River Yarra #Lucky #Boy EP

In 1978, Brian Eno started what would become his seminal Ambient series with Music for Airports. If he was to add a fifth volume to the series in 2018, he would probably call it “Music for Social Medias”, wouldn’t he? We’re not 100% sure that this is about to happen, so, instead, we take the lead and have Oz’s River Yarra giving his own take on Music for Social Medias (and the result doesn’t sound at all like ambient music).
At least, we might accurately call it “music from social medias”, as it sometimes feel it’s been generated by a possessed creative algorithm. Starting with the opening track, Aorsom Wislhs (whose name must have been given by a deficient Messenger chat bot), one might feel disoriented by the extremely weird and wonky lead melody. The melody of Sli Ggogg (sic) – the slow jam opening the flip side – is equally uneven; add to this the unsettling (slightly) human-sounding voice and you’re in for a trip to the Uncanny Valley.
But there’s a sense of non-human randomness infusing all of these four songs. Take the intensely mesmerizing Respiration Alternée with Elen Huynh, for example: there’s a high probability that its lyrics come from some random meditation tutorial found on YouTube, translated into French by an anxious Google Translate bot, eager to bring some (cheap?) spirituality to IRL dancefloors.
With this debut EP, the Ozzie producer succeeds in rounding up disparate & dubious elements together in a serious way without departing from a non-serious attitude - the record even rounds off with a very “put your hands in the air” moment with Space Gekko’s ravey sirens. “Music to party on the River Yarra to” (just Google it).