REVIEW: jitwam. - ज़ितम सिहँ

Phillipe Roberts

India-born, Brooklyn-based beatsmith jitwam. describes music as “a shelter from the storm, a place you can go to close your eyes,” and previous releases have followed that mantra to a T. Deconstructed samples of folk or jazz guitar pop and simmer in the warm hiss of vinyl drum samples. Layers of stacked delays send his voice rippling across the stereo field in a chain of echoes. Earlier works fizzed slowly to the surface; even disco workout "whereyougonnago?" from this year’s TJD006 EP seemed to emanate from a private, blissed-out bubble sliding beneath the waves. On his full-length debut, ज़ितम सिहँ, jitwam. emerges from that aquatic slumber wielding a few new production tricks and tighter songwriting. His songs maintain the languid, soulful style that brought him to this point, but evoke wider, more cosmic ambitions. No longer content with his bubble-bound hallucinations, jitwam. drags the melodies out into the light and puts steel in the walls of his shelter.

This expanded focus on songwriting over beatmaking is the clearest transformation that jitwam. undergoes on ज़ितम सिहँ. Make no mistake, his beats still knock; the quiet storm thumping underneath the soul-searching strums of “alone” is one of his finest percussive moments thus far, and “drowning in tomorrow” relies heavily on a sliding funk bassline to drive home its anxious intensity. But for the first time, his tracks carry a weightier narrative arc thanks to more confident vocal finesse and a less chopped-up production style. The aforementioned “alone” clears plenty of sonic room for his vaporous musings on romantic isolation, but beneath all the reverb, you could imagine jitwam. crooning it out with just an acoustic guitar. “goodlord,” a collaboration with trumpeter Nick Waters, cuts down the clutter completely, with jitwam. self-harmonizing a capella over sparse finger snaps. Hearing his voice so intact, free of clips and edits that add to the beat but can strangle the melody, adds a new level of magnetism to the tracks.

ज़ितम सिहँ also shows off the impressive range of jitwam.’s influences, revealing a songwriter eager to push his production game. Album centerpiece “i ain’t scared of no devil” deals a swift coup de grace to those who might lazily file him away under the Stones Throw umbrella. Swaggering into a shuffling menace of a beat, he tinkers with it mercilessly, adding a dash of dissonantly arpeggiating guitars and squeals of no-wave-adjacent saxophone. When the beat drops out halfway through, the two trade atmospheric touches, signaling cacophonously across a huge soundstage. “later…,” with its gently plinking piano, sounds like a mellowed-out reimagining of Brian Eno’s “On Some Faraway Beach” with a psychedelic folk melody. And “dooooooooooooooooooo” plays with a clipped vocal and guitar sample and police sirens to create an autumnal soundscape that gleams with childlike wonder.

Hearing jitwam. tackle a host of new approaches to his sound is truly a gift in these rapidly darkening late-fall days. ज़ितम सिहँ carves through peculiar channels in its search for shelter, but the inspired results make it well worth the journey. Slip on your headphones or bang it in the open air. Slide into a warm bath and dream for a while.

PREMIERE: Walktell - Nonsense

Laura Kerry

Jake Wachtel’s home, he says, is The Open Road. In this spirit, he has adopted the word “walk” in his stage name and many of the sounds he has encountered on his travels into his music. As Walktell, the artist plays kaleidoscopic psych pop that incorporates a wide array of instruments familiar and unfamiliar to most in a Western audience: ukulele, mandolin, sarangi, hulusi, tro, sueng, baglamas, and gunbri, to name a few.

If that list of instruments has left you feeling a little disoriented, you’re now in the right frame of mind to watch Walktell’s new video for his song “Nonsense.” Written in Mumbai and shot in Guangzhou, China, it illustrates the feeling of trying to process the volume of people in the foreign cities around him. Made up of one continuous, lo-fi shot, the video places the viewer in the perspective of the artist as he walks through the masses of commuters in the 14-million-person city. Wachtel’s face dips in and out of the frame, singing listlessly as forges on; the camera pans dizzyingly; and unsuspecting strangers dodge the camera and the tall, curly-haired American man headed their way.

Also disorienting is the Walktell’s version of a lyric video. Though it includes all the lyrics in the right order and timing, the words do more to confuse than guide. This partially results from the words themselves, whose chorus—”Is there any value to nonsense / I couldn't float a flock of fidgeting fibers / But I'll try to assign meaning once again”—might be the most comprehensible string in a song that take great pleasure in playing with the sounds of syllables (“irascible bullies bellowing,” “I can’t keep my cortex courting lies”). The text itself doesn’t help, though; highly stylized in translucent neon, its Ts curl into Bs in lines that dart out of order across the screen. A song about the futility of discovering meaning, “Nonsense” and its video are delightfully bewildering. As Walktell would probably agree, though, there’s joy in the journey.