Under the Foie Gras moniker, San Francisco resident Iphigenia purveys a strain of barely-there drone populated with swathes of sustained chordal pads that blur into a reverbed wash akin to the minimal ambient output of Hakobune or Celer. The project succeeds in concealing any vestige of her physical being, whose hands press keys or strum strings or twist knobs, under a veil of absence, as if her tones poured from some natural wellspring beyond human control.
Iphigenia inverts this paradigm with her Bad Kisser project, allowing a ray of light to streak through the parted black curtain and illuminate her visage somewhere in the darkness. Fragments of singer-songwriter balladry reach us as a garbled collage, smeared into abstraction by lo-fi production techniques and reversing processes. Her new mini-album Bate Kush presents these alien acoustic sketches in tiny bursts of muffled activity, fusing the dark energies and rituals of the Nico → Grouper school of melancholic solo songwriting with the truncated compositional tactics of, say, grindcore. Iphigenia’s yearning vocal melodies, projected toward us as if from the depths of a vacant foxhole, animate each of her miniature compositions into a morsel of emotional information beyond any hope of deciphering.
The video for Bate Kush closer “God Lived as a Devil Dog” finds Iphigenia running up that road in slo-mo. The song unfolds as a mirrored image, stretching in reverse to the midpoint and refracting back into legibility for its conclusion. The video presents both sides of this coin: reversed, black and white, drawn straight back into previously tread ground; forward progress, color, something like a future.
• Bad Kisser: https://batekush.bandcamp.com
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