Watch: Sleep — RYD feat. OK Button

Regular readers of BlackPlastic will likely know that I suffer from anxiety. One of the things I haven’t discussed much is how this impacts my sleep. The moment when everyone else goes to sleep can be a trigger for me — I am never as alone as during those hours when everyone else is asleep.

At the end of a long day, bedtime is where our brains start to unspool and process what has happened. Unfortunately if you suffer from anxiety, it is also the point at which your brain can get tied up in what certain things mean. Why did that person say something in a particular way? Is it significant that someone didn’t respond to a message? Why did I do that stupid thing? In the light of day, the edge on those questions has a tendency to dissolve but, at night, they can swallow my whole brain. Unanswerable, unresolvable and yet seemingly impossible to ignore. In those moments, the night seems to expand to infinity and the potential for loneliness can seem endless.

RYD is the creative alias of 25-year-old producer and songwriter Ryan Downie, and Sleep comes as the title track of a new EP, out now. Sleep is RYD’s first release since his 2019 eponymously named debut album.

The song Sleep feels like an exploration of those moments when you are trapped between sleep and being awake, caught up in the snatched memory of someone. The song’s central repeated refrain, “Now I’m losing sleep over what you said to me”, encapsulates perfectly an experience I know all too well. The layered vocals create an experience not too dissimilar to that of drifting in and out of consciousness, unable to shut my brain down but also unable to control it — snippets weave in and out to create cyclical, endless thoughts. And yet RYD’s production work gives the whole thing a quasi-peaceful feeling: you are safe, in your bed, and it will be okay. It’s a sensation only further cemented through the contribution of the lovely OK Button, who appeared on these pages back in 2018.

Having been the product of more than a year’s effort, the release of the Sleep EP comes together with an accompanying app, Sleep Room. The app aims to bring together the world of music, art and mindfulness, providing users with the opportunity to experiment with the loops that make up the songs on the new EP.

The inspiration from the app came out of the experience of lockdown last year, as Downie explains:

“A bedroom is a place where you generally feel safe and have no outside judgement looming, a paradise for introverts. Each item in the room triggers a different stem from the (Now I’m Losing) track, an intro to Sleep on the forthcoming EP. The initial tracks are a significant build-up of emotions, the introduction of different sounds and vocals coming as new thoughts that meld into one. All items in the room trigger different connotations and sentiments, of thoughts playing together in harmony like a stream of consciousness we can effortlessly converse with ourselves, moving from one unrelated thing to another whilst all seeming so natural.”

I love the level of thought that has gone into this release, but I also appreciate how well it landed for me emotionally. Check out the song Sleep below, the app here and look for the EP itself here.

Listen: Play Fair — Dolly Ave

Dolly Ave’s new single Play Fair moves with a certain tenderness. It quivers with the desire to gently disengage from someone whose feelings you care about, a tenderness that exists despite the fact another person no longer represents your future. The vocal itself surfaces a series of questions and requests of an ex-lover, the song’s title seemingly an instruction Dolly herself, as much as the song’s subject.

Originally written in Chicago, Play Fair ended up sitting untouched and unfinished for a year. Initially unable to finish the song, it was only in California with producer Ciayo’s decision to incorporate hip hop elements that it evolved into what we hear now. The slow, brooding percussion and bass give the song a cautious atmosphere that struck me as suiting the song’s subject.

Dolly creates music that focuses on personal subject matters whilst leveraging a sound that blends pop, R&B, soul and electronic. Play Fair follows on from her debut single Birds and a collaboration with rapper Charlie Curtis-Beard that trended on TikTok this year. She is currently preparing to release her debut EP, Sleep.

Listen: You — Tal Simon

You arrives in a flurry of piano keys, vocal samples and skipping rhythms, channeling the rave-like beach-combing sounds of Jamie xx, Caribou and DJ Koze. The first 45 seconds evoke the rapidly accelerating feel of a take-off, soon to be complimented by the weightlessness of flight. Singer/actress Sojourner Brown’s vocals flit in between synths and beats, with the whole thing feeling less like a singular structure than a collection of objects floating in space at the same time.

