Harrison Phinney
Promethezine, faces flickering in and out of blue screens, head in the clouds but feet in a fog bank, if anyone needs me I’ll be in the iso-tank.
990x has been blurring the line between rap and ambient for almost a decade, breaking up his subby, saturated 808 kicks and itchy percussive trills with effervescent pads, levitational loops and the kind of ghostly contrails you'd expect to hear on a Grouper record. He's never sounded quite as liminal as he does on 'Ruins', though, an album produced in recovery as he contemplated the healing process, shifting between one state and the next.
As part of the recently formed label clique The Citadel, along with Sauron and IJI, he hones in on decentralised, defocussed sounds linked across continents by the internet’s rhizomatic networks, repping a certain slant on the sound that originated with Lil B and diffused via soundcloud to become a key node in the contemporary definition of what Brian Eno termed a “scenius”; a collective intelligence that transcends the sum of its parts. Throughout ‘Ruins’, 990x deploys all the hallmarks of the aesthetic - glyding 808 bass and sibilant trills, vaporous pads, and noctilucent melodies - with a melancholic grip all his own.
According to classic cloud rap convention, the 8-part, 40 minute suite evinces a liminal, weightless state of mind with immersive structures that appear to float, buoyed by subs that plunge all the way down, whilst his ambient soul wraps the head in high tog puff stuffed with hopes and dreams. Shimmering echoes of Lil B and Clams Casino’s early works perfuse ‘Forest of Silence’ in his use of guzheng-like string motifs diffused to the rafters on diaphanous subs, and Yungwebster’s screwed diagonals come to mind in the vertiginous bliss-out ‘Fallen’. A tempered ecstasy thieves thru the saturated cinematic panorama ‘June Lovers’ and gives way to the ruder ballast of ‘Crates’ while the fractal hi-hats on ‘Sonar’ ultimately get subsumed by saturated waves of bass and screwed ambient dub on the album’s longest cut, the subtly optimistic 8 minute parting shot ‘Wisdom’, deploying a horizontal dembow rhythm that can't help but remind us of Kelman Duran's epochal '1804 Kids'.
(Boomkat)
credits
released November 8, 2024
All tracks written & produced by 990x.
Mastered by Miles Whittaker. Cut by Rashad Becker.
Artwork & design by Will Boyd, back of sleeve by 990x.
“Do you still dream in water?” she asks.
He nods—“only when it rains inside.”
Their words drift, slow like signal loss,, soft clicks between heartbeats.
A drone hums overhead,
its shadow stroking their faces.
“Are we free now?” she whispers.
He laughs, small, broken. “We’re just less afraid.”
They share one headphone,
listening to the city’s pulse—
loops of breath,
echoes of what could’ve been
“Hold me,” she says.
“I am,” he answers,
“in the static.” magoski
The perfect underscore for a warmly contemplative afternoon or evening, alone or with others. Lovely and frequently alluring: the perfume of a dream. jūken
Released via Ugandan experimental label Hakuna Kulala, Violence Gratuite's debut album fuses grime, avant-garde pop, chansons, and more. Bandcamp New & Notable Jun 23, 2024