After the last two weeks’ high-octane entries, s.drift arrives to RA Radio with an odyssean wend through stellar textures, humming ambience, technological soundscapes and flickers of glitch.
Across live sets and a number of self-published productions, s.drift has cultivated an uncategorisable sound that slinks between ambient, sound-collage and the variegated rhythms of dance. Yet his music never settles satisfied into any of these and implies always something exceeding the confinement of a label and beyond the bounds of writing.
It’s thus difficult to describe both Cal’s tunes and the way he mixes, where every echoic cymbal, every thrum of bass, every shift in pattern manages to come across with an unearthly significance. One thing Cal and I connected over was videogames, and there’s this idea in game studies about the technological sublime... that the trick of sublimity in a game is that it always appears to exceed what it shows - a game does not provide you an entire world, it intimates the imagination that the world one inhabits could be entire. There’s something similar, though there’s no illusion here, Cal’s mix. A universe is always present, if only in half-dreamt conjectures. There are lilts of mechanism and the discordance of industry, wisps of dislocated voice and embers of disco and hardcore and dub. But it’s always a peripheral universe, there being something innately charitable in the attitude to music... a universe as-yet undiscerned, a whole lifeworld made of shards into which only the listener’s intrusion can clarify some personal coherence. A music that proffers a canvas atop which the paints are particles and tinctures, oblique spaces into which the listener might build.
It’s like there is a secret in the music only s.drift knows. But this secrecy allures rather than excludes. It adumbrates a planetscape alive and coruscating, an ecosystem of ooze constituting an invitation to the tangibility of fantasy. And because of the skill with which Cal can conjure worlds, fantasy is here simply the given of reality.
artwork by
@frasier77777
type by
@manicpixiedreamgirl555
6PM (GMT)
/qs9L3P6oBJgPsiJm9
+ non-blurred TL
