Editor’s Pick: Aircode’s ‘Effortless EP’ for Alien Jams
Sweedish producer Aircode is the last addition to record label Alien Jams, with a new EP, effortless (Alien Jams, 2020). Aircode works with sounds extracted from various corners of the electronic experimental field. Using manipulated phone recordings, melodies of its own logic and unexpected rhythms, creating a challenging, melancholic, dubby and ever-changing but longing sound.
The artist shares that the tracks in the EP were written throughout a year of sleep deprivation, reflects a period of disorientation, social claustrophobia, and the unbridled feeling of a loss of focus. A navel-gazing introspective struggle of feeling apathetic and drowsy, yet simultaneously restless and constantly moving. Fractured machine fragments and riddled sleep-deprived speech alongside manipulated drum samples, distorted guitar, are symptomatic of her captivating work in electronic experimental music so far.
Using self-generated ‘logical’ melodies, unexpected rhythms, and phone and vocal recordings, the EP offers a challenging, melancholic and ever-changing aesthetic and a sound reminiscent sometimes of Jason Lescallet and even a more deconstructed DJ Screw.
Piecing together spontaneous text, and moments of glitch, like an anxious machine, or someone on auto-pilot, the tracks represent this mixture of apathy and a scattered mind, she explains, on the verge of hyperventilation with constantly changing rhythms as you feel your heartbeat and breath loud and out of sync. The melodies are also somewhat dipping in energy, never reaching the whole way up, but giving up and falling down.
Dry my face up
It’s easy, why
Heavy air
Pacing around the third floor
Your voices intrude
On my skin
Must be fed
Accelerating ahead
It’s easy at a high pace
I don’t believe in effort
The third time
Don’t shake
If it’s not enough
