For the past few days, I’ve awoken to the gun-cocking sonics of “Foreign Bodies” off Mångata Sequence, an EP by NYC’s Swim Team crew-member Color Plus. The sound is HARD with intention, followed by someone firing this gun and then infrequently repeating itself in a hovering 130 BPM. Although the sound is common in production work (whether you’re in Jersey, L.A., or Jamaica), the gun-cocking and firing encircling “Foreign Bodies” is so intricately weaved within the beat that it also complements the subdued focus of the four tracks. Here, Color Plus seems to suggest that even the violence itself implied by these sound sources can be reduced to a mere sample, a rhythm for syncing. The intention is not to desensitize the listener, but to create an unresolved middle-ground mood through sound.
Throughout Mångata Sequence, Color Plus traverses extremely free and almost track-exclusive minimal elements that space-out this intentional feeling of “maybe.” The EP is built for the club, providing listeners with spacious pace shifts with an ongoing nod that’s toyed with via freestyle sounds: if Color Plus drops any one of these four tracks at the next Household Swim Team event, people will be moving like mad to pounding 4/4 beats while being immersed in random (but not spastic) acoustic and synthetic sound outlets. But these shift-changes and random sounds don’t alter the consistency of the EP; while they melt and weave in and around the beats, they become internalized due to the steady time-signatures. As if the songs are propelled by an unheard entity at any and every moment, Mångata Sequence is manipulated in the foreground and unrelenting in the background, providing something that feels equally missing and complete.
What’s also compelling is this fine blend of acoustic samples and synthetic sounds scattered throughout. I usually despise vocals, unless they’re set to repeat ad nauseam, and Color Plus practically runs lyrical samples at clip-shitting speeds. That, or it’s more comically antagonistic, e.g., “Anybody gonna shake the club?” It’s amusingly cocky at first, but it becomes — like the gun-cocking and -firing — distanced through repetition: it doesn’t matter who you’re dancing next to or where or why or how — just drop-out and worship the rhythm. And replacing scaled notes with acoustic signifiers — glass-breaking, camera-clicking, jar-rattling, dice-rolling, droplets, reloads, etc. — provides Color Plus a smattering of zones to knock the listeners’ complacency within the EP’s humorous left-field (and potentially unintentional) bombastics. Not to mention the foundations built upon synthetic drumming, swirling, clapping, clanging, and snapping that drop out as quickly as they’re deployed, loosely dangling in the firmness of intentional uncertainty, not of reluctance.
Drawing from the Swedish word Mångata, which roughly translates as “the moons road-like reflection cast upon the water,” Color Plus follows this interpretation by treating each of the EP’s four tracks with delicate abandonment. As this fragmented image spawned for very little to witness, Color Plus reimagines the signified “dance release” into something similarly interpreted and jarringly beautiful. Take, for example, the track “Elsewhere,” when the beat drops out around the 2:28 mark: there’s a brief moment when listeners are privy to a glimmering mirage of sound that was previously hidden behind the drumming, which is quickly quashed once again, briefly, by the beat. Similar moments exist in every track on Mångata Sequence: resting waters, hypnotizing listeners into something there, yet absent — it’s like going to a club and dancing when the music isn’t playing; you’ll get there, you can catch up, and leave well enough alone. Color Plus is coming with those Household bangers on the freestyle-stoke and is about to bombard your thoughts with an unease that won’t be satiated until you submit your body.
More about: Color Plus
