Here’s another track where I pretty much know nothing about the artist, which is very much in contrast to a lot of entries here where the tracks featured artists that I generally have some listening history with, have some importance to me or at the very least can provide some sort of backstory to. In a way it’s kind of the point why I started writing these entries anyway, to actually write down impressions of the music, which can be a lot easier if the track sticks with me and without knowing really anything about the artist who wrote the track, I have to rely on my own descriptions of what the track actually songs like, or at least reminds me of, making for some possibly interesting thoughts on the matter.
This track, “Hololeaps” by an artist called Shmu, is one that sticks out like a sore thumb in a playlist that I apparently compiled a number of years ago featuring tracks more on the downtempo synth/vaporwave spectrum, possibly by way of a somewhat prolific online vaporwave curator known as Jason Sanders. It came on again the other night while I was half asleep in bed and it still stuck out like a sore thumb, which I suppose is a good thing.
This track is from a 2018 album called Lead Me To The Glow and digging into some background information about Shmu, I found this:
Although the 3rd official full length album from Austin, TX based artist Shmu, Lead Me to the Glow revisits some of the 90s shoegazing rock sounds that were explored on Shhh!!!! & its companion EP Oooze, its focus is more emphasized on softer and rounder shapes. One could say it is a meditation of the last 40 years of music collapsing in on itself and attempting to create a post internet pop music, utilizing mid 80s pop and R&B sounds, early 90s vaporwave-esque muzak samples, mixed with some 70s psych/R&B & yacht-rock influences that are glitched out with modern electronics are all melded together and melted down like a burnt cassette in the sun.
This is what I would perceive as a somewhat functionally descriptive summary of this album, especially after previewing a few other tracks from this album. Yet to me there’s a lot of aspects of tropical punk much like 2000s indie acts like the LA-based Abe Vigoda (see clip below) in their early days were doing before they shifted to a more darker synth-inflected shoegaze style — or world beat music (for some weird reason “Call Me Al” by Paul Simon came into my brain), combined with elements of loose, freak-out jazz and even prog fusion elements. It’s got a jaunty 6/8 time signature at a rather upbeat tempo, which is something I find more in non-Western music, especially from countries like Ethiopia which has its own rich history with its own homegrown style of “popular music”.
The cover artwork for this album — because I’m old enough to remember it — reminds me of computer graphics manuals or even magazine advertisements for programs like Pagemaker or Quark Xpress from the early 1990s, showcasing the types of wild graphic possibilities that one could create in those programs. It’s an intriging cover really, pulling from a lot of abstract modernism that reached its trendy heights from the preceding decade. Certainly a lot more wild than a lot of covers I’ve seen, and it’s interesting to know there’s likely visual artists out there still working in this style.
The time periods referenced by the artist in his description suit the time period well, as around the late 80s and early 90s it seemed like a growing list of pop musicians were looking further across the world for musical inspiration, mining a catalogue of more “ethnic” sounds from around the globe.
But perhaps its the imagery that sort of drifted into my mind as I was listening to this track as it wafted out of my bedroom stereo is the most wildly descriptive, which I’ve summarised as the following:
Your plane starts to descent for landing in Barbados. You’re looking out the window with your good buddy Alfonso, who works with you as a detective on the force back home. Alfonso is originally from your destination and like every year you go on holiday with him there, where he moonlights as a bass player in a holiday resort band.
A taxi whisks you to a beachside multi-story hotel on the beach just down the coast. You and Alfonso check in and go your separate ways to your individual rooms, which you enter yours and look at the turquoise waves crashing along the beach sands just outside of your breezy hotel room window from five floors up. You decide to take a nap in the pleasantly humid afternoon air and get up as the sun starts to set on the horizon in a dazzling gradient of pastel shades. You put on your soft, billowing khaki slacks and a breezy tropical print cotton shirt and walk down the spiral staircase where you meet Alfonso on the patio. He’s ready to play his lavender coloured Fender Jazz bass with his band, the bass itself strapped unusually high on his person, the top curve of the instrument almost under his chin. With a smile he lets you know they’re ready to play and heads off to the stage through the crowd.
You start talking to a couple on a package holiday from Miami and you mention you’re still groggy and spaced out after the flight into Barbados earlier in the day. The husband offers a round of drinks to settle you in and goes off to the bar to get a few cocktails. The wife offers you a couple of herbal capsules to make you more alert, but only to realise they’re actually caps of Golden Teacher mushrooms as the visuals soon start to kick in. The husband returns with the drinks, pastel blue liquid fading to a vibrant pink in giant fishbowl glasses with what looks like dry ice spilling down the curves of the glass. You take a sip — tropical explosion ecstacy. The music the band is playing gets louder and you look over to see Alfonso deep in a hypnotic groove, his eyes closed in concentration and his fingers deftly moving about the fretboard. All of the holidaygoers on the patio start to writhe around dancing in contorted shapes in a din of colourful laughter.
You start floating through the crowd as massive fountains of flame blast through the planters of palm trees that line the area where everyone is dancing. The crowd splits and festive partygoers start bending backward to shuffle under a limbo bar that’s been set. Your body feels malleable, light and flexible as you take your turn. As you bend backwards the stars in the night sky start to dance and grow brighter. The patio scene dissolves away as you find yourself dancing in a multi-coloured tunnel of light that leads up to the planets and galaxies far away.