Friday, July 5, 2024

Album Review: WiFiGawd - Chain of Command


Probably the best way I could describe WiFiGawd, in general, but particularly on his album Chain of Command, is an escape artist. He's hard to get a grip on and pin down. He's made a career of evading the chains of convention and other constraints, and CoC is no different. Scooping up drops from old heads and soulful progenitors, he slips through the vents of digitized liquid funk to pop off triplets in a setting ordered for a poet's quill but which he's commandeered for cyber-surfing, pyrotechnic piracy. What's more fantastic than his folding over, to the 7th degree, of Golden era partitions and Soundcloud era dialects is the way that he and his collaborating producers pragmatically thread and territorialize the kind of soul samples, new age aesthetics, and torqued and bent digital sampling common to vaporwave and new spiritual music within his aggressively materialistic and factually certain flows and compositions. WifiGawd is not out wandering the ether; his head is screwed onto his spine, his feet are in a good pair of kicks and firmly planted on the ground- he is locked in as they say. But the strange tug of the production on Chain of Command does manage to color his treaties, particularly when he slinks into a bobbing, laid back harmonious flow, with the soot of chaos and confusion that burns around him. WiFiGawd allows the disorder and dissociation that characterizes life in this half-feral, cyber-subordinated epoch of human history to settle on his compositions like the fog of war that it is, making what he does and says on Chain of Command that much more believable in its flirtation proximity to absolute madness. 

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