“My music is a big mash of fusions and re-imaginings,” Phoebé Guillemot recently said about the music she makes as RAMZi. That mash is as slippery as anything currently being made in electronic music. Across a series of cassette releases and 12”s, Guillemot has presented sounds from around the world as though mapped onto a wad of Silly Putty. On the nine-track Pèze-Piton, RAMZi makes the most club-friendly iteration of her music yet, signaling a pivot away from its gooier aspects.
Nose flutes, kuduro rhythms, bits of bandoneon, and dubby bass tones all bob to the surface of “MWI Intro” before a sturdier beat overtakes “Backin.” RAMZi has said that she gravitates to kwaito’s 100-bpm rhythms, and “Safe” hovers in that range before a heavier drum pattern drops. Brief bits of German and Portuguese can be discerned, another hallmark of her work. Beyond a surface similarity to Kanye’s sped-up soul productions of the early 2000s, the mix of slowed-down, molasses-like voices and high-pitched chirruping brings to mind the giddy sensation of traveling in another country and sitting down at a café, where conversations swirl around you, none of them quite making sense.
That sense of peregrination with no exact destination in mind speaks to our present moment in music consumption, in which listening takes the form of skipping from tracks on SoundCloud to YouTube videos suggested by friends to whatever tickles us in the moment. It’s an overwhelming array (and amount) of music for any listener and music producer to digest, which seems in part how RAMZi herself approaches it. Nigerian hip-hop, the bewildering modern batida of labels like Príncipe Discos, the spongy dancehall of Equiknoxx, Brazilian baile funk, Ugandan electronic music—all come to mind when listening to her productions, mixed in a way that can feel dizzying.
The title of “Brazili” might evoke the South American country, but RAMZi refuses to make such an easy comparison; the bustling percussion and echoing whoops that make for the album’s most satisfying track could really be from anywhere. “Fly Timoun” is the longest track, and also the one with a hand-drum pattern that makes you drunk in trying to move with it as cowbells and organ slosh around the song’s perimeter. Midway through, RAMZi wanders away from the beat, and the club walls give way to bird calls, dense foliage, and the butteriest pronunciation of the word “chocolate” possible. Rather than stay on the grid like so many electronic producers, RAMZi knows that getting lost in a new place is one of traveling's biggest thrills.
