The burgeoning Miami-based record label and fashion collective Bribery Corporation presents “bahna” by ROOMS, a soaring, progressive, ambient song complimented by an equally powerful and minimalistic music video.
ROOMS is Chris Weisson, a Miami-born, Los Angeles-based producer of Cuban/ Ecuadoran descent whose debut LP, There’s No Noise Here, will release on Bribery Corporation this year. The colorful 4k resolution video, directed, shot, and edited in Iceland by lauded Canadian film-maker Edward Platero (responsible for 2012’s The Drop: The EDM Culture Explosion) is a sight to behold.
Indeed. “Bahna” has both the intangible atmospheric brilliance and masterful melodic touch evocative of Tycho, Bonobo, and, to a lesser extent, Flume. A reverberating, innocent synth pad opens the song, reminiscent of Boards of Canada’s “Wildlife Analysis”, only to give way to a collage of erie, discordant voices that are quite challenging to listen to. Then, perhaps with a vague stroke of metaphor, the clamor of voices ceases and the music and magic begins.
At the foundation of the drop and the rest of the movement is an undulating wave bass, the type of super-charged sine wave which we heard throughout 2016 from avant-garde “wave music” to ascendant hip-hop a la Travis Scott. It’s a simple sound with width and depth to fill your spirit, mirroring the size and scope of the rich Icelandic landscape. The rest of soundscape is filled with a swirling stew of ambient glitches, strange, synchronized percussive sounds, and deep, broken bass playing off of measured, high-pitched tones that sound like a dialysis machine, betraying the life-giving essence of this music. The protozoic scenes in the music video and the lyric-less expression of the song synchronize perfectly, giving the entire project a primordial power as if the music is part of the Earth itself.
Bribery Corporation, “The Holy Grail of naked bodies, draped in the finest of silks, paid for with the foulest corruption,” is clearly onto something. We look forward to more avant-garde electronic music from their ranks, as well as the full-length debut from ROOMS, who makes his first musical contribution to the public a magnificent one with “bahna”.
