Every person has their own embodiment of nostalgia. Mine is: in the backseat of our family car at night, seeing the then futuristic-seeming steel and glass skyscrapers shoot past me, neon lights in rain puddles, the sound of windshield wipers – and music that was deeply emotional, translucent and hypnagogic. There was a short time, from the late 80s to early 90s, prior to the birth of trip-hop, when R&B merged with downtempo, ambient, dub and jazz electronic music to craft what was, pretty much, the soulful equivalent to shoegaze: pure mood music. I possibly could at some point, given enough time and conversations with the originator of our familial mixtapes, recreate some of those playlists, but I fear that, removed from the curious gaze of a child growing up in a divided West Berlin (even when reunited), the music would have lost its magical appeal. Like revisiting Everything but the Girl or early Massive Attack, it likely would sound more defined and dated than it did back then, at that moment in time.
Lifetime, Erika de Casier‘s mind-blowing fourth album, not only recreates the era – and feeling – I speak of, it seems to exist outside of material logic and corporeal reality. It is engulfed in a constant aura of futuristic film noir haze. Both hypnagogic early 90s R&B and cyberpunk fantasy, it resembles albums held and heard in dreams, whose beautiful and unreal structures disappear to make way for even more sensual passages, freed from any need to fit commercial sustainability. For 30 minutes, the album melts reality away, creating a parallel universe.
Opening track “Miss” immediately sets this tone, laying de Casier’s echoing voice on top of fractured synth tapestries and slowed down beats. “I just miss / What I know, what I know, what I know, what I know / Innocence / Is no more, is no more, is no more, is no more” – her statement trail off, as if her mind itself is mere echo of the past she invokes. Follow up “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” leans even closer into ambient, with the beat only entering halfway into the song, as de Casier’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics interweave desire, superficiality, ageing, love and mortality. “Seasons” opens with a string sample, only to explode into a sudden explosion of synth notes, which seem to kickstart an industrial beat, as if the entire song chronicled some strange, alien mechanism coming to life.
“You Got It!” is a short, sensual hip-hop interlude that sounds as much like early Massive Attack as it resembles a slowed down entry of Madonna’s Erotica period, while the lush, “December” resembles Enigma (including the signature pan flute) and Sade’s Love Deluxe. Following, de Casier delivers two songs who that should be hit singles in a just world: “Delusional”, possibly the album’s most conventional R&B song, has a beautiful chorus and great hook, seemingly plucked from a 1991 pirate broadcast it seems so familiar in its beautiful inner logic, while “The Chase”, cleverly sampling sounds of a telephone, could fit on Kelela’s standout Raven or Liv.e’s astonishing Girl in the Half Pearl. In contrast to its predecessor, which is quite typical of a certain early 90s radio sound, “The Chase” employs backwards masking, phone sounds and a surreal lead melody to portray an off putting relationship marked by trauma attraction with an absent partner. These are some of the most cleanest cuts of the album, and some of their catchiest. Yet it’s de Casier’s experiments which stand out. The tropical and jazzy “Moan” disintegrates into pure, echoing ambience halfway through, as if the protagonist dissolves into ghostly transparency.
The cool, subterranean “The Garden” contrasts the song by introducing strong dynamics, both in the lead vocal melody, with the chorus jumping an octave down to underline a bold sexual invitation, enforcing a symbolical garden of Eden: “Right around the corner from where l live there’s a garden / Meet me there in five and I will show you all of me / Magnolia and willow trees is all that I can fathom / A spur of life that rises from the ashes of our kin / You know wе can’t stay”. Then, suddenly, de Casier dives into a sultry spoken word part, revealing that the sudden, sexual connection with a stranger was in the faraway past, but an idealised memory, and like waking from a dream, she’s now left longing: “Baby, don’t settle now, why so blue? / ‘Cause I won’t live forever / And I want love too”.
Lifetime ends on two parallel closers. The surreal, quasi-middle eastern flavoured “Two Thieves” hints at a funky side with interspersed bass lines, before breaking down into a beat that slows down gradually for an extended coda. Here, de Casier invokes this strange boundary between the desire of online imagery and impermanence of physical connection, as images of people on her feed meet the scent of her perfume – a contrast that seems to invoke the nature of the album, which is caught between the imaginary and embodied in a half-born state. Finally, the closing title track uses a distant, delayed piano progression as motif, while de Casier compares the desire for a soul-mate with her own ability of self love: romanticism vs the realisation of maturity. Can we find love if we ourselves have no ability to embrace who we are? As the song ends and the instruments fade away, there’s the short ghostly hum of a voice, before only silence remains.
I opened this review with a personal anecdote, and I will close it with one: last night, I dreamt of a strange “museum of riddles”, which really was more of a mixture of escape room and immersive theatre. Within, a gallery presented what were the many paintings and statues of a fictional artist, who held hidden codes and parts of a larger puzzle to solve, while actors would engage in conversations that held clues and information. In the dream, the paintings were strange in their strong embodiments, from large Miro and Kandinsky like canvasses to smaller, expressionistic renditions of minotaurs and Monet-like vistas of coastal villages. The dream was likely influenced by my recent fascination with Pol Taburet, but the point here is that the very works I witnessed only exist within that brief, fragile experience, and they certainly become lost to time. Many artists have attempted to capture these doomed configurations, tearing them away from the mist of our dreams and into reality. But like nostalgic recollections, their make-up can be too sensitive to daylight, and they dissolve, like tears in rain. There’s few examples – such as the works of dear David Lynch and the many configurations of vaporwave – that have found adequate methods that won’t break the delicate surreal geometry. On Lifetime, de Casier not only manages to create a truly hypnagogic aura, but captured this elusive quality of oneiric purity and grace. It’s the sound of an existence beyond our own, prismatic and startlingly beautiful.
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