Spectreview: LA Timpa – Modern Antics in a Deserted Place

Released: November 19, 2020

Experimental
(Electronic)
(Ambient)
(Alternative)

-GREEN-

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Nigerian-born, Toronto-based LA Timpa makes music that feels multi-scenic and collagist, like pieces ripped from the corners of photos and tessellated into a new locale. In that vein, Modern Antics in a Deserted Place juts out at odd angles, spiny in places and smooth in others. Its constant vocal splicing recalls Laurel Halo’s Dust on a comedown, and its textures are often equal parts soothing and nauseating. Throughout, the weight of suppression and captivity – internal and otherwise – seems to bubble underneath.

In “Quarterback” we’re thrust into disorientation, as the track’s cement mixer of chopped expectorations and cascading wood blocks plays out under Timpa’s mournful vocals. It’s not easy listening, but it is wildly original and peculiarly hypnotizing. The album follows suit in “Deaf in Three Corners,” a clanging jam anchored by a sample that sounds like a cross between a zither and a gong. Nightmares abound in the dark, moody piano of “Common,” the eerie moonlight crossing of “Master”  all surfacing from some broken, familiar source. Occasionally, as in the quietly unsettling “Spin (Trade),” and the close-mic’ed utterances of “Wicked,” Timpa approaches a breathtaking intimacy. 

Unsettling as its sonics may be, Modern Antics in a Deserted Place absorbs purely on its imaginative qualities; you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything quite like it. Depending on the state of your mind it has the potential to devastate or placate, but regardless it’s worth a spin all the way to the funereal “Tongue Tear Down,” a fitting closer to a mystifying, elegiac record.

Recommended for inhaling.