#15 - kurtains - "spawn"
#15 - kurtains - "spawn"
kurtains was one of those digicore producers last year who camouflaged in the pack and didn’t necessarily have a “big moment,” like Quinn, glaive, or ericdoa. When I briefly interviewed the Welsh singer-producer in August 2020, I remember what struck me most about their music was the weird glitchcore-esque vocal tricks they deployed — stuttered neon syllable-braids (“spinna,” “trees”); computer-fried vocal clips (“rain”); high-pitched somersaults (“talk talk”) — and this pervasive spine-chilling ache. Trading bright tones and cheerful melodies for purple hues and malefic beats, a lot of kurtains’ music seems to emanate from the same abyssal otherworld of silhouettes, shadows, and vocals chopped into cries.
On “spawn,” kurtains pairs aural hate mail (“I don’t like your fucking vibe”) with a piano-driven instrumental that could be a love letter, or maybe a meditative piece on transcendence and the passage of time. Much of the short track is underpinned by a fast three-note piano refrain, in which each note is separated by a small but noticeable break so it sounds like the sequence is glitching with intent, stutter-stepping toward the light. kurtains weaves between dissing an unnamed person and flowing lyrically about how “the purple moon, it’s calling me.” Somehow, the delivery syncs perfectly with the instrumental, so when kurtains says a sentence like, “your spawn is done, it’s time to meet his end,” the beat vanishes for a second and then reappears after they says “end,” accentuating the thrust and volatility of the word, giving it real emotional stakes.
kurtains’ insignia’s manor EP received little fanfare this year and may end up going down as one of the more slept-on projects — besides “spawn,” the pokey, chiptuney “scorpion” is also fantastic. kurtains kills at integrating pixelated noises that seem like they could belong to an Animal Crossing sound pack into subtly hypnotic pop-rap compositions.
Check out kurtains:
https://soundcloud.com/kurtains
The list:
#20 - aya - "what if i should fall asleep and slipp under" and "Emley lights us moor"
#19 - rrodney - Jersey club remix of Trippie Redd ft. Playboi Carti’s “Miss the Rage”
#18 - aghast - “thas wut i do” (prod. lungskull & wavebird)
#17 - Yves Tumor - “Secrecy Is Incredibly Important To The Both of Them”