Rabit resets his sound in kaleidoscopic, cinematic dimensions on ‘Life After Death’, an absorbingly psychedelic, pop-wise and fractally refined follow-up to his trio of boundary-pushing albums that bridged the gaps between DJ Screw and Coil, grime and the GRM, also inspired by Surrealist art, Enigma, and Japanese Ambient artists like Hiroshi Yoshimura...
Divined and constructed over the last two years between studios in Houston, TX and Paris, France, ‘Life After Death’ is Eric C. Burton a.k.a. Rabit’s most concerted effort at working deeper into the cracks between genres, so deep in fact that stylistic taxonomy becomes obsolete and sonic alchemy is now firmly the aim of the game. Across its 12 tracks Rabit essentially offers himself as a conductive vessel between dreams and machines, a kind of dark interpreter and interlocutor between metaphysical spirits and the material world.
‘Life After Death’ is still patently Rabit, but a tempered version of himself - one that’s clearly coming, or has come to terms with himself and what he wants from his music, which now finds him moving away from relatively obvious pattern recognition to a finer graded consolidation of styles, meters, textures and feelings. In his words “the probing and revisiting of genres in electronic music felt fetishistic and limiting and wasn’t the best way for me to communicate”, adding ”…I think the occult term is interesting because I don’t hear this explored in music in ways that I find relevant. I leave it to time and the intelligent listener to make up their own meaning.”
Within this wider yet finer semantic framework, Rabit elaborates an unfathomably mystic sound akin to a movie score without the visual aspect, conjuring a kind of modern sonic answer to the percptions and notions expressed in Alejandro Jodorowsky or Stanley Kubrick movies. It’s succinct parts each connote the feeling of distinct, interrelated scenes traversing from keening synthetic chorales to impendingly doomy orchestrations, knots of gnarled distortion and isolationist instrumental grime études, with each finding a Cerberus-like biting point between rawness and deliberate, filigree detail, or the ultimate abstraction of death and the thizzing surreality of waking life...
