LA label Friends Of Friends continues its crusade into Berlin with another signing, this time singer-songwriter Perera Elsewhere. She's easily the label's most surprising addition yet, though her smoky atmospherics are of the mood music variety preferred by many of the crew. A member of downtempo trio Jahcoozi (alongside producers Robot Koch and Oren Gerlitz), you might otherwise recognize her sultry tones from Modeselektor's "Silikon," back when she went by given name Sasha Perera. But on Everlast, her solo debut, she mostly abandons the smooth electronica of her past in favour of a gothic atmosphere that actually kind of sounds like it was recorded in a frigid castle, her vocals echoing through chambers of cold stone.
Perera has the kind of breathy, sighing tone that complements well-groomed, trip-hoppy electronic music—the kind you'd expect to hear in the background at a public place, unobtrusive and pleasing to the ear. But laid naked on Everlast, there's a spooky and beguiling quality to it. The album opens with the bluesy strum of "Drunk Man", where her vocals are appropriately slurred so you can just barely make out the words. Her quiet voice is accompanied by steady drums and a distinctly wooden thump of a bassline—earthy sounds with sanguine accents that feel like a deliberate reaction to the perfect production of her other work. It's not very often you hear of an expat in Berlin who tries so hard to sound acoustic.
Not that the production is an afterthought; every element is touched with some level of reverb and so neatly placed that you'll wonder which are judiciously-chosen samples, and which were actually played by hand. Hard-panned multitracking and other stereo spectrum tricks makes the Gonjasufi duet "Giddy" captivating in spite of its stupor, and pitch-shifting on "Shady" lends it an ethereal feel underpinned by implacable noises that sound like guitar strings being melted and stretched like taffy. She even plays off a ghostly, masculine version of herself on "Carousel," whose simple chorus echoes the bare desperation of Neil Young's Ditch Trilogy—it's amazing the amount of emotional mileage she can get out of merely repeating and enunciating a single word, especially when she's doing it over guitar chords that drip with anguish.
Indeed, as thoughtful as the production on Everlast might be, it's simplicity that's key. Album highlight "Dreamt That Dream" isn't much more than a few mantra-like phrases stuck together and rolled off Perera's tongue almost carelessly, but it proves intoxicating in the album's walk-in freezer of an echo chamber. It works the same magic on the heavy-handed political didactic (and first single) "Bizarre". Her lyrics ("money's running everything/ the same ten families that run the show/ friends with the president and friends with the Pope") amount to high-school-level social commentary, but set against a distant synth whine and decisive acoustic guitar, it's like a 60s protest song dressed up in modern clothes.
Most of all, Perera Elsewhere’s debut is a defiantly quiet record in a scene of maximalism; compare it to the oversaturated landscapes of her labelmates Shlohmo or Groundislava, or the rhythmic attack of Salva, and she's an obvious outlier. But not that much of an outlier; Friends Of Friends has always had a knack for finding artists whose sense of pathos borders on maudlin but usually end up on the right side of the divide. The same goes for Everlast, where even the most earnest moments, like the baroque "Light Bulb" or the self-consciously trippy "Bongoloid", become captivating thanks to her unforgettable voice and cultivated ethereality. It’s a short but penetrating record of far-away, foggy reveries that’ll burrow its way into your consciousness until it haunts you, one breath after another.
