Northern California’s Sloww Lyfe (aka Jkub D. Favela Raya) deals in abstracts, with musical ideas and thoughts that sit somewhere on the periphery of our collective musical consciousness. Interwoven with strands of multiple genres and musical ideologies, Sloww Lyfe is an outlet for unrestrained creative release. Dealing in hazy nostalgia, R&B crooning, and obscured electronic experimentation, his music comes to rest somewhere between How To Dress Well and Washed Out. Giving listeners something that feels attuned to the hips but which also strives to engage the mind, Raya never lets his music lose that personal connection. And to further this desire for communal interaction, he is getting ready to release his self-titled debut EP sometime in the next month via Memory No. 36 Recordings.
For our first glimpse of the EP, Raya has chosen “Psychic Lies,” an ephemeral, memory-soaked slice of thudding electronics and neo-soul rhythms that sets us down somewhere within the inner workings of his subconscious. Trading off bits of Chillwave’s gauzy synth saturation with burry, half-focused beats, the track becomes the looping soundtrack to a bleary night of forgotten events. “Psychic Lies” displays a casual and occasional lucidity that allows us to see the complex production and exacting detail of the song. And it’s in this hazy borderland between memory and reality that Sloww Lyfe seems most at home.
Sloow Lyfe has also created a video for “Psychic Lies,” which finds Raya singing directly to the camera at times, interspersed with brief glimpses from inside speeding cars, shots of slow walks along empty sidewalks, and even clips of a video game fight between Final Fantasy‘s Cloud and Sephiroth. The disparate visuals seems drawn from some fevered dream, and the video rushes by in a blur, leaving us to pick apart the images still fresh in our memory.
Beats Per Minute is pleased to premiere both the new track, “Psychic Lies,” as well as its accompanying video, taken from Sloww Lyfe’s upcoming debut EP.
