The immaterial nature of digital audio and its ease of transmission through the internet has led to increasingly short, scattered habits of releasing music amongst Gen Z and millennial artists. It’s within this context that we turn to two recent EPs, Genuine Uppers Life by Sacred holes and ANTERIOR POSTERIOR by w/lson. Together, they don’t even surpass twenty minutes, but they’re both jam-packed with creative musical ideas and off-beat production tricks.
Sacred holes is the solo project of Jonah Paz, one half of the electronic duo Ear. Genuine Uppers Life has the same minimalist production as Ear, including the duo’s signature buzzing bass sound and heavy usage of scrambled sample chops. As if making up for the loss of bandmate Yaelle Avtan, Paz fills the space with recognizable samples. On “The Cyclone,” he cycles through Kesha’s “Your Love Is My Drug,” Alex G’s “Gretel,” 2hollis’ “Jeans,” and Astrid Sonne’s “Do You Wanna.” The song has more meat to it than mere reference, featuring a hooky verse melody (delivered slightly off-key) and an addictively bouncy snare pattern.
“After class” opens the EP with a deep voice saying “this is a Sacred holes joint,” followed by an AI-generated Joe Biden exclaiming “If you do bad things you go to get them. Fucking Sacred holes.” On the one hand, the ridiculous vocal samples make the entire EP feel like a joke, but on the other, they feel befitting of Genuine Uppers Life’s cheap, stitched-together aesthetic and genre-bending percussive backbone. “The Cyclone” is the only song on the five-track EP to make it past the two minute mark. This brevity gives the whole affair a half-finished feel, but it comes off as charming rather than sloppy. Perhaps part of the point of Genuine Uppers Life is that we shouldn’t take it seriously, but that won’t stop me from trying.
Oberlin College student w/lson’s ANTERIOR POSTERIOR is quite a bit more serious than Genuine Uppers Life, though parts of it also sound intentionally unfinished. His singing on “The door” is muffled and mumbly, like he woke up at 3:00 a.m. and decided to record some vocals into his phone. Compared to Paz’s flat vocals, w/lson experiments with a variety of styles and processing techniques to get the most out of his voice. He brings together demonic, pitched down singing with breathy autotune and intricate vocal layers, adding a lot of replay value to his brief song-sketches, most of which are just over a minute long.
“The hardest part” highlights his production skills, combining offkilter sampled drum breaks with toylike synth melodies and metallic pads. It feels intimate yet vaguely ominous, as if there’s some hidden conflict just beyond the brief confines of the song, one w/lson can only allude to as he sings “lying on my bed is the hardest part.” ANTERIOR POSTERIOR is far more freeflowing and dense than Genuine Uppers Life, but both combine a meticulous attention to production with little care for conventional track lengths or vocal performances. These aren’t necessarily faults or limitations of the two EPs: in fact, they feel just as essential to their character as the spellbinding production.
thecounterpoint.org 