Against assimilation: COOL FOR YOU’s ‘HOW TO MOVE SO CASUALLY?’ subverts dance music convention & passes undetected

, 29 May 2019
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COOL FOR YOU (aka Vika Kirchenbauer) is releasing album COMMUNAL MESS via Berlin’s Creamcake on May 31, with a video for track ‘HOW TO MOVE SO CASUALLY?’ premiering on AQNB today. The Berlin-based producer dropped her MOOD MANAGEMENT EP through the label in 2017, which interrogated the notion of community and participation using warped and pitched samples of Sacred Harp choral singing from the Deep South of the United States.

COMMUNAL MESS expands on Kirchenbauer’s repertoire with white Christian choir music more generally, while producing music outside the 4/4 beat conventions of electronic dance to explore ideas of queer visibility and what it means to ‘pass’ versus assimilate in public space. Recently released tracks from the full-length debut include ‘OBJECTS AND SOLIDITY‘ and ‘UNITED IN SHAME‘, which take on a softer tone from the earlier work. ‘HOW TO MOVE SO CASUALLY?’ cuts and slices through the celestial atmospherics of its harmonious vocal samples, creating discord without quite revealing itself as such. All this while the accompanying music video builds on the monochrome thermal vision of earlier COOL FOR YOU films with an image of the artist transposed over footage of the choir in question, depicted in pink-and-blue two-tone colour.**

COOL FOR YOU’s COMMUNAL MESS album is out via Berlin’s Creamcake on May 31, 2019.