Boocanan
Jawbreakers
2015
Hailing from the drenched panoramas of Richmond County, Nova Scotia in Canada, Boocanan unlocks the secret to a contrapuntal orogeny by augmenting Vaporwave’s aesthetics with a certain twisted kind of aliphatic Ambient-focused constituents that should not work in tandem, but surprisingly do against all odds. Enter Jawbreakers, her nine-track epitome released in June 2015 on DMT Tapes situated in Earth’s sunniest state Florida. Available to stream and fetch at the label’s Bandcamp page as usual, the digital-only Jawbreakers promises a thunderously crashing abiogenesis by means of its title and front artwork: the grizzly moiré seems like an impervious wall, a filter or gauze that covers the saccharified treat of affection. This train of thought is quirkily annihilated over the course of the actual soundscapes though. Advertised as an album for "the introspect, the wistful, and the redolent," Jawbreakers worships cold, metallic surfaces without ever succumbing to Glitch territories. In fact, these steely parts become gaseous and aeriform more often than not, even the attached Hip-Hop markers are liquedous enough to float within the magnanimous fluidity. Prepare yourself for a special album that soothes the soul and ostracizes every orthonormal trend in order to build a preon-fueled chirality. Crack the Jawbreakers!
Opener Hinokuri guides the listener through the industrial complex… in all-caps, stumbling and tumbling, providing a high-metallicity cymbal smoke machine with pluvial Rhodes hooks and an overall desiccate atmosphere despite the fluid-processed shape. The Hip-Hop scheme eventually leads to an Ambient rivulet which itself flows into Error Macro, a collaboration with Kidd Thunder. Vincristine fog banks, slowed-down chloroderivatives and argentine blebs of blur make for a wondrously pitch-shifted epithalamium whose presumed thinness only augments the cross-linkage between the periglacial constituents. The adjacent No_Mercy_Title keeps the temperature at sub-zero, enchanting with rotenone halides, gaseous wind gusts and cautiously overdriven sections. These storms reign across the land alright, but somehow their immediacy is faraway, letting the listener aurally watch the pageant from afar. Three Ambient antrums in a row: Boocanan’s Jawbreakers is a mellow phytholith.
… or maybe this isn’t the case after all. Haribo Havoc truly opens the curtain, revs up the kineticism with the aid of polyphonic lavabo synths, heavily scything hi-hat profusions and an echoey aura that eventually leads to a simmering cauldrons of the bit-crushed kind. The laissez-faire attitude of this minimally saccharine corker is luring; there’s an industrial vibe to it, but the song just is, remains remote and inapproachable. You can smell the molybdenized micrometry. Meanwhile, Look To A Luna introduces corkscrew melodies whose overdriven benignancy forms a mutualistic bond with the softened ignis fatuus of the laid-back beat. Everything is a lanthanum-alloyed mass, the beat lacks the oomph on purpose and willfully sinks into this plasticizing plateau. By the way, what’s OSCOB doing at the moment? As luck has it, collaborating with Boocanan on the rotatory rhizome And That’s A Promise: vinyl crackles and biomorphic ribcages eventually lead to a salubrious guardian light, a viridian veil that is carefully altered, warped, doubled, stacked. Evoking the matutinal polarimetry of a harbor, the pulsatile circumambience and attached lo-freq lycopod increase the polyvalent nature/tech superimposition. A lighthouse amid the chlorotic colloid.
Caught Up In Midnight leads the final triptych of Boocanan’s silvery-shimmering vapor by placing her in a bonfire-compatible four-note p(i)anorama whose nostalgic-neutraceutical sarcopenia is seemingly presented as is, but augmented against its wills via various filters. This is the producer’s laziest effort, and willfully so in order to let the nocturnal nematode do its ogival thing, creating a color abrasion and baroclinic reel whose artist-aided interferometry celebrates the nightmare, but subtly so. The crystalline-aquatic showstopper Dive To The Heart doesn’t reside in jejune anhydrides and rather ventures into the opposite direction: ethereal-as-can-be aqua oxidants, echoey parallax strata, cavernous magnetotails and aposematic c(h)orals make for an utterly hieratic strychnine-coated atmosphere. Weightlessly adrift, this is the organic belter, the accretion of telomeric puissance. The finale Joy Of Painting has a particularly auspicious – or pernicious – title, and yes, particles and vestiges of the theme song are definitely injected, if only by the power of one’s brain. Echoey sermons, apocrine afterglows, the flaring of electric pianos and a short bubbly reprise of the opener Hinokuri let Boocanan’s carbonaceous album come full circle.
What a string of events and gradual redshift into higher chroma spheres! Jawbreakers is less harsh and cracking as I imagined in the given setup, and yet its industrial complexion shines through time and again, boosting the already volcanic ionosphere further. Boocanan’s first six tracks are magnificently coherent, providing an avulsion that comes as close to a stream of consciousness as the V-genre allows in the self-imposed circumstances. Despite the presumably austere metals, catenae and adiabatic steelification, this is no Power Shoegaze album, let alone a harshly abrasive churner boiling and swirling ad infinitum. The basic ingredients are there, that’s right, but the titration worships an ameliorated approach, with the inorganic counterparts being enormously soothing, mellifluous even. The Hip-Hop adjuvants and breakbeat backends are noticeable alright, but in lieu of staggering kick drums, the beat only fragilely accentuates the plasmatic atmosphere, leading to a surprising conclusion: Jawbreakers is first and foremost an Ambient album. No sumptuous synths are attached, no New Age mannerisms absorbable. The last three tracks might extrapolate the formula here and there by means of a synthier and more sample-focused approach, but both the constant emphasis on and evaluation of its principal quantifiers make Boocanan’s polymer called Jawbreakers a curiously timeless sinecure.
Further listening and reading:
- You can bite and stream the Jawbreakers at DMT Tapes’ Bandcamp page.
- Boocanan’s Twitter account is – wait for it – @boocanan. Woohoo!
Vaporwave Review 095: Boocanan – Jawbreakers (2015). Originally published on Jun. 15, 2015 at AmbientExotica.com.