Over the past decade or so, Rory Ferreira has built a deep, consistent, and strikingly versatile catalog. The nomadic artist, who now goes by R.A.P. Ferreira, was born in Chicago but subsequently lived in Wisconsin, Los Angeles, Maine, and currently Nashville; much of his early work was issued under the name milo, though his masterpiece, to this point, is the beautifully fluid sovereign nose of (y)our arrogant face, released in 2018 as scallops hotel. His new album, the Light-Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures, is rich and rewarding, channeling sovereign nose’s improvisatory air and pairing it with the aqueous vocals Ferreira has been refining since he left L.A. in 2015.
The album is packed with some of his most impressive, thematically sophisticated writing to date, and his most vivid imagery: ontologically curious snakes in one song, “pythons on leashes” in the next. Yet Ferreira has arranged it in such a way that the timbres of each song create and relieve tension on their own. Scriptures opens with “contrapuntal,” where his vocals are subdued—maybe tranquil, maybe weary. That voice disappears for much of the album. When it resurfaces toward the end on “praise & worship,” it’s imbued with something closer to dread, effectively recasting everything that came before it. On that latter song, Ferreira raps in near-monotone, “Guess I’ll follow that North Star home/Sure as the porn star moans,” an airtight couplet that gets at the tension between the elemental and the artificial—between what is inherent and what is performed—that so much of his work is about.
The music is texturally rich and rhythmically varied, even between songs by the same producers. See, for instance, the way the Tel Aviv-based argov balances the somber “contrapuntal” with the bright jazz bounce of “humboldt park jibaritos,” or how Nashville’s Brainweight lets his percussion shift from light and skittering to woozily full when “brother mouzone library card” becomes “hyperion.” Ferreira has never interacted so virtuosically with drums as he does on Scriptures. He cascades over them on “Blackmissionfigs” and leans his syllables toward the end of each measure on “gemilut hasadim”; on “uptown 37,” he jumps from pocket to pocket like a frog between lily pads. Some of the beats are microcosms for the larger intersections Ferreira himself embodies—take the gibbsfreelance-produced “wedding cake eighths,” which recalls the Los Angeles beat music scene of a decade ago but has all the hand-stitched grit and open space of those Freestyle Fellowship records he occasionally evokes.
In his videos, Ferreira has also developed a unique visual language that eschews elaborate plotting, conventional color correction, or any of the other markers meant to indicate a work has been professionally finished. Sometimes his videos flirt with the same aesthetics of internet ephemera that he references in his writing: The clip for who told you to think??!!?!?!?!’s “sorcerer” frequently looks like a fan-made edit, an illusion that’s punctured when Ferreira raps directly into the camera. The “east nashville” video is in this vein. He ambles across a bridge in no hurry, stopping to underline passages in the song; he dances in front of a minimally tagged wall, his body lit only from the chest down. It is not unfinished; it is not sloppy or “lo-fi.” It is a prolific artist arriving at the perfect unity between content and presentation, his carefully considered thoughts allowed to move his body, the camera, the microphone as if those things were animated by impulse alone.
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