Channeling the sounds Tal grew up listening to whilst visiting family in London, on You he gives us an all too brief experience of what it feels like to just exist within the music… Literally, inside it. There is a flow-state like purity to what the 21-year-old Brooklyn producer has achieved here. Like a magpie, he takes what he needs from various forms of dance music — UK Garage, dubstep, house, dream pop — and puts us inside the resulting collage, free to wonder at all those sounds.

The inspiration for Simon’s music has come from the same loneliness and boredom many of us have experienced through quarantine. Rather than just sit with it, Tal spent his time revisiting disposable photos he had taken over the past five years and channeled that inspiration into something nostalgic but hopeful. Some of those disposable images have now been given new life as the photography artwork for his debut EP,Reworks. The release sees the producer take some of his favourite b-side releases, remixing and reworking them to creating something new, looking back to help us contextualise the future, in much the same way as those photos.

Check out You below, and listen to the full Reworks EP on Soundcloud here.

Listen: Who’s Having The Greatest Time? — Low Island

Appearing here in the form of a live recording, Low Island’s Who’s Having The Greatest Time? has been the song I’ve had most stuck in my head this week. It barrels in with an anxiety-fuelled repeated synth stab and clipped drums, a vocal delivered with a certain sardonic style that seems to ask, “Are we actually having a great time, or just trying to convince ourselves we are?”

I’ve been feeling a little nostalgic of late for 00s-through-early-2010s electronic music. What happened to the experimentation, attitude and excitement of Electroclash, French Touch, Ghostly International and Italians Do It Better? Whilst some of these things arguably all still exist, there doesn’t seem to be the same energy pulsating around our electronic music as there once was.

Who’s Having The Greatest Time? manages to push my nostalgic buttons — recalling those sounds that seem to have been left behind. Ironically, Low Island evoke those sounds by feeling like they still believe in the future. The deadpan vocal feels like Matthew Dear at his Black City-era peak, with Caribou’s Dan Snaith on production duties. The song bubbles with discontent, the sort of constructive frustration on display on LCD Soundsystem’s Get Innocuous!

Check out Who’s Having The Greatest Time? below, and look for Low Island’s debut album If You Could Have It All Again when it drops via Emotional Interference on April 16th.

Listen: Just Chemistry — Dance Lessons

Following on from SMABTO and New Job, Just Chemistry is the latest single from London-based and female-fronted trio Dance Lessons.

Just Chemistry floats upon a loose percussive bed, with vocalist Ann’s statuesque vocal performance elevating the sound to some sort of earthy-disco. The song feels unfussy in parts, yet boasts a sophisticated yet relatively unfussy sound — there are layers, but each sound still commands its own space.

Among all of this sophisticated and understated pop is a saxophone. I love a bit of saxophone, but it can be overpowering. Not so here, where it embellishes and enhances what is here, without overwhelming it. In fact, it lends the track a level of expensive sophistication that contrasts to the easy accessibility on show elsewhere.

Describing the song, Ann says:

“Just Chemistry is about the over-complication of our relationships. It’s about the things that are left unsaid in-between the awkward text messages and conversations, and how the absence of knowing can be misinterpreted as doubt. Last year was a difficult one. For a long time, I felt at the mercy of my emotions. I doubted where things were going. I lived in the future and found it hard to commit to the present. But these moments of not knowing can be equally thrilling and beautiful. And that’s what the song is about: finding beauty in the unspoken. In most cases, it’s chemistry that makes us fall in love. Things end, all is temporary. Let’s not go to war with one another over it.”

Just Chemistry exhibits the humanity and complexity I believe the song is shooting for, and yet it also points to a natural and universal simplicity that exists in all our relationships, and in music itself. Check it out below:

https://instagram.com/wearedancelessons dancetodancelessons@gmail.com Written by Dance Lessons Produced by Ann Mixed by Andrew Maurey