Various Artists
Artzie AM Volume One

2015

 

 

 

 

2015 is the year of the compilation: every important Vaporwave and Future Funk label issues one, and during summertime, the incandescence of these releases only increases. Call it a cliché, but what is quite often needed in these well-lit months is music created by artists who are purposefully reducing the eclecticism in favor of more simplistic – but not simple-minded – messages, rhythms and tone sequences. These trains of thoughts are best envisioned by the Future Funk genre, and Artzie AM delivers. Run by Italy’s Funk ferrero/videographer 私名前はTheo aka Trashbin and Ireland’s vaporwaver/illustrator MARCUS32X aka Angelawave, the label is part of the Artzie Empire as kicked-off by フレッドYOLO and Brzywave whose anime-focused video channels Artzie Music and Artzie Extras gave the V-genre and Future Funk an animated, cinematic, peachy home. Now Artzie AM tries to do the same as a dedicated label.

 

Artzie AM Volume One – stylized as Volume ONE – is the very first release, spanning the talent of 19 musicians and artists from all across the globe, many of them well-known luminaries of both aforementioned genres, oscillating few and far between the poles. Quite a few of them have been extensively featured on AmbientExotica, be it through in-depth pieces such as Future Girlfriend and コンシャスTHOUGHTS, or in a Vapor Vertebrae writeup which lets Floral, Aloe Island Posse, Explorer! and 悲しい ANDROID - APARTMENT¶ come to mind. Digitally released in August 2015 and available to fetch and stream at Bandcamp, Volume One is astonishingly focused and never strays away from the self-set path, showing both the curative and creative skills of the community. If you prefer the occasional Ambient segue or Vapor vignette in your music, this volume is definitely not for you. Marcus, Theo and everyone at Artzie believes in both Vaporwave and Funk, but it is the latter that is exclusively featured on Volume One, with every track relying on the eternal 4/4 rhythm, keyboard-and-sax amalgamations and Disco vocals. Maybe future iterations and volumes will venture into different areas, but that’s for the runners to know and us to find out, so for the moment, come with me, absorb the Funk and read about the 19 artists and tracks below.

 

Mr. Vtage - Tropical Daze: Uh la la, Mr. Vtage opens the compilation with a well-known vocal sample that is presented in isolated form. This nullspace, however, makes room for a laid-back guitar granuloma, fusillades of frilly Funk and sax strata. Not necessarily futuristic as it is much more fond of love, this fuzzy cotton candy gem kicks off the tryst and lets you taste magenta.

Literature - Sheila Take A Bow & Boogie: Literature’s contribution takes us back to the 80’s and ameliorates the galactosamine-alloyed synth bursts with a workaholic rhythm. From high-energy clarity over a toned down bokeh of blurry frequencies and back to a lanthanum lake of cymbals and hi-hats and chopped vox, this Boogie Woogie is your personal steel mill: adiabatic, mucous, eclectic.

Ichi no Yoru - Everyday Is A Party: “Life ain’t so bad at all” The Jacksons utter in Ichi no Yoru’s sped-up void that unites a quasi-shady caution with the gregarious advise to party. Despite the seemingly picayune and meaningless track title, the attached soundscape isn’t your archetypal superimposition of technicolor. Hatched hues and nocturnal ancillary routes are key to an unexpectedly contemplative corker.

悲しい ANDROID - APARTMENT¶ - ナイトバイブ Feelin’ The Night Vibe!: polyphony, fantasy, Italy: 悲しい ANDROID - APARTMENT¶’s solanum is a tunnel vision that severely enchants with its stop-and-go, tachycardia-inducing bursts, pauses and gridlocks which are further ennobled by an ever-swooshing laser inferometry. This scapegrace is so fast that every bit-crushed artifact augments the cerulean cataract. Scattered saxes and hyperpolished synths are a given as well. Blow out the torch and succumb to the panchromatic stroboscope!

CAPE CORAL - //MOON PATROL: Cape Coral fathoms the faux pentatonicism by means of wonkily elasticized lariats and “book/cover” adages that altogether create a cool – as in: gelid – vibe. But it is the generous amount of pauses and loftier texture cocktails with less surfaces and more surfactants that make this funky vision a balanced crepuscular outing. If patrols have this much fun(k) in the future, the moon is going to be a better place. Plus it inherits the mysticism of Vaporwave, and that’s tops.

