Conchis: Cray Cray
Out Now
Finnish all-rounder and Alt-Pop experimentalist returns after some enforced time away with a new single and album and some new stories to tell. MK Bennett listens in.
As an artist or musician, any one thing can affect you and change your day, take you down a tunnel you did not choose or roads you had previously ignored, and those crackling and firing synapses present you with their work, and medicated legally or otherwise, you wrestle that thing and fix it in place until you’re happy.
Suppose you’re chronically ill, disabled, overmedicated, overstimulated, or under-stimulated. In that case, it will affect the work, consciously or not if that thing is keeping you a prisoner inside your own body, controlled by its whims and fussy desires, its constant demands until it eventually becomes less of a driver and more of a subject, a waiting room where you have to be aware but seem uninterested, while the sand slowly runs out.
Inevitably it will be reflected in the music, electricity made magic by the progression of the written sequence. Conchis, a Finnish artist, has turned the time-sensitive demands of ME/CFS, if not exactly to her advantage, at least to a hugely inconvenient muse. You learn to work around it; this tired white elephant.
It starts like someone asked Aphex Twin to half remember a Jaimie XX song, before morphing into something bubbling under the skin, then into a shared vocal that sounds like Sampha or Ghost Poet. It meets the current contemporaneous trend of the slightly gothic, while the half dozen modern pop hooks do their thing. It is somehow discordant and harmonious, dark with light edges. There are some SIA and Christina From The Queens shapes thrown too, but even with all this in the mix, it sounds unique enough to stand out.
There is a very emotional middle-eight, where the melodies and counter melodies crash against each other like pre-storm waves, while the swell moves moodily around, with too much beauty to care, as it settles back inside itself, the pain subsiding, the riff maintaining the unbroken circle, it is the hope that kills and it is the hope that saves.
A song of favourites then, let them without disease cast their stones, and may the inevitable cult of Conchis start now, the future is a concert hall full of wheelchairs and walking frames, no affectations because there is nothing like the real thing.
Conchis Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
All words by MK Bennett, you can find his author’s archive here plus his Twitter and Instagram
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