Tuesday, June 14, 2022

Album Review: Kid Mania - Current

Web-dwelling electronic artists fascinate me. It's intriguing how closely nit and yet diffuse their community is. How loose their release schedules are- dropping albums on Bandcamp almost as soon as they are complete. And further, how starkly defined the various sub-genres they operate within are, and yet, how unconstraining these categories are to them in reality. 

The talent inhabiting this nitch of the web tends to evolve extremely quickly as well, rapidly rising to the level and ability of touring DJs and name-brand producers in the span of only a couple of months or a year. Nearly every mainstream critic and publication ignores them though- which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I mean, would you trust a vaporwave artist who signed to a major label on the back of a Pitchfork endorsement? That would be pretty sus imo.

Still, whenever I like something I want to see it get as much publicity as possible. While I doubt Kid Mania will be getting an All Songs Considered stamp of approval anytime soon, that's no excuse for you to ignore them (especially if you are reading this blog!). 

Kid Mania's latest LP Current is a collection of mood music, that is ostensibly vaporwave, but has an incredibly sturdy sense of groove and the ability to underpin even the lightest motif with an adequately corrugated backbone and beat. The other thing to note, is their chameleon-like ability to shift lithely between modes and musical personas. 

There are hints and traces of several varieties of electronic music inlayed between the emotive atmospherics on Currents, each with a slightly different balance of personality. Melting and reconstituting like living wax idols. Kid Mania's warm prodigious aura is able to assume the shape of an Eastern sojourn, reminiscent of Amon Tobin' more recent work on "Passages Under the City," then forms a dense pour of whimsically shambling Musique concrète on "Rainbow Granny," and finally transforms to lurk in the shadows, like a Perturbator-esque demonic prowler on "Current," which begins with a deranged segment of poetry and ends with an eruption of slabs of slasher film sound effects. 

In addition to the diversity of inspiration and style, Current also sounds incredibly dynamic with very clean production and tight sequencing, with only slight compression to contour its profile and give the mix boundaries. It sounds professional but not constrained by a professional's demands for thematic consistency. There are nightmarish vocal performances ("The Construct") as well as tranquil, cylindrical-tone new age and ambient ("Visitation"), and even an analysis of the end of the US's Afphgan war ("The Inevitable"). It really doesn't get much more heterogeneous than that.

The diverse themes and sounds are tied together loosely based on the premise that you are hearing all of these strange transmissions via a corroded radio antenna that picks up alien frequencies as much as daytime television broadcasts and the unrecorded, errant thoughts of strangers from across the globe. If this sounds like it could be on your wavelength, then tune in, let your inhibitions drop out, and let the vibes take do the steering from there on out. 

It's available via Sunset Grind.