What’s inside your fortress? This week the Friday Night series journeys to our interior system of solitude and haven. vhvl is an electronic producer from Harlem. She’s collaborated with the Stones Throw afro-space cadet Ras G on the Seat of the Soul cassette and is currently preparing a follow-up to 2013’s self-released, myrrh.
Teetering on the astral planes of ambient and experimental hip hop, vhvl is a cipher both in cryptic moniker and in sound. Like all outsiders window gazing into the inventor’s fortress, we find ourselves wondering, “what’s she building in there?” Seemingly on a whim she titled her mix “frammento” after the 12 seconds of a Claudio Rocchi sound piece from a 1976 Italian psychedelia album, while the duration of the mix is studious and vaporous, a term apropos to her Tumbler bio: “still finding my way through the fog…” The studious side speaks to vhvl’s well-versed collection obscure gems from Italy, Brazil, and her contemporaries in the Stones Throw/Leaving Records sect. vhvl’s fortress is where emotions are explored without temperance and catharsis is not the expected finish line. Curious enough frammento translates to fragment, and in navigating vhvl’s mix the uncertainty that comes with fragmentation is not only a thematic through line in the arrangement, but arguably part of the textural blueprint of sample-based electronic music crafted on the SP-404.
01 Oscar Vargas & David Espejo, “Cometa 1973 (excerpt)”
02 Dem Hunger, “Rainwater Tea”
03 yuk., “Iris Dahlia”
04 Deru, “Midnight In The Garden With Ghosts”
05 Ahnnu, “Ghille In The Mist”
06 Vladislav Delay, “Viimeinen”
07 Tribo Massahi, “Walk By Jungle”
08 Claudio Rocchi, “Frammento”
09 ohbliv, “Strange Heart”
10 Ras G, “Find Ya Self (Anu Wrld)”
11 Lukid, “Spiller”
vhvl’s music is available on Bandcamp and Soundcloud. Her Seat of the Soul collaborative tape with Ras G is available in the Stones Throw store.
