SHLOHMO

“Are you doing well?”

(you should really listen to this while you read)

Henry Laufer looks like a thrift store mannequin. He’s dressed in sweatpants, white New Balance shoes, oversized jean jacket and a bucket hat pulled low over a fluorescent green wig and dark sunglasses. He futzes with the microphone - set comically low - and then gives up, speaking to the audience bent-over at the waist with his head tilted sideways.  

“Good. I am also well.”

Shlohmo has always been something of an enigma, walking the line between experimental hip-hop and emotional ambient. He’s come a long way musically since I first listened to his  2011 EP Places, a lo-fi chillout tape heaped with vinyl static and overlapping murmurs, beautifully garnished with acoustic guitar and warm pads. His latest release The End retains a textural approach to sound design, employing analog tape distortion, discordant layers of feedback and droning, melting guitars to dredge up an atmosphere thick with anxiety and lament. It’s a far cry from the last time I saw him perform live, and I’m more than excited to see this neon apocalypse play out.

If his candor between songs feels robotic, he becomes a machine struggling with sentience during his set. His face upturned, framed by his glowing wig, he channels despair, apathy and hope through his guitar. He turns his back on us frequently, lost in a crumbling world all his own. When the music allows, he lets his guitar hang and, one hand on the decks, hits a vape hard.

Those of us in witness sway gently under the punishing drums and acidic feedback that fills Holocene’s small upper performance area. For a moment it feels like we’ve been buried deep, slowly ascending towards a distant light before hooks find purchase and drag rusty clouds overhead. Eyes close, and twisting synthesizers play to themselves like eroding records of a long lost civilization. I can hear a final distress call forging out into the dark, away from a burning world - radio channels slowly overlapping, mixing messages of despair and forgiveness. 

As I open my eyes for the first time in what feels like hours, I see Shlohmo cheers someone in the front row, touching their Juuls together briefly before sinking back into the music. It’s a perfect moment of garish humor against the dour soundscapes, a fitting symbol for the strangeness of this concert.

To me, Shlohmo sounds like melting nostalgia and corroding innocence. Laufer takes these distorted moments, fragmented feelings, and distills it all down into a warm molasses scattered through with shining detritus. Familiar and disorienting at once, his music pulls back from a happy childhood memory to reveal something dark and many-legged curled about its periphery, a smoky red sky visible outside.

Tracks like The Best of Me and Still Life (from The End) seek to return to the quiet of his earliest works, painting scenes of tranquility amongst the debris. It’s easy to mistake the falling ash for snow, the deathly stillness as a peaceful repose. This complexity of texture and sincerity of human experience, all without a single spoken word, is what draws me back to this artist time and time again.

Open a corona, charge your vape and grab a spot on the couch next to us to watch the apocalypse.

Don’t worry, it’s not all sad. Listen to The End - it Bumps well with mushrooms clouds, a comfy couch and a cold corona.

♥ Zach