#DarkArc0017
Back with a banger. Lillit returns in visceral style
DarkArc 001, our first ever release, was Lillit Vega, alone, at the very start of everything The Datura Tapes would become. "The Great CollideHer" wasn't just her debut single — it was the first record to ever appear on The Tapes, full stop.
Then came Holiday, catalogue #012, a howl of emancipation, powered by a relentless Balkan backbeat, acid basslines scattering spiked shadows, telling her toxic partner that they were done.
How could we top that?
DarkArc 017 is her answer. It might also, depending on how you read it, be a distress signal from the deep dark well of 'remember, all fame is fleeting'.
"MirrorMirrors" and the basement studio that built it treated the return the way you'd treat an actual emergency — which is to say, badly, at strange hours, and all in. When it sounds like there's an air-raid on, you don't expect the noise to be IN the bunker.
“Is it Laibach? Maybe it’s more Boney M from the future, which… all told… is even better”
Boasts in the Machine
It started with a synth, or synths. Specifically, D16's Lush 2. The Roland SH-101 was the first synth darkStylus goofed around on, and this beast un-hingedly stacked eight of them together (!) So they ran its arpeggiator until it broke into what's been called, without much exaggeration, "basically armageddon": a loop that had stopped behaving like a musical part and started behaving like weather.
Lillit heard it and pulled it somewhere else. Working from her own Armenian and Sicilian musical ear (who pays for that wedding?) Lillit blocked out the building patches, and zeroed in on the bit-crushed OBX box-beat, rolling out fierce rap ennui adjacent poetry, haunting dream-asides and acid invective against her party guests — 'will they ever leave?'
Then there's even, a la mode, a recurring vocal guest threaded through the track, a deep, Laibach-toned voice that surfaces and recedes underneath everything else. Getting it right took a long time. As darkStylus gripes, "We tried to make a vocal sample that was like Laibach down a mineshaft, so we filtered female voices, trained AI singers, crushed formants and all sorts and threw it into a stack, then did the same to that! Is it Laibach? Maybe it's more Boney M from the future, which… all told… is even better."
When Too Much is Not Enough
Lillit was played the full, unfiltered rough scratch of the track before she ever opened her mouth — her own description of it was "like 5 radio stations from my youth in Armenia playing at once through a load of FX pedals and a huge PA. Even by darkStylus standards, this was pretty fucked up." She didn't want that in her ears while she sang. She asked for just the stripped drum loop instead, and sang to the idea of the track rather than the track itself.
One take. No redo. Inside it, without ever breaking character, she moves through rap, soul, and dance phrasing like they're the same instrument. "The dynamics of her words and phrasing, it's just insane," is how darkStylus put it afterward — and there's a reason the arrangement around her sounds like it's straining to keep up: "you have to keep the beats moving to get out of the way." Her vocal pyrotechnics were relentless enough that even the gnarliest acid basslines had to get out of the way too.
It took three days in a Florence studio in August to get there — days that, by all accounts, involved underwear, a fan, fizzy water, and Rei running sandwiches and iced tea up the stairs to people who had stopped being able to leave the room. Lillit herself had already left by the time the track was finished, headed to Palermo, to family who — her words — "have the good sense to own pools in August."
And Mujiki mastered all the tracks, hard. "You know," she says, bizarrely quoting Swedish-Strat-super-shredder Yngwie Malmsteen, "people say less is more. That never makes sense to me. By definition, more is more. Sure, we leave only what the track needs in the mix. Just the bass, beats, echoes, FX we need.
It's just, well that, it turns out, was all of it."
And The Rest of Me, Got…Waylaid
Artwork and limited edition Mirrorz vinyl
"MirrorMirrors" is set inside a house that's stopped being fun a long time ago, and can't figure out how to stop. There's just a central-casting of the beautiful and ruined, cycling through the same night on a time bounce loop, where the next morning just sees your über drop you back at exactly the same spot.
Who is Purdey playing in her ranked matches? Why did Jane get her own room? Has anyone seen Steve-O's movie? What did Laurie's dad do that they will kill him for?
Who is 'The Boy' and why does everyone watch the clock for his arrival? And what exactly, does he 'deliver'?
Ultimately. Who knows when it all started?
"I don't remember much, but I remember one thing — I used to be, like, a singer or something."
Lillit herself knows that somewhere in all this, she had a cat, and a career. Until…
"Someone knocked. And we played. And all of me just got…delayed"
The first primal mix of this bottle-episode of a track is called 'This Is Not An Exit', the last line of, approximately enough, American Psycho.
When grotesques are trapped in a cycle of moral voids and empty pleasure, the curse is to know this degenerate reality is of your own making, and worse, it was you who threw away the key.
The Specchio kimono from fugacefugace
These Are the Wonders We Deliver, Deliver
If you know the NxN Collective, as ever this track lands with more than a simple audio release.
fugacefugace are delivering three separate pieces: a mini movie, the vinyl artwork, and a garment called Specchio, Italian for "mirror," continuing the same naming instinct that gave Crossroads its Viaggio and Bivio artefacts. Studio head Rei says it's the kimono that brings Purdey luck in her crank-filled Call of Duty marathons. We can't wait to see it.
All three land the day of release.
Credits
DarkArc 017 · Recorded on The Datura Tapes
Lillit Vega — vocals, lyrics, co-production.
darkStylus — programming, arrangement, vocal textures.
Artwork, film, and Specchio kimono — Rei Zarhane / fugacefugace.
Curated by Mujiki @The Tapes, for the NxN Collective.
"MirrorMirrors" is out Friday, September 25, on The Datura Tapes.