambitious, toeing the line between two stratified worlds and refusing to give into the confines of either. She can pull off accessibly bare songwriting as well as textural tone-poems, finding formidable power in her singing both when it's untouched and heavily damaged. Damage courses throughout Dust Collision, and it's not the easiest listen, but like most difficult albums, it's eventually rewarding, and her vortex of haywire synths, quaking guitar, and unsettling helium squawks is powerfully magnetic.
