#17 - lecie - "ex post facto"

One of the coolest stylistic tendencies of this new wave of internet rapper-beatmakers is the way they completely mutilate the architecture of their songs. Since many of them produce as well as rap, they tend to maim their performances with erratic glitching and chaotic pitch-switching, and lacerate the finished mixes with ruptures and distortions. The end result often doesn’t even feel like rap anymore but some liminal genre somewhere between lyric music and wordless electronica.

lecie’s “ex post facto” has it all: frenetic vocal malfunctions, hectic tonal heel turns, moments where the sound suddenly falls out, dizzying bitcrushed textures. My favorite part of the song is how he deploys Auto-Tune, which has been used so frequently and for such wildly creative experiments by this point that it’s hard to imagine anyone doing anything new with it. 

But I’ve never seen anyone integrate it into the guts of a song like lecie does here. He’s rapping with the device the whole time, remorselessly dissing people, until he decides to turn it off because he’s about to say something “real” and needs his raw voice. He does that for three lines, then turns the Auto-Tune back on at the same time as the instrumental seems to speed up, so it feels like the entire song is swept up in a riptide of pixels and shiny throbbing. He starts chanting “I’m too fucking real, I can’t help it,” but because of the vocal disfiguration, it sounds like he’s moaning “Auto-Tune fucking real I can’t help it,” like the tool is a compulsion he can’t shake. Soon the song decomposes into a fit of sputtering vocals and slamming synthesizers.

The list:

#25 - Destroy Lonely - “NOSTYLIST”

#24 - elusin - “Elksling”

#23 - skaiwater - “#miles”

#22 - Wednesday - “Bull Believer”

#21 - islurwhenitalk - “pink neon lights”

#20 - Two Shell - “home” & “Memory” (tie)

#19 - Luci4 - “ON GANG”

#18 - Harto Falión - “{*______*}” (prod. evilgiane, whitearmor, Gud)