Elysia Crampton Announces Her Debut Album With A Track From Another World
“Petrichrist” is the most epic “epic collage” from the artist formerly known as E+E.
Under her previous moniker E+E, Virginia-based, Bolivian-born producer Elysia Crampton was described by The FADER's Adam Harper as being part of a wave of "epic collage" producers. That is to say, like her contemporaries Total Freedom and TCF, Crampton makes expansive music that weaves together jarring, often violent elements to create something totally and shockingly new.
On many of her earlier tracks, Crampton would pair ghostly vocals from the likes of Justin Bieber or Kelela with minimalist percussive palettes and shoot-'em-up sound effects. But today, she announces her debut release American Drift on FaltyDL's imprint Blueberry Recordings with a sound that's all her—in a press release, she describes it in her own words as "epic psych metalera crunk tribalosa." The below single "Petrichrist" is a mechanical composition that starts out all nuts, bolts and lasers, until it's gradually overtaken by a lush blast of melodies; like a kind of inverse Frankenstein's monster, it gets warmer, with more traditional strokes of emotion, as it builds to its climax.
"'Petrichrist is based on the etymology of the word 'petrichor' [the scent of rain on soil]," Crampton told The FADER over email. "This piece follows a journey in my Ford Ranger, driving up Shenandoah mountain: an encounter between mountain and vehicle, interactions of non-human objects touching one another in a world where all things have agency." She added, "dedicated to writer Jeffrey J. Cohen and crunk artist Nicole Walker."
As for the four-track album American Drift as a whole, Crampton explains that its core is "Virginian American history, [and] exploring brownness as more than culture or Othering, as geology. American narratives are re-examined on this level: narratives of colonized and colonizer, slave histories, impact events and fern spikes, two-spirit and queer indigenous histories. Trans-ontologies are given voice and resonance." Look out for the record when it drops on July 31st.