私はAn​Tgryです x ALPHA CENTAURI アルファ – 太陽の光Sunshine: Highspeed Bublegum Pop from Japanistan, that’s the forte of this collaboration. As such, this sun-dappled mica luminica radiates all the things that are so perfectly right about this subgenre: soulful, over-the-top vocals, backing choirs that deliver the performance of their lives as well as beat-driven Disco strings and upwards-spiraling tone sequences. I remember the Dutch plastic pearls of the mid–90’s that featured a similar BPM range. Happy Hardcore is back, thank you Artzie for considering this belter (with more to come over the course of Volume One)!

Mr. Coquedeux – 渋谷区!: Proto Funk with supra-glissando electronic organs, cowbell coruscation, heavy solos and a punctilio of stringent chords, that’s Mr. Coquedeux for you, presenting a carefully chopped scratchtastic Saturday Night anthem that celebrates mutual friendship, understanding and party puissance. In the epicenter of it all: a pitch-shifted Disco queen. This is a – most welcome – slippery slope though, for the constituents are purified and hence mesmerizing.

カセット ｋ ａ ｚ ｚ ｅ ｔ ｔ ｅ - 横須賀 ｃｉｔｙ ＇８５: A glittering response to the aforementioned 太陽の光Sunshine comes either from the Far East or Faux East, but whatever the correct location may be, rest assured that カセット k a z z e t t e knows how to build an aural city. Tropical syringa splotches, a synthetic reticulation of protruding keys and carefully placed vibraphones transmute the megacity into a sunset-colored cathodic cathexis.

陽神L O R D S U N - Last Dance Night: The MIDIlicious brass sections and handclaps are probably not overly surprising in their electropositive appearance, but it is the biomorphic percussion that makes 陽神L O R D S U N’s offering so bosky and sylvan. Whether it is bongos, congas, claves or timbales, Last Dance Night features adaxial cornerstones with every beat, and to make things even better, the pectiniform synth flares and paradisiacal vocals aren’t too shabby either. This is one coppice to live in!

ID Cℎίℯƒ - Find You Somewhere: Equally at home in the V-genre and Future Funk forests, ID Cℎίℯƒ tends toward the latter genre with his contribution and revs up the heat via lozenge cristae, heartfelt centrioles as uttered by beautiful coquettes and – again most successfully – vitreous clicks whose echoey magnetotails add a jungular plasticity to this extroverted megafauna. With a locale this alluvial and erbaceous, I doubt that the inhabitants want to be found…

Aloe Island Posse - Super Dry: Various voluminous vesicles and a very velvet vincristine, that’s the basic gist of Super Dry whose title is more or less an affront in the wake of the agglutinated soundscape which bursts at the seams due to its fluvio-lacustrine physiognomy, several pluvial aortas and ethereally stacked vocals. Short sightings of Eastern epithelia, debonair fibroblasts and that sentiment of get-togethers: Aloe Island Posse reigns, come rain or come shine.

コンシャスTHOUGHTS - Can You Feel It: Glaswegian vaporwaver Chris aka コンシャスTHOUGHTS is a chameleon as he takes the listener to so many different levels within a kaleidoscopic array of ever-changing styles. For Artzie AM’s Volume One, the producer decides to fully succumb to the Funk and presents a beat-driven rotoscoping and ultimately good-natured conniption with mixed vocals, limewashed segues and high-clarity guitar granulomas. So catchy and outgoing that one’s pondering and vicissitudes are farther away than ever. The artist holds two records: he is featured at least once a month on Artzie Music and AmbientExotica. What could be the reason?

Explorer! - I Don’t Know: An exclamation mark for David Peña please! His Explorer moniker is all about excitement and a good time, coupled with turbulent zoetropic rhythms. Not so on the cheekily I Don’t Know which comprises of an unexpectedly oneiric-orographic stokehold loop whose granular ventiduct physiognomy eventually leads to a lilting fovea. Everything feels as if watched from beyond a glass wall or pressure chamber. This additional layer of surrealism makes I Don’t Know the yttrium crystal of this compilation: a hallucinatory fractal with more sex appeal, less reality. Now you do know!

