Description
2024, 12″ EP, Sheik N Beik Records.
IVVY, aka Madi Levine, makes music for heady dance floors. They layer in squelching synths to disfigured techno rhythms influenced by a youth spent at renegade warehouse parties in the Midwest. They have been on constant tour for a while now and left their mark everywhere, from Hot Mass (PGH) to On Earth (Toronto), while also teaching production and studio management workshops at events such as Kremfest 2019.
Madi also organises the experimental ambient music festival Ground Hum at home in Seattle and says the songs on this EP are a means of emotional processing. Violence, oppression, drugs, sex, growth, hope, and deep magic are explored through futurist techno tracks. “This EP represents a new era of healing for me, tracks created through a need to reflect on the way trauma has shaped my creative work. For me these tracks are musical building blocks to a better version of myself.”
The compelling ‘Top Me’ opens up with pulsing deep techno drums, bass, and loopy vocal fragments that bring plenty of edge. ‘2 Balloons for 15’ is more clanking and textured, with percussion ripping up the minimal rhythm and synths growing in intensity next to warped vocal mutterings. ‘On Some ‘Rear Window’ Shit’ is another deliciously dark and driving take on mutant techno with twisted metal and whirring machine
sounds, and ‘It Only Takes One Brick’ is powered by distorted bass rumbles straight from a sleazy warehouse and peppered with twitchy stabs and menacing voices. Remixer Bergsonist is Morocco-born but NYC-based. She explores notions of identity, memory, and social politics in her work. She is the founder of the community resource Pick Up The Flow and the Bizaarbazaar label, and hosts monthly shows on NTS Radio. Her first take on ‘It Only Takes One Brick’ is gloopy and off-balance – a perfectly heavyweight house cut with vast kicks and tripped-out details. The second one is just as thumping, but this time with a broken beat pattern and more sci-fi synth details.
A trio of digital-only cuts then closes out the EP – the stripped-back but booming techno-paranoia of ‘Eric’s House 3AM’, the glitchy and industrial textures of lineal banger ‘Gives Me Hope For Us’ and the spooky
synths and eerie energy of the urgent ‘Witchcraft.’
This most direct yet detailed EP explores plenty of fresh techno ground.
