Almost imperceptibly between the low-slung clouds and ruddy horizons, the producer Tomu DJ has continued to refine and recast her palette of deep house and downtempo, which is flecked with a sun-dappled Americana during its more arid moments and dank when it retreats into the moist bosom of the club.
Amid a slew of extended plays and collaborations, on her untitled effort of the past January her unfaltering commitment to the groove became more wistful, foggy and granulated as eleven tracks stretched long, from molasses-thick concoctions and enzyme breakdowns to moonlit roads and the limpid piano keys of the last few tracks, tranquil yet sometimes a little trepidatious. And the apparent ebullience of last summer’s Crazy Trip, which felt lysergic and freewheeling with an attendant narrowing of the borders and bore features from Petty Getty and kimdollars1, found its catharsis through the balmy dembow rhythms of the album closer and title track.
Still her new record I Want To Be marks a more substantial shift of approach for the artist, who complements the honeyed reflections and hopeful palpitations of her productions with lyrics and vocals from a series of collaborators including Eric Wang, a returning Petty Getty and Nore Genesis, with Lien Do on drums, Jason Du on the cello and Angela Song on backing vocals serving to buttress three tracks.
After the sugary and bucolic opener, like a field excursion in the company of someone with a sweet tooth, the finely scented ‘Flowers’ seeks to quell latent anxieties, as a spoken word recitation from Eric Wang notes:
I can’t even look people in the eye sometimes. My brain is going a thousand miles per hour. I just want to pull over on the highway, you know, and look at the flowers. But when I look at the flowers I think about if they need water, if they need sunlight, how it fits in the rest of my garden.
with a tumult of worries around worms and fertiliser, bees and pollen, seasonal allergies and the withering of plant life to boot, as the beat kicks in and almost inaudibly Wang gets to the heart of the matter, with a sense of tender nostalgia muttering ‘I thought I loved you but it was just a crush’.
A snarling and crackling take on legalese, Petty Getty raps on the next track ‘Fuck with my rights, with my civil procedure, tryna treat me like a real tortfeasor’, in the manner of the Jamaican crew Equiknoxx and the singer Shanique Marie parsing the civil code for some semblance of personal identity. More upbeat moments arrive with ‘The Truth’ and ‘Distant Memory’, before the synthesised groans and the faintly winnowing flutter and churn of ‘Empathy Machine’.
Memory and identity and the fecklessness or unreality of both are constant themes. Tomu DJ appends I Want To Be with a long quote from the autobiographical novel The Lover by Marguerite Duras, which discusses buried facts and feelings, clear periods ‘on which the light fell’, the vanity and void but seeming necessity of writing, and a life both conducted and conveyed which has no centre or through line and quite simply by way of an opening conclusion therefore ‘does not exist’.
Eric Wang glances back through the fogged-up glass on ‘Window’, a grungily distorted track about an unrequited romance and a world of sensation which is passing the singer by. The lengthiest piece on I Want To Be, the seven-and-a-half-minute ‘Close’ opens with a refrain from the spiritual ‘Amazing Grace’ and the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son, as the phrase ‘I was lost and now I’m found’ is filtered through the auspices of a vocoder to arrive in Frank Ocean territory circa ‘Thinking ‘Bout You’ or ‘White Ferrari’ from Blonde, with Tomu DJ’s patient and pellucid synths laying out a water bed for Nore Genesis and their bleary-eyed, mutant yet emotionally steadfast, quasi-confessional brand of indie pop.
‘New Groove’ is a marked shift, its highway-spanning breakbeat calling to mind the Detroit missives of the Motor City native Gerald Cleaver on last year’s standout 22/23, a hybrid of jazz, hip hop and electronic music, and the staggering Stone Roses classic ‘Fools Gold’, plus a little bit of mid-career Kraftwerk. Then the record closer seeks to slough off all the haters, through percussive whops and an unusually propulsive return to the house bedrock.
