If you’re familiar with the work of multidisciplinary drag artist Salvia, you’ll know that her work is transfixed with the ‘post,’ that is: post-gender, post-trans, post-human. For Salvia, her body has been her most favourite canvas on which to enact her quiet disruptions, contorting and mutating her form into impossibly alien shapes and masses through fashion and technology. While Music has always felt intrinsic to her artistry, it’s been in more of a supporting role to her image focussed corporeal shock art. This pivots with the release of Salvia’s debut album, 001011, which casts the shapeshifter as an alien pop princess attempting human connection from a desolate space station.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Salvia’s music is rather cerebral. Her sonic ideas are driven by conceptual and thematic frameworks that are sometimes directly referenced in her titles (Posthuman, Summer), designed as specific stages for her to play on. Salvia accesses music by way of performance, and 001011 presents us with various iterations of her persona. She’s an alien superstar on Stargirl, a Rick Owens wearing sugar baby on Money, a flirty bubblegum princess on the gloss lacquered Kiss. Sonically, 001011 owes much to the music of SOPHIE and Arca, taking shape as futuristic bass experiments and fractured hyperpop. The synths are chrome plated, the beats hydraulic and caustic. Salvia flits between 2000’s pop girlie speak-singing and passages of spoken word, her voice more often than not processed into a parahuman glitch.
While poppier offerings often buckle under the weight of Salvia’s meaning-making instincts, 001011’s most promising moments are those that don’t attempt to conform to any genre conventions, where Salvia is given space to be at her most performative. Summer is part monologue, part spoken word poem, with Salvia recounting discovering a dying loved one against jagged industrial bass. The repeated ‘“summer / sun”’ refrain atop Summer’s shrapnel beats feels visceral, seething with a sort of horror that you can’t turn away from. It pivots in its final moments toward sepia tinged ambience as Salvia recites a poem, the overall effect feeling like watching a dance piece. Posthuman is both 001011’s centrepiece and a manifesto of sorts for Salvia and her pertinent brand of trans body politics. “Made of code, my face is fucked up” she drones over shredded trap and industrial pastiche, weaving in samples of Crystal LaBeija. The whole thing explodes into a rave of gabber and happy hardcore sledgehammers, but tellingly concludes with Salvia’s voice alone, singing in the dark: “There’s no shelter.”
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