-
"Compulsion is the force at the center of Emily Allan’s singular music. She is a rapper, but the music on her debut album, Clanging, bobs and weaves off the coast of hip-hop. It is dance music—of a distinctly downtown-NYC vintage—but provides an emotional shock to the system that might make you want to flee the club completely and withdraw from society. A whisper is as disconcerting as a scream; harrowing descriptions of psychological warfare are as funny as recognizable jokes. In her cosmic vocal fry, with the persuasiveness of some post-apocalyptic it girl, Allan beckons the listener to adopt a healthy regimen of self-flagellation, gaslighting, cubist sexual ideation, and abnegation of all social decorum. In Allan’s wild and visionary music, everything functional seems arbitrary, and we are better off hacking down language into jumbled shards than to keep saying the same things over and over.
This impulse emerges from a phenomenon that has plagued the Manhattan-based musician, writer, actor, and director throughout her life: She frequently finds herself locked in “mental loops” that cause her to rhyme half-nonsensically to herself. In a Wikipedia hole one day, she discovered that someone had given the effect a name in the late 19th century: clanging. On her debut album of the same name, she defines the term, as if pulling it from the yellowed pages of an old psychiatric treatise: “excessive illogical rhyming…symptomatic of an extreme state of psychosis.” On Clanging, therefore, Allan imagines rhyming as a symptom of a kind of disease, making blown-out party-rap a conduit for her most untethered and maniacally inspired thoughts. The album plays like a communication from a hedonistic doppelgänger, exploring every form of modern brain rot and detailing our basest urges." -Winston Cook Wilson
Built with Berta.me