James Ferraro has become one of the most divisive artists in underground music, although he didn't start out that way. Ferraro has released an extraordinary amount of material since 2004, but you can divide his career into two parts, with 2011's solo album Far Side Virtual as the turning point. As half of noise and drone duo the Skaters and altered tape constructivists Lamborghini Crystal, he enjoyed wide acclaim, but Far Side Virtual saw him equally dismissed as a charlatan and lauded as a visionary.
Talking about FSV in an interview with The Wire, Ferraro called it “an opera for our consumption civilization.” In his work since, it became apparent that Ferraro's interest in the representation of capitalism coincided with a preoccupation with some of its most prestigious and powerful manifestations: namely modern hip-hop. Inhale C-4 $$$$$$$, a mixtape released under the alias Bebetune$ that swiftly followed FSV, and Silica Gel, released in 2012 as Bodyguard, made this clear. By the time Ferraro got to Sushi at the end of 2012, a physical release under his own name, the shapeshift was complete. He had reached a unique and beguiling electronic body music heavily informed by commercial R&B and hip-hop, but somehow contained in his own distroid soundworld.
With new mixtape Cold, that restless creativity remains in forward motion. Ferraro's consistency lies mostly in his ability to confound, a disconnect of simultaneous banality and profundity that has threaded through his output more clearly than any allegiance to a particular sound or genre. For example, one of the most obvious shifts on Cold is his singing. It's on almost every track-- you can't have R&B without it, right? He still doesn't sing very well, but while occasionally painful, the Auto-Tuned balladry is fascinating in its oddness. This style of vocal is almost always reserved for professionals, and hearing Ferraro's amateur but earnest attempts are endearing. Not unlike his pre-FSV solo period when he made an aesthetic out of the hyper-compressed sound of poor bitrate mp3s, it's almost as if he gets a kick out of doing things he knows he shouldn't, upending clearly defined and accepted notions of taste.
The production, on the other hand, is accomplished-- and unusual. One pleasure of the record is the moments where his instinctive, unquantized, sensual funk materializes. Another is in its weird samples: a single coin falling to the floor, what sounds like a sword being drawn from a scabbard, the muffled unintelligibility of distorted voices in the background, digital rain-- all of those appear on “Slave to the Rain”, topped by lyrics like, “Wanna have babies/ And you shower them in cash.” Some might be tempted to compare it to the tongue-in-cheek pop of HD Boyz, but that would be unfair: that Dis Magazine-fueled project was never sincere, and featured experimental artists aping the mainstream. But here this essentially experimental artist clearly manifests mainstream influences.
If the text on the press release for this mixtape (“Cold is the repetition and consumption of hedonism that cannot represent or replace one night of love... Cold outlines the human drama in a nihilistic era.") is taken at face value, Ferraro is still pondering the affect of capitalism. But his interests have been redirected musically,and he touches on the restless groove of two-step, bass swells of dubstep, the tightly sequenced synths of techno, dive-bar lounge blues, and symphonic string arrangements. And while he doesn't really flaunt the vaporwave sound he practically gave birth to with FSV, he does acknowledge it, even going so far as to call a song “Vapor Weight”. But the point with James Ferraro isn't so much that he's constantly switching genres. It's more that he's actually inventing them as he goes along, or changing them so much they become reinvented. Hypnagogic pop, vaporwave, distroid-- he's had a crucial role in them all. Within his sphere, Ferraro is one of the most important artists of his generation though, as Cold demonstrates, it's hard to get a handle on his career from any single release.
