I knew I had to check out Golden Champagne Flavored Sweatshirt's Expectant as soon as I saw the cover. The image of a hollow mask exploding with hair, and flowers, and spikes, in a garish but glorious eruption of beauty and terror. It blew my mind a little bit. The color pallet works for the image as well. Shades of pale, icy blue illicit the impression that the creature before us is cold to the touch. Possibly so cold that to lay a hand on it would cause you to lose the tips of your fingers as the moisture in your cells freeze and remain attached to the gelid facade of its face even as you pull away.
While it is not within our sense capacity to acknowledge or interact with it, the creature on the cover is possessed of inner warmth, a heat that powers a forceful process of a perpetual, liminal unfolding. A miraculous transformation into a ceaseless becoming. An evolution that is taking place internally and without outside interference. In fact, to interfere is to invite injury. Not everything is for you to have and to hold. Somethings exist for themselves. Look but don't touch, as I'm sure your parents used to tell you. It's still good advice.
The cover of Golden Champagne Flavored Sweatshirt's Expectant is an ideal way to package the music it contains, as it is cool tempoed electonic music, that evolves in ways that are fantastic while familiar, and unsettling in their unveiling. Spacey synths feedback into floweret, interstellar exchanges. Sound purls in translucent transformation chambers, collecting starlight like raw clay in which to build itself a vessel. Cosmic tides that emanate from an interior, fortifying glow.
The tracks on Expectant remind me of early synthesizer experiments that coincided with the birth and rise of disco, harkening back to the primordial ooze of modern electronic production. Like the artists who embarked on those early sound experiments, GCFS is found her to be searching for some form of penetrating clarify. Something that will fully align the frequencies she emits with the base level of radio fluctuations that flow through the universe. Twisting dials and unleashing signals. Allowing partially encrypted messages to catch corners at odd angles, rebounding back to their source to be reencoded and fired off again.
GCFS describes Expectant as a journey of self-actualization, and I have no doubt she achieved obtained her intended objective. However, I am equally sure that whatever form these ends manifested in, they will remain a mystery to the rest of us. A truth hidden behind the riddle of a mask. We, as the audience, are only privy to the consequence of these processes. Not their cause, nor their intended effect.
