iwmoe by Xafya
Stitching together a kind of sonic autofiction, Xafya describes her singular approach to audio collage as “life-affirming anxious attachment relief meditation music.” Determined to wring more intimacy from her palette of apocalypse electronics and dissatisfied with “the echo chamber of online deconstructed club niche aesthetics,” her debut EP marks a turn toward introspection and emotional honesty. Having scrapped a project that had become bogged down by the complexities and neuroses of the extremely online, she started from scratch, retreating into herself to begin working on what would become I Want More Of Everything.
The result is an intensely personal statement that Xafya views as her first real work of sonic expression, the true beginning of her discography. Intended to function as a series of diary entries, I Want More Of Everything is as influenced by an emotional landscape as it is by video game environments and sci-fi soundtracks. Each of the project’s five tracks captures a feeling, raw and unfiltered, before spinning that feeling out into its own richly textured sound world, entire universes born from the desire for a desire that may lead beyond desire, or the weight of an epiphany. Excavating these twisted sound collages, Xafya pits organic found sound against shredded patchworks of samples and synthesis, using dissonance to pick out tensions between internal and external worlds across a “series of prophetic tales and love songs.”
On ‘I Will Always Be This Tender For You’, searing strings and somber horns sound through cavernous space, the words “tender, for you” echoing through blizzards of granular grind while pockets of crawling, pent up tension build and release. ‘Pure White Awakening’ sees Xafya making contact with an eldritch entity, contrasting woodland folk strings and stumbling steps through bracken with the sublime sounds of something gargantuan. Seismic bass thuds evoke the movement of a hulking leviathan, or an unstoppable force of nature. “I don’t understand, what is your purpose here?” a voice asks. “How can you know the future?”
‘All My Fondest Memories Lie In Lucerne’ pitches us directly into this future, a battleground for unseen forces. Caught breath, broken metal and the sounds of weapons discharging are layered under muted blast beats and muffled voices, textural sound design flourishes pulling focus on the memories of a fight after the smoke has cleared. Serving as an interlude, ‘Three Good Omen’ pierces radiant vocal ambience with eviscerated spurts of FX, like a conversation with an extraterrestrial intelligence, while ‘Godspeed’ plummets us straight back into deep bass void. Between digital whip cracks and building pressure, an exhortation: “what was I supposed to do, leave you there dead? We need to stick together.”
As ‘Godspeed’ builds through ecstatic surge to a pummeling climax of pitch-shifted choral chatter and thunderous percussive gallop, it’s emotional complexity that’s shown to be the driving force of the sonic worlds that make up I Want More Of Everything, as well as the source of the strength of the artist that has built them. These evocative compositions are as expansive as the emotions from which they emerge, worlds that are born and die in the fleeting moment of feeling. Sounding clear through the noise, Xafya leaves us with a cryptic message of optimism: “your faith didn’t crumble, and your powers haven’t either.”
Tracklist
| 1. | i will always be this tender for you | 4:06 |
| 2. | pure white awakening | 4:29 |
| 3. | all my fondest memories lie in lucerne | 4:49 |
| 4. | good omen | 1:34 |
| 5. | godspeed | 3:41 |
Credits
Mastered by Rashad Becker
Artwork by Xafya & Niels Wehrspann
