Advertisement

Album reviews Music

LA Timpa

In interviews, Nigeria-born, GTA-raised artist LA Timpa (aka Christopher Soetan) has explained that his debut EP was recorded between 1 and 9 am following his move from the burbs to the city. Harmony Korine’s love-it-or-loathe-it 1997 movie Gummo helped shape the 21-year-old’s spare aesthetic, but if these five songs recall anything from the cult filmmaker’s catalogue, it’s the strangely transfixing, VHS-shot images of unremarkable back alleys and street lights in Korine’s antisocial masterpiece Trash Humpers.

There’s something similarly garbled and perplexing about Animal: voices are buried under layers of effects, noise and distortion. The title track establishes this lo-fi aesthetic with a lonely, repeating guitar riff over an eerie melody that sounds like a choir of munchkins fading into another dimension.

Wilfully obscuring your lyrics is a classic move by a new musician who lacks confidence in the word department, but if that’s the case here Soetan has turned a possible weakness to his advantage by treating his voice as another instrument in service of the wider mood.

The overwhelming emotion on display is anxiety. On Caged Animal, a soft, near-spoken-word vocal and spacey music box that could sound lulling are relentlessly disrupted by heaving synths and agitated rhythms. From there, the sounds only grow more abrasive and erratic until a knocking beat devolves into industrial clanging on aptly titled closer I Don’t Care, which abruptly ends the EP’s emotional trajectory.

With all its lo-fi distortion and melancholy, Animal establishes a clear aesthetic for LA Timpa, one that feels at once beautiful, confounding, distancing and still in development.

Top track: Animal

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Recently Posted