#4 - xaviersobased - "far" / "choir" prod. cru (tie)

Dec 26, 2022

There’s a crookedness to Xavier’s music that might make you recoil at first. The bass is often brutally blown out, the songs glitch and buffer like an awkward dance, and the vocals are sometimes minced and looped into incoherent chains of gleaming sound-shards, certain words laced with so much reverb it sounds like he’s keening into an abyss. Barely any other artists have so forcefully rewired my brain to not only cope with but actively seek that hazy asymmetry, this parallel sound-world of wonky beats and denatured vocals. Once you start sinking into the slanted rhythm of songs like “crisp dubs” and “patchmade,” all of his music begins to hit. He’s had a crazy run of tapes and loosies this year—you could make a top 15 list of just Xavier tracks.*

A lot of my favorite xaviersobased music is the left-field rap that’s so deformed and otherworldly it’s basically sound art. “far” could be an alien civilization’s pop chart topper: it’s 88 seconds of speaker-obliterating synths and bass with just one vocal (“ah” or a crumpled pronunciation of “eiffel”) repeating endlessly. Bizarrely, the song brings to mind the infamous Crazy Frog song; the vocals make me imagine the Swedish blue cartoon amphibian melting in a PCP overdose. Even shorter (0:58) but similarly demented, the cru-produced “choir” revolves around brightly-pitched gurgles and single words—“like,” “desire,” “choir”—that flicker with hope before being scrambled and steamrolled by a murderous bassline.