During the first few minutes of RAMZI’s Houti Kush, we are released into a terrain of ponds, palms trees, and fake suns. A new form of gesture, a kind of quantum gesture, is suggested. We are trying to relate non-verbally to an evaporating apparatus: a land composed of quarks and plank lengths, of CGI and binary code. This is our music, albeit non-specific. A space space. A thing thing. A leap, leaping. A beat, leaping. Just as when a large, fat, lazy frog hops off her lily pad like a cannonball propelled by a bazooka and disappears into the water of the swamp with an enthusiastic plop: not really there, just a vanishing, shivering meme.
Neuro-cognitive time-space has always been questioned by electronic music: think of Dopplereffekt or The KLF. RAMZI’s Houti Kush makes us think about temporality, emotions, tones, lost memories, sips of cold water, announcements, abandonments, continuous mutations, raptures and risks, secrets, small words, small months, materials, morphisms circumstances, and Descartes, the mathematician responsible for our notion that space can have coordinates and be mathematical. Houti Kush goes beyond Descartes for Einstein: if space is bendable (non-Cartesian) and time abstract, then music is metaphysical. It’s here, but not. A space space. A thing thing. Its a constructed relation to the world of non-human objects, probed by computers. I’d rather not say the word Nature, as it’s hard to see Nature. We just saw Pluto, and it contains icy mountains. This music is those mountains.
Imagine being on one of those mountains on Pluto for a second. Imagine making a map of it. (No doubt you’d have your iPhone blasting 1080p’s catalog inside your space-suit.) RAMZI — Phoebé Guillemot — loves to make maps with her music. Maps twice-removed from a jock jam: a strange, strange half-cousin you only see at weddings and funerals. Maps like George Washington surveying New York in the 1700s, a pipe full of marijuana in his mouth. Maps of techno-phenomena: plastic and minimal, subtropical and humid, full of unconscious desire, expressing pleasure and failure, danger and warmth. Part of the experience of Houti Kush involves animation, navigation, and interaction. We’re not just standing up in the club, idle, indolent, lethargically ogling the performer. We’re participating, albeit silently. We’re exploring mind-architecture. We’re driving in a red Jeep to a gigantic pyramid, to kill some goblins with a sword and collect gold coins. We’re in Puerto Rico with my grandfather, drinking vanilla ice cream drenched in jugo de piña. What we are doing, most importantly, is creating spaces. Houti Kush is an album of blueprints: we are the contractors ready to start building.
But yet, this is just a betweenness. This is just a between space. This is between music, not music, not field recordings, not pure club, not pure Vancouver. It’s phasing through these things, profoundly, productively, coexisting here and there, purely pure with free energy. It wants to be a forest. It wants to be a picture of a forest on a computer. It wants to be a forest inside a computer. A forest made of computer chips. A forest made of chocolate chips. A forest made of chocolate trees, native to Central and South America. A forest of language. A forest of numbers. A forest within a forest, within a computer, within the mouth of a human chomping on a chocolate bar in Vancouver, BC, at a RAMZI show.
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