Unsettling and alluring in equal measure, RAMZi’s Phobiza series was a kind of imaginary travelogue, its title an apparent portmanteau of “phobia” and “Ibiza.” Across the course of three releases, the Canadian electronic musician mapped out an archipelago of fantasy islands and forgotten languages—a mingling of the tawdry and the exotic where bird calls, chintzy synths, and garbled voices tangled like overgrown vines. The sleeves, emblazoned with bizarre flora and fauna, were styled to resemble artifacts of 20th century ethnomusicology, and the music offered a correspondingly global web of references: oddly tuned flutes, indistinct radio chatter, and the splintered rhythms of dembow, kwaito, and footwork. If you’ve ever lain awake in a strange country, jetlagged and listening through thin walls to the sounds of a nearby market square, then you already know the sensation.
RAMZi, aka Phoebé Guillemot, is working with similar materials on Multiquest Niveau 1: Camouflé, but the new material sounds like she’s turned a corner. Guillemot has always been considerably more invested in rhythm and groove than peers like Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler, and Visible Cloaks, who have taken a shared interest in globe-trotting to more atmospheric ends, and Multiquest Niveau 1 is her most rhythm-centric release. Where previous records seemed to be on the verge of dissolving into the muggy night air, the new album puts its drums front and center, leaning into muscular syncopations, slow-motion breakbeats, and, on more than one occasion, deep house.
“Muskin” opens the album as though pushing through a beaded curtain into a dimly lit watering hole; saxophone riffs curl like smoke against a meditative backdrop of bells and Rhodes keys. But at barely a minute and a half long, it’s also something of a fake-out, and with the following track, “Kombat,” RAMZi plunges into the kind of propulsive cut that constitutes the bulk of the album: a bass-heavy dub groove covered in acidic synths, vaguely non-Western scales, and the occasional outburst of police sirens.
The song strikes Guillemot’s customary balance between familiarity and strangeness, and the rest of the album follows suit. On the surface, the deep-house drums and buoyant synth pads of tracks like “Balmi” and “La nuit l'été 1996” sound conventional, with echoes of Mr. Fingers. But her habit of collaging mismatched chords and samples creates weird, murky pockets of dissonance, and even the most straightforward tracks are suffused in chipmunk chirps and molasses-thick baritone vocals, pitched on each end well beyond the limits of intelligibility.
But the most unexpected influence is a far more pedestrian one: trip-hop. The album is shot through with distant echoes of acts like Kruder & Dorfmeister, Thievery Corporation, and other period purveyors of satiny aspirationalism and frequent-flyer beats, from the sitar and vibraphones of “Rubicon” to laid-back cadences that are just a stone’s throw from a Café del Mar compilation. Trip-hop, synonymous with early-’90s electronic music, is a funny case: It’s never really had a proper reappraisal. From personal conversations I’ve had over the past five years, I know that there’s no shortage of left-field electronic musicians interested in dusting off classic trip-hop and trying to make something new with it—something that resonates with the uncanny feel that distinguished, say, Portishead’s Dummy upon its arrival, more than a quarter century ago. Multiquest Niveau 1: Camouflé might be the album that finally recognizes the latent experimental potential in that most misunderstood of genres—and makes the easy-listening doldrums of “chill” safe once again for aberrant behavior.
Buy: Rough Trade
