Working within a fairly heavy philosophical framework, New York’s Photay has made some of his most captivating electronic music yet, with nimble house and disco rhythms and real emotional weight.
Onism begins from what sounds like a fairly heavy premise: The album takes its title from John Koenig’s philosophy of the same name, which deals with “the frustration of being stuck in just one body that inhabits only one place at a time.” (Honestly, the idea that it might be otherwise had never occurred to me, which makes learning about onism feel a little bit like having your first experience of Santa Claus being told that he doesn’t exist.) Fortunately, there’s nothing frustrating about the record. Onism—his third album, following the self-released 1st and a self-titled album for Astro Nautico—is playful, joyful, and downright frisky in places. It takes the Woodstock, N.Y., musician’s interests in African percussion and zippy electronic funk and weaves them into the most captivating and inventive music he’s made yet.
Despite the philosophical subject matter, Onism is first and foremost about pleasure. When he turns his thoughts to the dancefloor, Photay (aka Evan Shornstein) trots out nimble house and disco rhythms touched up with live drumming and rolling Latin percussion. “Inharmonious Slog”—definitely a misnomer—boasts the same kind of effortlessly gliding synth melodies that marked early Floating Points singles like “Truly” and “Vacuum Boogie.” The record’s clubbiest cut, “Screens,” tips its hat to Four Tet in main-room mode and piles on strings and winking brass synths.
When he eases into slower tempos, his wheezy organs and spacious beats share something in common with James Blake. But unlike the reams of “chillstep” producers that came along in the latter’s wake, Photay is less interested in industrial-strength side-chain tricks or vertigo-inducing drops than he is in intrigue and surprise, which manifest themselves in odd arrangements and hidden trap doors. In “Off-Piste,” the rickety drum groove and fat, stacked chords perpetually build toward a climax that never comes; where other producers might insert a Pavlovian drop, Photay simply lets the floor fall out, and a good quarter of the song’s running time is taken up by an extended denouement. “Eco Friend” is a polyrhythmic tug-of-war between African percussion and 808, but after two minutes of stark slinking and strutting, it tips over into creamy sax riffs evocative of late-night cable-access television: potted palms, red and blue neon, the works.
But it’s the tactile nature of his sound design that really makes Onism so thrilling. His synths have the warbling quality of audio tape drifting through someone’s fingertips; his drum sounds come wrapped in a weird, crinkly sheen, rattling like gelcaps in blister packs. “Screens” sets warm, naturalistic piano and strings against a beat imbued with an otherworldly quiver; the bass synth in “Balsam Massacre” sounds like an asthmatic duck honking through fan blades. In “The Everyday Push,” one of the album’s two damn-near perfect songs, the clicky intro hiccups like a stuck alarm clock; a series of small, splotchy chords makes the most of the electric piano’s overdriven harmonics; and somewhere there’s a sound like an old guitar amp being kicked. The buzzing tone of the balafon, a West African xylophone Shornstein learned to play during a stint in Guinea, only serves to accentuate the song’s ragged textures, and when the kick drum hits, you can practically feel torn speaker cones flapping in the wind.
All these pleasures are hardly limited to the visceral realm; the record’s best songs are imbued with real emotional weight. “Outré Lux,” the album’s other highlight, doubles as a showcase for the remarkable voice of New York’s Madison McFerrin, the daughter of Bobby McFerrin. She first appears as a pastel swirl of close harmonies bobbing above footwork-paced 808s: “Can you see me,” she murmurs over and over, half hidden in software. But when she steps out from behind all the computer processing and sings, “‘Cause I don’t wanna play this game again,” it’s as though Photay’s expertly constructed digital world had dissolved beneath her breath. “Why must I always defend/What it means to be free/To be myself,” she sings at the song’s climax, splitting once more into umpteen-part harmonies. Strings swell; there’s a harsh digital crackle, like a cable being jiggled in a socket; the song hovers hesitantly between the real world and the virtual. If we can’t truly inhabit any perspective other than our own, Photay seems to say, here’s a workaround, via multi-tracked vocal parts that refract a single voice into a rainbow of tone, and drum sounds that dissolve into tiny droplets. Everywhere you listen, unities are breaking down.
