4 out of 5

Label: Africantape

Produced by: Alexis Gideon

It’s rare to say that I’m dreading listening to something. I mean, that’s really not fair: if you’re going in with that mindset, why subject yourself, and will that in any way lead to a helpful review?

That firstly assumes you’re the reviewy type, and then the other assumption-adjacent consideration there is that I “obligate” myself to some things by collecting music labels. So, yes, if I don’t want to listen to something – right, I won’t. Except if it’s on my labels, and then it has become exceedingly rare when there’s just something I can’t crack, and find my way in to. That’s kind of the point of label collecting, beyond finding a curator mentality that I believe aligns with my tastes: you’ll likely discover stuff you otherwise never would have. But still, still, inevitably fates will cross, and there’s that band or artist that, woof, you just can’t do.

Alexis Gideon’s Video Musics II somewhat falls in that category. While I think I can appreciate how it works as a live performance, watching the video with the score, or listening to the score separately, are just, for me, pretty unpleasant experiences. The music’s boom-bap laptop beats are fine; the looser, surreal electro doodlings are intriguing but too short to establish atmosphere; the brief intro / concluding tunes that rock out are awesome but similarly brief; and Gideon’s rapping is functional – sometimes impressive! – but when applied to narrative story-telling, creates the most cringeworthy dad raps and ‘tude. The animation lands in an unfortunate deadzone of being quirky without being unique, and is, like the music, too brief in its sequences to work as something you “watch,” as opposed to experience as an art piece. (Now you can factor in my general disdain for art music that’s sold as a music album.)

Okay! Now – Video Musics III. It’s… a lot of the same shtick: it’s based around a text; Gideon flatly raps; music alternates between relatively minimalistic beats and impressionistic washes of strings and other instruments; and there’s an accompanying video. And yet, this time it works really, really well.

I’m going to credit the main difference to the format: adapting / insprired by short stories from Lord Dunsany, it’s less required of Gideon to construct this as a longform narrative, and can instead approach each song (story) individually, while being mindful of how the thing fits / fitted together as a performance. That… that kinda sounds like how an album might normally be composed! (Indirectly, feel free to assume my general disdain for thematic, narrative albums.)

Video Musics III also leans much more into an organic sounds than II, and is much less reliant on Gideon’s raps to carry things. As I found his noodlings intriguing before, now that they’re given more space to become actual thoughts / songs, and there’s allowably more variance, we get a wider range of emotions, and the time to soak them up. And Gideon’s rapping flow is almost Aesop at times; the dude can be pretty quick, if his delivery is rather humorously flat and off-key, and the rhymes occasionally verge on cringe. But with those moments as punctuations, Alexis elsewhere explores how to manipulate his odd tone as another layer in the sounds, harmonizing with himself to bring melody out of particularly non-melodic moments. This is then mapped to a phalanx of surreal background noise brings that can bring the style closer to Bablicon or (when rapping) Soul-Junk, and actual cinematic moments to link us between more erratic stuff. Visually, ‘Oceans’ is also stronger, having a more compelling central conceit of creaky looking maquettes that get stuck against varying set pieces of either sensory imagery or actual plots; whether you’re following along or not, because it’s all shorter form, it’s much, much easier to accept what you’re seeing as, essentially, a music video.

Am I now a champion of Gideon’s? Probably not. This still verges on a type of outsider art I’m not sure I’d actively seek out, but whereas as II’s approach to this really made me desperate just to get through listening to it, I was happy to flip through Floating Oceans multiple times to better identify why it worked where the preceding volume did not. And maybe there was personal growth for Alexis, or maybe, as an artist, he chose what worked best for the piece, and I just lucked into a version that worked best for me as well. Most importantly: Video Musics III works as an album, justifying my time listening to it. There’s nothing really affecting about the stories, at least without my knowing the texts outside of this, but the delivery keeps you hooked while it’s happening, and for returnings appreciators, Alexis is still able to stick to his particular style.