REVIEW: Thanya Iyer - Do You Dream? Mixtape

Raquel Dalarossa

Montreal's Thanya Iyer calls her music "future folk." It's an apt categorization, not least because the future is, by definition, full of endless possibilities. Iyer—a vocalist, composer, producer, and bandleader—crafts music that is fanciful and roaming, incorporating bits of soul, jazz, electronica, and pop to build her own version of the future.

Formally, her band includes friends Daniel Gélinas and Alex Kasirer-Smibert, but the trio recruit plenty of contributors to complete their ambitiously lush sound. The experimental group will put anything at their disposal in an effort to enhance the textures in their music; on Iyer's debut album, Do You Dream?, released two years ago, Gélinas is credited for playing "dried clementine peels," but the percussionist can also be seen in a live video using two bowls of water for instruments.

Now, in a cassette mixtape put together for Topshelf Records, the band has revisited their album with fresh minds and fresh appetites for ever more exploration. The result includes three thoughtfully reimagined tracks and two new ones that dial back Iyer's orchestral tendencies in favor of something more intimate in character. Aided by the "Mawmz" choir (Brigitte Naggar, Shelby Cohen, Sarah Rossy), the tracks here have an especially dreamlike, ethereal quality when compared to their original album versions, but Iyer’s vocals remain the anchor to the constantly expanding and evolving landscape of sounds. 

"Daydreaming" gains a full minute of gauzy, sleepy rumination, while "Bridges" becomes an after-hours jam, the hushed vocals, atmospheric hums, and heartbeat-like drumming blending together like muted, watercolor tones on a creamy canvas. “Not Warm / Not Cold” jumps between choral a cappella sections and noisy maximalist ones before nestling into a warm nook, where Iyer’s honeyed, soulful vocals sit atop a bed of gently played keys and hi-hats. Finally, the two new tracks, "Water" and "Solace," round out the collection, the former full of inviting intrigue and mystery, and the latter a space-age lullaby.

With the tracks all bleeding into one another, they feel more like vignettes than fully formed songs per se, which means the mixtape is best enjoyed uninterrupted. But who would want to interrupt this all too short and tender ride through Thanya Iyer's imagination anyway?

REVIEW: Froyo Ma - pants

Laura Kerry

You either are or you know someone who can’t stop playing the band name game. It’s that game where, in the middle of a conversation about where to eat dinner, someone says, “Greasy Chinese Food—that’s a great band name.” Froyo Ma, the alias of Zack Villere, sounds like a product of that kind of brainstorming, and therefore reliably elicits the requisite eye roll and chuckle that accompanies that sort of thing. But it also conjures up the other side of the band name game: matching the name to a sound. Once it’s established that Greasy Chinese Food would make a good band name (which I don’t think it would, for the record), the imagination sets to work on what kind of music they would make.

So, what does the name “Froyo Ma” tell us about his music? Nothing much, it turns out—but in a way, that disconnect is telling. More of a producer than a typical artist (although the lines between those two are increasingly blurred), Villere gives very little away about himself on his new EP pants, an electronic, experimental amalgamation of jazz, R&B, and hip-hop. His real name is hard to find on the internet, and he outsources most of the singing on the album. His music also blends so many different influences that it seems impossible to attribute it to a single guy.

Starting with “berrymilk sea,” a minute-long, all-instrumental track of sparsely-laid, non-melodic electronic blips, Froyo Ma sets a tone of jazz-inflected electronic. Warm but strange, it feels like waking up at dawn on an alien planet.

When the next song, “spent missing,” comes in, though, we return promptly to Earth. Leaving behind the ambient synth sounds, Villere lays out straightforward-seeming R&B that, sung in the smooth voice of Charlotte Day Wilson, recalls the late-‘90s, early-2000s neo-soul of Erykah Badu (a cited influence of his) and Lauryn Hill. A weird instrumental break at the minute mark brings back the Boards of Canada vibe, though, reminding us that even in the songs that seem to most decisively stick to one genre, Froyo Ma will infuse it with something weird—the jazz of nearby New Orleans or the low, pulsating bass of his hip-hop idols, to name a few.

From “there,” the restrained-yet-driving third track—the EP’s jazziest—to “squid limbo,” the ambient-synth-turned-rap performed by Yote in the over-enunciated, percussive style of Tyler the Creator (another of his influences), pants covers wide and varied terrain. But, like any good producer, Villere leaves his own mark. Though disparate, pants coheres around its smooth sound and easy, electronic polish. Froyo Ma might be a bit of silly name, but his music is seriously delightful.