V.A. Apocope

The C.A.N.V.A.S label assemble a cast of mutant pop oddities featuring warped takes on Gaelic-language mumblecore cloudrap, modern shoegaze and computer noise from Elvin Brandhi, Lugh, and Olan Monk, Nadah El Shazly, Billy Bultheel (Anne Imhof), Alpha Maid and more. With ‘Apocope’, the exploratory label interrogate the limits of pop music’s meaning in the age of a slow burning apocalypse, and under the shadow of a rising hyper-pop zeitgeist. The compilation’s title literally means “the omission of the final sound of a word”, as in the way people naturally elide or trim words to fit the flow of speech, and with it, conveys more meaning than the literal words themselves - a sense of style, time, and place that pop music has long been key in shaping. In this context, the artists draw very canny links between the onomatopoeia of shoegaze and mumbecore rap, between lonely bedroom blues strung over nearly a century of amplified woes, but expressing a sound very much for the here and now of the scorched-in-advance 2020s.