Lately, there have been many YouTube videos about the need for people to use art to survive the world around us. Each one stresses the need for music to be its own artistic catharsis, for people to understand there is no time like the present to abandon the dreams of going mainstream and bring music back to its artsy roots—back to the people, as it were. To be fair, it does seem like the hold celebrities had on people is slowly and surely waning with time.
This phenomenon where artists are divorcing music from celebrities has happened ever since people on the internet planned a worldwide boycott by “blocking” any celebrity who fails to speak about Israel and Palestine. Soon, it stretched itself into an overall distrust of the rich and wealthy. (This brings us back to when in the 2010s, people wanted to trade in Justin Timberlake’s “Suit & Tie” for a trip to the “Thrift Shop” with Macklemore during a recession). So, with them out of view, regular degular people with recording DAWs, a smartphone camera, a microphone, ambition, and imagination can one day be the next big yet wholly relatable superstar like, say, Clairo. For now.
Enter Lagos, Nigeria producer, singer-songwriter, director, and DJ Seo. With many hands in many pies since 2019, Seo has worked on many projects, EPs, and albums that run the gamut from acoustic pop to synthpop to neo-psychedelia. She directs her own videos and even creates mixes to help provide an idea for the album’s vibe. Seo’s commitment to creating compelling art doesn’t count on her being bound to any specific style. .S.E.O.T.R.O.N.I.C.A., for example, is her third project this year and is a more stylistically intriguing project than the title may suggest. It is earth-rattling, mind-bending, the sound of stars dancing before they officially explode into thin air. But above all, it is electronic music sounding like nothing before it.
If the music video for the bass-rattling “Infinity,” where Seo serves face from sky view, doesn’t demonstrate her exercising DIY spirit, the music ought to. (Also, in various videos, Seo can be found full-bodied chilling in a bathing suit or employing a greenscreen.) The best way to describe .S.E.O.T.R.O.N.I.C.A. is audio dissociation. A rocketship liftoff into a dimension where harsh noise, electronica, and, sometimes, pop collide into a thick cloud of lo-fi production. For example, the explosive “Asterism” storms out the gate with a cherry bomb of bass and drums blown to Goliath-like proportions. Imagine if you will, a room where music is blasted at a maddening level, and such blinding intensity is the musical vibe. Added to that are more than wavey spacey synth bass chords, but chords that feel like wandering into the frightful nothing. Claustrophobic yet hypnotic. After such a forceful opener is the abstract “Spectroscopy” boasting arrhythmic drums, dark and dissonant synths, and glittery Fargo keys forming stars stretched amongst the endless pitch-black sky. Think someone blasting ambient Autechre or overstimulated Actress at full volume in their headphones, and you will be there.
“Brain Damage” is a brief yet effectively steady dance track with bubbly synths but is no less bonkers than the best of the ideas on hand. It’s a bopping track doubling as a moment of reprieve before sinking back into the echoey void that is “Infinity.” “Infinity,” as previously discussed is packed with explosive and blown-out minor-key bass, equally blown-out and fast-paced drums, and Seo’s soft, wanton vocals peaking in and out of the mix. .S.E.O.T.R.O.N.I.C.A. ends with the mysterious, bombastic, and turbulent “Advanced Seonometry.” Skittering cowbells and petrified string synths are all overpowered by the drums and bass. It ends the project on a note sure to keep overwhelming the senses before it fades into a synthetic sputter of what sounds like electronics that ran out of battery juice. No beautiful bow of an ending. No curtain call. The curtain is on fire.
Those who have sifted through her prolific and genre-apathetic output might feel a sense of both confusion and intrigue at .S.E.O.T.R.O.N.I.C.A. It is a project experimenting with texture, rhythm, melody, and many other things, but it isn’t so experimental that you can’t get anything out of the music. In a way, the album demonstrates the spirit of creating true art and captures the current zeitgeist by being raw, raging, dissociative, and, like most indie projects, overall unconcerned with outside influence and expectations.
