#21 - islurwhenitalk - "Pink Neon Lights"
#21 - islurwhenitalk - "Pink Neon Lights"
Islurwhenitalk makes music with a different center of gravity, a different sense of space and movement that’s much quirkier than ours. The songs speed and slow, glitch and stutter at random; little soundbites explode and then re-form; records jump forward and rewind like a broken film. Despite the chaos, everything is bound by a weird sort of cryptic language, a blundering coherence. You can sense it in the name, islurwhenitalk—five words compressed into a 14-letter monolith, a jumbled mass of verbs and Is, the vowels pressed into each other. The name also speaks to the visceral intensity of his music, the way “islurwhenitalk” verbally evokes someone slurring their words, unleashing a hot gust of breath and crumpled language in your ears.
Islurwhenitalk is prolific as hell and his capacious catalog contains some of the most creative remixes and one-off experiments in recent memory (he’s also a pioneer of multiple SoundCloud microstyles, vampjerk and sigilkore). “Pink Neon Lights” is a personal favorite apex of strangeness. The song begins with lavish piano notes that lead into the graceful plucks of a string instrument, an unusual sonic setting even for Slur. But then his voice comes in and he defaces the classical composition with a relentless barrage of bass jerks. There’s an art to the way Slur blows out these bass notes. Rather than make them so brutal it’s deafening, he opts for this metallic, springy texture. The effect is like slinkies exploding. He has a knack for knowing just how far to crank the low-end and on what instrumentals to deploy the distortion. None of those “808 boosting” YouTube channels could make a song as gloriously bass-butchered as his version of Gunna’s “P power.”
The list:
#25 - Destroy Lonely - “NOSTYLIST”
#24 - elusin - “Elksling”
#23 - skaiwater - “#miles”