The illustrious British producer’s latest releases highlight their creative streak, with a diverse array of electronica
The surrealist cover of Vegyn and Francis Hornsby’s new spoken-word album
“When the hell is Frank Ocean releasing a new album?” I don’t know, but Vegyn might. The 31-year-old UK-based glitch-hop and prog-house extraordinaire, best known for producing Frank Ocean’s Endless and Blonde, has been steadily pumping out projects over the past four years. Now having made his own label, 3 albums, 3 EPs, and 2 mixtapes—with one a staggering two-and-a-half-hours long—it’s safe to say that Vegyn’s taken Frank Ocean’s silence as a message to double down on his sound. Admirably, Vegyn isn’t simply copying the same production formula across all these projects. Ranging from ambient house-thumping ragers to his own disconcertingly minimal (yet melodic) take on intelligent dance music, Vegyn’s unabashedly pushes his songwriting in new directions. In the last two months alone, he’s ricocheted between avant-garde poetry to prog-house with surprising dexterity.
The Head Hurts but the Heart Knows the Truth—the aforementioned ‘avant-garde poetry’ album—is perhaps the biggest change in sound Vegyn’s made to date. The trip-hop-driven album unleashes a hurricane of melancholically booming synths yet is calmly centered around the narrator’s psychosis-propelled spoken-word poetry. The stream-of-consciousness lyrics, written by Francis Hornsby and delivered by AI, revolve around sardonic stories about the narrator’s past lives, detailing their thoughts on music, love, spring onions, and everything in between. “I used to take my breakfast off of a mirror / Now I just walk around and stare at people at the park” are the unwelcoming first two lines in the project. The surrealistic implications of ‘staring’ juxtapose the familiarity of simply people watching. It’s clear the narrator is unwell.
The album also marks Vegyn’s departure from minimalistic-glitch-hop-inspired beats, though he makes his ambient influences clear: “Truisms 4 Dummies” and “Bucket Listener” are Boards of Canada worship, with synth and guitar lines that ground the listener with the weight of emotional memory. This style of instrumentation lends itself perfectly to a spoken-word album. Cathartic strings and synths dot (and at times swallow) the instrumentation of “Business Opportunities,” giving the AI’s emotionless voice faux depth. Hornsby expertly weaves between stories of drug abuse and lost love in this track as well, making it easy to get lost in the narrator’s musings. “I felt happy in a secret way / Naked obviously, / Angry that I could hear voices / But really, / I was at peace with everything.” Some lines cut through the mix and demand the listener’s attention, like a stopped clock being right three times a day.
While Vegyn does demonstrate he’s able to produce a compelling album in this style, the narrator’s storytelling can be too cryptic at times, giving the album moments of embarrassing bathos. “Of all the onions in the world / I prefer spring onions,” the narrator interjects in “Truisms 4 Dummies,” right after discussing how life makes them feel “both dead and alive.” Contrary to its purpose, these intrusive comments don’t highlight the narrator’s deteriorating mental condition, they instead clumsily show that Vegyn has yet to find his footing in this sub-genre of trip-hop. Despite its kitschy attributes, there’s a lot to love about Head; it explores a style of electronica rarely indulged in. Forgoing his pattern of musical reinvention, I hope Vegyn returns to the album to smooth out its rough edges.
Less than two months after Head’s release, Vegyn’s new single “Makeshift Tourniquet” made for a particularly surprising listen given its lack of experimentation. It begins with spacey house-inspired synths pulsating in and out over a sample of a man discussing “the creative process.” His words are masked by the flow of synths, only discernible when they ebb back. As the synth’s reverb starts spiraling out of control, the song plunges the listener into the depths of a frigid and sparsely populated underground electronic venue; a crispy drum loop replaces the ethereal echoes which are now just a backdrop to the song’s new head snapping anthem. Where a lesser artist would have let the synths engulf the mix in a saccharine chant, Vegyn’s subversion of the dance formula forces listeners to perk their ears and focus on the production’s minute changes.
Despite not seeking to redefine genres like Vegyn’s other works, “Makeshift Tourniquet” is an incredibly gripping track which sits right in the middle of prog-house’s oft-explored motifs–apart from its surprisingly minimalist drop. This, to me, is a welcome change. Partially as the result of his reinvention, Vegyn oftentimes struggles with developing depth to some tracks. Head’s small bumps in production and layout are clear growing pains from Vegyn’s introduction to the spoken-word sub-genre. Some sections of his other albums (Only Diamonds Cut Diamonds) are also so minimal, I can’t help but wonder if there’s supposed to be more to the mix. Sometimes reinvention is unnecessary. For Vegyn’s next release, let’s hope he continues his foray onto already-established sound.