Visionist: Safe

Louis Carnell, if you’re into neat categorizations, is a grime producer. But his debut album Safe squirms out of all such neat categories. Hailing from suburban south London, Carnell is of grime’s second generation, scholarly about its history but not hidebound by its rules. His more conventional productions have leant towards the energetic and darkside—see his 2013 track “Snakes”, the murky swing of its beats accompanied by the crack of gunshots. But increasingly, Visionist has shed conspicuous genre trappings and shucked off layers, too, tending towards something more minimal, introspective and haunted. His two I’m Fine EPs, released on the New York-based label Lit City Trax in 2013 and 2014, were ethereal and virtually beatless, barely grime at all. They explored, said Carnell, the five stages of grief—the journey from denial to anger to acceptance, known to psychiatrists as the Kübler-Ross model. About the precise nature of his loss, though, Carnell was keeping schtum.

Since, Carnell has joined forces with Bill Kouligas of the Berlin-based label PAN to create a new sub-label Codes—a sort of reboot of his earlier label Lost Codes, dedicated to outliers in the grime matrix. And now the debut Visionist album appears on PAN, and comes with a theme not unlike I’m Fine—billed as “a personal portrait of anxiety” that traces the onset and passing of a panic attack. This subject came as a little bit of a surprise, as I interviewed Carnell in 2014 and he struck me as coolly self-assured in that way that you might easily read as arrogance. Still, reflect on the crisp meticulousness of his music—those deft flurries of icy melody, vocal samples diced as if by scalpel—and perhaps you can perceive a telltale tension in his hand, a yearning for precision and control.

As with the I’m Fine EPs, Safe finds Carnell working extensively with the human voice. Broadly, his approach with vocals recalls that of Burial: both filch acapellas from pop and R&B records before bending them out of shape and turning them to new ends. In Burial’s productions, though, vocal lines generally remain vocal lines, while what Carnell does with them feels rather more baroque. On Safe, these voices are assembled as melody lines – cloned, layered and pitched way up until they form a fluttering polyphony, or glitter like jewels in a crown. (Perhaps a closer reference point for Carnell’s sampling technique would be Fatima Al-Qadiri’s Asiatisch; indeed, the pair collaborated on an earlier Visionist track, “The Call”, their breathy melodies arranged as point and counterpoint).

The track titling—“Tired Tears, Awake Fears”, “Let Me In”, “Constraint”—indicates something of the territory that Safe seeks to cover, a landscape in which love equals imprisonment and feelings skirted or repressed. Around beautiful melodies, Carnell arranges more dissonant sounds to imply pain or unease. On the opening “You Stayed”, a diva's cry is encased in a prison of cascading, pointillist melodies and queasy timbres. On “Victim”, metallic percussion pounds without mercy, while up in the higher registers, synthesized strings sketch out a sad elegy and voices curl into gasps, sobs and whimpers. Sometimes, vocal lines repeat themselves, numbly circling as if frozen in some kind of Stygian limbo—see the closing refrain of “Too Careful To Care”, a cry of “In my head…” that repeats over and over, pitched alternately high, low and midrange, as if in search of some sort of escape route. Elsewhere, Carnell’s disembodied cries strike more graceful notes, as if their wordlessness allows them to softly alight on truths over which mortal sentences clumsily stumble.

Key to Carnell’s style is a sense of spaciousness, although Safe is more filled out, less minimal than the I’m Fine material. Still, it is seldom predictable. The breathtaking, gothic “1 Guarda” moves forth on ticking hats and dull rumbles that sound like rotating granite pillars, and where there are beats, they upset expectations. Floor-trembling bass bombs erupt spasmodically throughout “Constraint” and "Safe", while “Let Me In” rolls forth on the sort of booming trap undercarriage you might expect to hear blasting from a passing jeep—although everything above that is a mirage, a weave of woozy strobes and hiccupping voices. Here and there, Carnell does pare things right back, and this is where Safe is at its very prettiest. “Sleep Luxury” is a washed-out grime lullaby adorned by twinkling harp and the ripple of running water, while the cold chimes of “Sin-cere” appear to fantasize a music box sculpted wholly from ice.

This year has been a banner year for producers working at grime’s outer reaches. On the one hand, the likes of M.E.S.H. and Rabit have released records that intensify grime’s alien skitter into something harsh, mechanical, and abstracted. In parallel, the “weightless” tendency, pioneered by Mumdance and Logos’ Different Circles imprint, pulls away layers, lifts grime off the road and into the stratosphere. Safe draws on elements of both, but more than any of his peers, Carnell has succeeded in making a statement that feels not just a flexing of experimental techniques, but something rich and human, too. Perhaps its closest recent antecedent is Arca’s Xen, another record dealing with the desire to shed one’s skin, slip free of this prison of the flesh. Diaphanous of texture but heavy of spirit, Safe revolves upon this tension, the pressure point of a soul under strain.