It being spooky season and all I decided to check in on an artist who has kind of slipped under the radar for me in the past few years; French producer In Love With A Ghost. I was delighted to see that the witchy, synth-hop artist had a new release as of 2020, and listening to Playful Spirits definitely served as a jumping-off point for rediscovering the once anonymous Tumblr denizen's catalog- specifically the album that first introduced me to the ILWAG, their 2017 release Healing.
While Playful Spirits consisted of mostly unfinished songs and sketches, the majority running between thirty seconds and a minute, most of the songs on Healing don't stick around for much longer but still manage to make a lasting impact. The length of ILWAG's actually forms an important aspect of their aesthetic and their appeal. While they draw from 8-bit NES scores and drum and bass music, their compositions are resistant to becoming the kind of background radiation that bedroom-beats style hip hop tends to. You really can't zone out to these tracks and get much out of them. Instead, each on of ILWAG's songs is best enjoyed with your full attention, as each is calculatingly composed to establish a mood or develop a musical idea to its potential and then elegantly transition to the next.
What's amazing to me is that ILWAG is able to create so many self-contained little worlds with their music, each with a unique theme and purpose and logically linked to the next. Healing is particularly good at this and stands, in my opinion, as ILWAG's loadstone release. The album tells the story of a burgeoning friendship between a gender-fluid witch a human as they embark on an adventure with some fellow witches in enchanted woods. It's a simple premise and would make for an excellent short animated film- one that captures the whimsy and subtle grandeur of Miyazaki with the absurdist and lightly existential and absurdist hijinks of Adventure Time. Hey, I'd watch it!
Beginning with a soundcard chirping ditty for an introduction, the album quickly moves to set the scene and introduce our protagonists on "i was feeling down then i found a nice witch and now we're best friends," where the sounds of crinkling leaves and snapping branches are transformed into a crackling hip-hop beat, accompanied by the calming whisper of a ghostly synth melody. The tempo and pace of the antics are stepped up quite a bit on the busy funk jingle "welcome at azerty and qwerty's home," whose frantic, gummy grooves the album will return to on "qwerty enchanted the house and now it's attacking us." While the bustle of the aforementioned tracks adds a sense of rye mischief to the affair, it's the more unobtrusive moments that make Healing a memorable listen. Songs like the tranquility contemplative mosey "let's walk across this forest, i can feel that everything is real again" and the fluid ripple of the meditative melodies and chilled-out synths on "chilling at nemu's place" manage to transfix you in a spell of impenetrable calm and make the album feel truly transportive and rejuvenating.
Even though Healing is only from 2017, it feels like a message from a saner, more peaceful realm- one that I'm happy to return to often.