Combo Reseller – cloudy曇った: Where there’s Future Funk, there’s an Italo House Piano. It isn’t until Combo Reseller’s 8-bit jingle-saccharified offering that this adage rings true though. From longitudinal tercets over dry guitar undercurrents to the various hidden chopped nods toward a certain plumber, cloudy曇った is a eupeptic hydrazine that runs on all cylinders for way over five minutes, and not one second is wasted on long-winded serpentines.

*Future Girlfriend - funkia*: From Asunción, Paraguay hails Future Girlfriend, bringing us plasticizer pads and fibrillar lilts aplenty. Luckily enough, the artist uploaded funkia to SoundCloud many weeks before the release date of Volume One so I know it by heart. And this tune is a strong peritoneum! A moon-lit night is invoked: tropical flutes, diaphanous-glossy sirens and cajoling Rhodes rhizomes altogether evaporate the scent of a luxurious theophany. A winner is you.

DELTA金TOPCO – MARY: One thing is certain, MARY is profound, deep and less adamantly catchy melody-wise. What DELTA金TOPCO’s ladybug lacks in this field, it gains in terms of style, verve and contingency. Whether it is the electric piano droplets or the amalgamation of breakbeat patterns, this beatbox-oriented sample conundrum features pulsatile pericarps that brighten up the lavabo. Watch out for the vocoded illuminants in the latter half and obey!

Peazy86サイバーハンター - Summer Breeze: The wow factor is sky-high, the helicoidal corkscrew chromaticity aglow with blue tinges, the tempo mind-blowing and the secretly Jungle-oriented rhythm section a superb change of pace. Summer Breeze by PC’86 works like a gargantuan slot machine. Everything is pumped up to the max: catchiness, the aureole factor, the encore of the plumber. This is a win/win gigantomachy for everyone involved, especially so for the listener. All those glitters…

Floral - Don’t Stop: Has Floral ever come up with a midtempo tune? Speeed (with three “e”) is the elixir of life for the producer, and it’s only consequential for Don’t Stop to inherit the style and become the concestor. Bubbly beats, eponymous orders and the constantly altered flow of difficult surfaces, patterns and muons transform this track into an aural cannelure with grandiloquently gleaming melodies that gleam brighter than a pirate’s hook.

Yuni Wa – Possibility: Yuni Wa kisses the listener goodbye with the expected joyous polyhedron. Prismatic cowbells, beguiling vocals and various filters such as bedazzling treble turnabouts or AM frequency excoursions (the label is called Artzie AM after all) round off the speckled europraxia of Funk. And cheekily enough, the tempo is so high that the outro fuels the energy only further. Rinse and repeat-t-ttt.

 

From 2014 onwards, a tendency materialized that interprets Future Funk as the quick consumption subgenre and Vaporwave as its majestic master, the latter encapsulating a wider array of instruments, visions and moods. Fair enough, no harm done. In the right moments though, Future Funk propels and elevates the listener into the troposphere, with the barycenter of one’s real life still being somewhat graspable, but far enough away to enable shrugged shoulders in one’s concurrent situation. Make no mistake: Artzie AM’s Volume One fully embraces the qualities of Future Funk, and with this notion come the many loveable quirks, wondrous boons and notable restrictions. If you don’t care for 4/4 rhythms, you’re at the wrong place. Guitars, saxes, common lyrics about partying, love and devotion are equally ubiquitous. There is no secret in here, no polysemous clandestine cloak-and-dagger side quest, maybe not even a genuine futuristic element that’s far out, but there’s talent on top of it regardless. The curation skills of Marcus and Theo are not to be underestimated: there’s a golden thread, every song feels right and correct in its respective place, no arhythmic-labyrinthine arthouse monstrosity ever kills the motion. This must be worth something for devoted Vaporwave fans I like to think, but Volume One is especially a no-brainer for Funk and House fans who love to reciprocate between the rubicund Occident and the pastel-colored former Orient.

 

Further listening and reading: 

 

Vaporwave Review 116: Various Artists – Artzie AM Volume One (2015). Originally published on Aug. 13, 2015 at AmbientExotica.com.