- RAMZi debuts on Music From Memory with a peculiar and charming exploration of fungal textures via downtempo and oddball club music.
- Hyphae are the underground branching fibers of fungi. When you see a picture of a mushroom and its roots sprouting off in a series of seemingly infinite directions, that's the hyphae you're looking at (or, technically, the mycelium, as the hyphae are called collectively). Despite the deliberate misspelling—hyphea—Phoebé Guillemot's most recent album as RAMZi takes this fungal framework as a starting point, with ten songs originally composed to accompany Frederic Lavoie's film Fun Fungi. In continually searching for a fabled "fifth world," her music digs deeper and deeper into the strange worlds that exist beneath the surface. hyphea follows unexpected rhythmic filaments that blossom into endless configurations of downtempo and club music.
Guillemot's records have always been dense, but on hyphea that quality feels even more pronounced, as she tries to fit what feels like a thousand different ideas into the album's 38-minute runtime. It's easy to get lost focusing on just a few motifs on any given song. If you get caught up in the vinyl scratches, funky breakbeat and smoky sax line on "smooshi," for example, you'll miss the sun-soaked xylophone she buries elsewhere in the mix. Or on "foggi," a collaboration with fellow Montreale Priori, one of the latter artist's signature crystalline gets lost in a maze of foggy voices and squiggly melodies. Elsewhere, sitars duet with synthetic parakeets ("mille et une nuits") and strange woodwind instruments glide over crunchy bass frequencies ("égrégores").
Guillemot has never been squeamish about blending New Age pastiche with contemporary club sounds, which puts her work in conversation with a number of other Canadian producers. Light up a spliff, dim the lights, and you could mistake the hand drums and dubby chords on "fly to me" or the piano line on "afloat" with the afterparty afterglow of an early Yu Su or Flørist record. But starting with 2020's cocoon she branched out, exploring the polyrhythmic, bass-driven music of the likes of DJ Plead or Deena Abdelwahed (just check out "couer dodu"). Guillemot reprises those influences on album highlight "megafauna," which pairs a wobbly guitar line with the gentle lull of waves crashing.
hyphea is the second album of 2020 I know that was directly influenced by mushrooms (following Bjork's Fossora). This doesn't feel like a coincidence. Mushrooms have become the subject of both curiosity and possibility for humans in a world that teeters closer to the brink. They are strange fauna that thrive in places of ruin when nothing else can, offering us a model for rethinking our own relationship to the planet (so much so that academic publishers now have whole series dedicated to them). Guillemot applies this same principle to dance music. She's interested in the seemingly infinite mutations of a wide cross-section of global sounds and styles that can thrive in new environments. hyphea is an album that captures the myriad possibilities that sprout just below the surface.
Tracklist01. awakenin
02. foggi feat. Priori
03. mille et une nuits
04. chantilli
05. smooshi
06. megafauna
07. égrégores
08. fly to me
09. nightquest
10. afloat feat.. NAP