Tei Shi is the stage name for Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter and producer Valerie Teicher, who hails from Buenos Aires. Since the release of her second EP Verde (2015) in May, she's scored critical appreciation from many music critics. Paul Lester of The Guardian has been particularly effusive about her music, hailing her as a "dazzling new exponent of celestial R&B/pop/electronica".
Her distinctive musical style certainly involves a blending of genres, earning descriptive catchphrases like "bedroom music", "mermaid rock", "future pop" and "alt-R&B". Lester has described Tei Shi's music as "sweetly ethereal, spacious dream-daze avant hyperballads"; pointing to the intriguing aesthetic at work here: Tei Shi's melodic, whispery, airy, sensual, multi-layered vocals looping, harmonizing and reverbing against a minimalistic backdrop of dreamy electro-beats. As Minna Zhou of Pitchfork notes, Tei Shi's first EP Saudade (2013) "introduced her to the world as a skilled and fluid vocalist, the kind who can create waves with nothing but her voice and loops."
Its the sensual and dreamy intimacy quality of many of her tracks (especially 'Nevermind the End' and 'Get It') that probably earned Tei Shi the 'bedroom music' descriptor. But on 'Basically', which is her most widely-exposed track, this aesthetic gets shaken up to an interesting effect.
The opening verse sets up a potentially dysfunctional relationship that seems to be characterised by a power disparity:
'Baby, I'll behaveIf you let me stayPlease don't sayThat I'm begging you for love'
The unequal power dynamic persist throughout the track, with Tei Shi's lyrical persona promising to 'behave' and to 'Never right your wrongs', while questioning if her male lover prefers 'Someone you can throw/ Like the other toys?', or 'Someone you can drown/ Like the other noise'.
This power dynamic becomes more disturbing when she compares him to 'the other boys', suggesting a repeated pattern of getting romantically entangled with men who tend to efface female subjectivity with violence and emotional manipulation. When Tei Shi's whispery vocal delivery turns into a full-out siren wail, you get the unmistakable sense that the song has escalated into an emotional crisis that seems even more alarming when you consider how private and inwardly-directed the screams seem to be.
The song's beats subside after the climax, leaving Tei Shi to repeat the opening verse, promising to 'behave' while delicately insisting that she isn't 'begging for love'. The track definitely showcases Tei Shi's dynamic vocals, but it also hints at darker feminist themes of domestic violence and power inequities within heterosexual personal relationships. Tei Shi and her all-female fighter squad may successfully defeat the unseen monster in the grindhouse-style (a film genre generally associated with violence and sexploitation) music video for the track, but the lyrics suggest that female empowerment in the private sphere isn't so easily won ...
