Earlier this year, the L.A.-via-D.C. singer Kelela spoke about the challenges of performing electronic music in a live setting. "I feel like I just want my emotions to be at the forefront of my performance, and if anything distracts from that, I’m in trouble," she told The Cut, riffing on the experience of seeing the veteran of digital feelings, Björk, on stage. That kind of resonant tactility also goes a long way when it comes to listening to electronic music, and Kelela’s 2013 release Cut 4 Me indicates that, whether she was aware of it or not, this ability to transpose intimacy to music has been part of her wheelhouse from the start.
Her new EP, Hallucinogen, uses the gristle and guts of feeling as a thematic base for exploring new textures in music. Like Cut 4 Me, the sound is like being enveloped in the black-lit silence of the intro to Belly: it’s a sensuous, sensitive, hi-definition approach to R&B. Some of the producers are the same (Kingdom, Nguzunguzu’s MA) and some are new (Arca, Kendrick and Drake collaborator DJ Dahi), but these partnerships hew to what’s now the Kelela template: soulful songs with unpredictable, assaultive drum patterns, whorls of whimsical synthesizer effects, and so much processing on the vocals that it sounds like you’re listening to a transmission from tomorrow. The deconstructed clatter of FKA twigs—who also worked with Arca—might be from another dimension altogether, but Kelela, whose music feels like there is blood flowing through it, looks to a future with a decidedly human shape.
Kingdom, who co-produces the EP’s sole uptempo track, "Rewind", is a student of Timbaland’s slick approach to pop-R&B. Alongside Kelela and Nugget, he channels that, as well as the bounce of Jazze Pha, for the song, which is the EP’s lead single and a showpiece for Kelela’s much-improved singing. "All the Way Down" pulls rap producer DJ Dahi into completely different terrain; the shudders of hi-hat trills provide the seams, but the print he’s working with is studded with twinkling synths that gives way to a droning. Dahi’s beat doesn’t explicitly recall Aaliyah, but Kelela's voice does—she riffs on the melody and phrasing and pillow talk-closeness of the late singer’s 1999 track, "I Don’t Wanna" (incidentally, a Jazze Pha production).
More pressing is the existential rumble that bookends the EP. "All I know is all I’ve got/ Is it hard to face all we lost?," Kelela questions on the desolate opener "A Message". Arca’s hollow kickdrums prod the song along at a ragged crawl, allowing Kelela to wring out a melody with her voice while he fills the space with funereal, yawping organ-like patches. It’s the only song on the EP, aside from closer "The High", in which Kelela sings without heavy reverb or effects, heightening its somber quality.
"And I’ll do anything for the high," she urges a placid lover on the latter, the piercing hook contrasting with her hushed verses. In content—and maybe even in producer Gifted & Blessed’s tranquil heartbeat—it’s a song that feels spiritually descended from the Weeknd. And there's another connection: writing on Pitchfork about the Weeknd’s music and its inherited ambience, Hannah Giorgis described a "long Ethiopian musical legacy of tortured pining," and it’s instructive to think that Kelela—whose family is also from Ethiopia—may have absorbed a similar propensity for mournful music.
If you consider that Kelela’s roots are in soul and R&B, the emotional side of her music makes sense. The mechanics of dance music might inspire feelings in listeners, but within the genre, overrun with the egos and opinions of "bro-teurs," her emotions are revolutionary. She is a transparent creator, unafraid of tainting the canvases of her mostly male collaborators with the imperfect, vulnerable contents of her brain and heart.
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