This isn’t a scientist’s blueprint for mathematically optimal dance music; UK based Italian-Ivorian artist Ehua is clear that her process is guided by intuition, but the puzzle of her music is informed by intersecting practices and deep research all the same. Her desk the dancefloor. From the Ancient Greek phrase comes the title for her debut album: “panta rhei”, “everything flows”. The bass pulsates in a sweaty river and the drums gyrate with movement and release; life changes and it’s all included.
“They don’t fit”, she repeats on ‘NYC’ over filtered, blocky piano chords, “even when I’m spinning around, drifting, dizzy.” She’s talking about thoughts, but she could as well be describing her method of splashing sounds together, genres that might not ordinarily fit until you rotate them. Whether it’s breakbeat, UK bass, techno, ambient, pop, Ehua refracts all sounds and styles into a curious mixture of musical materials and sonic strategies. Her vocals are reversed on tracks like ‘Albicocca’, born out of a desire to hide and escape vulnerability while yearning to explore her voice, yet it somehow only adds to the album’s endearing jigsaw, pulling from her background in linguistics to enact a novel grammar of dance music.
And while plenty of dance music gets labelled as sculptural, Ehua really traverses topology and texture with these tracks. Her vaporific vocals sweep through jittery pulsations and broken rhythms as she opts for a convergence between organic and synthetic sounds, where the pulled bass and brushed drums of nu jazz are transported into thick robust rhythms, with percussion slapping like tree leaves or a basket of acorns. Curious about that person on the other side of the club as much as she is about the world, her melodies seem to revolve across multiple layers as she makes her way over to connect.
Freeing dance music from Euclidean space, Ehua explores her own idiosyncratic structures and patterns on her debut album Panta Rei.
