- Industrial-adjacent experimental pop soundscapes from an artist whose work only becomes more impressive with each new release.
- Since the release of her woozy Rum EP on UNO NYC in 2013, New York-based Jamie Krasner's music has lingered somewhere in the margins of pop. Although snappy hooks and dreamy textures are a recurring theme across her records and aliases, they're only half of the James K story. The glorious synth pop melodies of her 2016 Dial album PET drew comparisons with early Grimes, but the undercurrents of anxiety in her production suggested a kinship with the noisiest strands of the post-everything aesthetic of the mid-2010s. When Yves Tumor bridged adventurous electronics and guitar rock in Safe In The Hands Of Love, it made a lot of sense for them to enlist Krasner on the album's poppiest number ("Licking An Orchid"), only to return the favor with a ghostly appearance on the most abstract track off Krasner's own AD 93 EP 036 (Open). Both in her solo and collaborative work, her style of pop is made all the more alluring in how seems to be constantly on the verge of disintegrating.
Her new album, Random Girl, doubles down on adventurous song structures and abrasive sounds, turning its back on pop-friendly electronics with a hint of defiance. The shoegaze reverie "Life Of A Fly" and the hazy melodies of first single "Eiv Mude"—driven by a slow-burning techno beat married with K's signature ethereal vocals—echo her PET days, but the similarity is misleading. Rather than explicit nods to K's most accessible offerings from the past, the two tracks appear as pockets of respite within a wildly impressionistic and at times brutal record.
On opening track "alright," an ominous voice mutters "Everything's gonna be alright / Just listen to me," only to implode under the weight of a crescendo of noise and dissonant pulses, like sci-fi-inflected musique concrète. As the track unfolds, the idea that anything would be alright feels nothing short of an illusion. On tracks such as "Bound, To" and "Don't Walk On the Dunes" (one of two collaborations with Vancouver composer Stefan Maier) sumptuous ambient textures and hypnotic samples lure the listener into a precarious dream state. Sudden bursts of sound and strategically placed silences keep any prospect of ambient relaxation at arm's length.
Random Girl is most turbulent on its longest tracks, endurance tests that are likely to win James K new fans in harsher music circles. On highlight "Marketa," she joins forces with Coil veteran Drew McDowall (the two already collaborated on McDowall's The Third Helix, released in 2018) for a bath of glitchy electronics, where Krasnner's chants wrestle with a funereal beat. In the Maier collaboration Teen Cruelty Krasner wails amid lurches of noise, bringing to mind dungeon dirges from Pharmakon or Purge-era Dis Fig.
The long-form compositions on Random Girl have an affinity with classic industrial artists like Throbbing Gristle or Nurse With Wound, with a sense of unpredictability as unsettling as it is enticing. Album closer "Nude Volvo," with its acoustic intermezzos and sweeping movements from wobbly techno to dark ambient, best exemplifies this. Continuously morphing and and slipping through any easy classification, it's a fitting soundtrack for an artist caught in the midst of what sounds like a radical shift from pop outsider to bona fide experimental composer.
Tracklist01. alright
02. Eiv Mude
03. Bound, To
04. pretty song
05. Life Of A Fly
06. Don't Walk On The Dunes feat. Stefan Maier
07. Marketa feat. Drew McDowall
08. Teen Cruelty feat. Stefan Maier
09. Tropical Island
10. Nude Volvo