- Trap isn't a style known for subtlety, so James Prudhomme's debut album as Suicideyear, the elegant and expansive Remembrance, comes as a genuine surprise. A collection of hybrid electronic soundscapes that uses trap fundamentals to complicate, rather than define, its sound, Remembrance adds Prudhomme to the growing roster of interesting artists on Daniel Lopatin's Software label. Stylistically, it's a lateral pass from the transplanted genre exercises of label-mates like Slava and Thug Entrancer, anchoring its billowing soundscapes with the same heavy beats Prudhomme explored on his Japan mixtape from last year.
But spiritually, Remembrance has more in common with Lopatin's own Oneohtrix Point Never project, particularly 2011's Replica, which channeled seemingly disparate sonic patches into an intense emotional tour through nostalgia-laden media. Prudhomme's approach is less structurally freeform than Lopatin's, but it similarly revels in collapsing the boundaries between sounds marked by specific times and places. Opening track "I Don't Care About Death Because I Smoke" taps Terry Riley by way of The Who's "Baba O'Riley," its tinny, stuttering snares splintering a simple harmonic structure into prismatic bliss. Its glibly defensive title could have been shortened—as it descends repeatedly over Prudhomme's booming bass, the four-note melody begins to sound deathless.
Most of Prudhomme's settings build on similar, hovering washes of harmony that expand and contract into piecemeal melodies. "U S" begins with a tonally vague bell-like sound, which Prudhomme constructs into a heavily layered, buzzing mass, only to interrupt and deconstruct it in the last minute and a half. "Caroline," one of the warmest songs on the album, methodically follows the sound of digitized strings into a tangled nest of woodpecker percussion. These are synthetic sounds that have a sense of natural decay built into them, but Prudhomme unleashes them with such carefully built momentum, the music can't help but feel optimistic.
His textures also call to mind 1980s avant-pop group and ZTT founders Art Of Noise, whose damaged take on new wave sprang from the invention of the Fairlight CMI sampler. "Daniel" and "Savior" feature ghostly sampled vocals, and Prudhomme's production has the breathy, aerated feel of '80s hardware. He's also a similarly audacious producer, choosing to close out the album with a My Bloody Valentine cover that's so woozily sweet, it ends up sounding devotional despite the anachronism of its trap percussion. It sounds forward-thinking without committing to a specific genre—no small feat in the hyper-saturated internet age—and it's the best-case-scenario for hopeful devotees to technological futurism: uplifting, but with its feet firmly on the ground.
トラックリスト01. I Don’t Care About Death Because I Smoke
02. Daniel
03. Caroline
04. Hope Building A
05. Savior
06. U S
07. Remembrance
08. When You Sleep