- E+E / Elysia Crampton (2013) • Album
an epic mass of sound collage. the liminality of music; of everyday sounds takes on this sort of primal urgency, in which faded memories of familiar commercials both Latin and American; of music through a broken pair of headphones; of bustling city traffic break through the psyche with the strength of a saturated kick drum. when the brutish intensity of it all slaps you sideways, you see the childlike fragility of the memory still remaining. the anonymous female voice (and it is a HELL of a voice. don’t get it twisted, for all the nothingword vomit i’m spewing up this album’s ass, it sounds seriously addictive and seriously beautiful) recontextualizing pop hits over city ambience, rainfall, crackling firewood. Drake lyrics become mournful, John Mayer cranks up the longing to Number Eleven. it is anti-colonial, reinterpreting these sounds; displacing them, to create its unfamiliarity. yet in the bleakness there is warmth. Elysia Crampton has no regard and no time for Traditional Western Music Production, and THE LIGHT THAT YOU GAVE ME TO SEE YOU acts as a brash, rugged interrogation of the “why” and when The Light shines through, it takes on a new form: a tearful, solemn, busy question: “why?” coughed through the smoke of an exhaust pipe.
