It’s possible that Australian producer Teneil Throssell’s greatest superpower under her club music alias HAAi, is her pysch-rock origin story. As HAAi, Throssell has been cultivating a sonic identity over the past few years that has become notorious for its high energy, acidic, peak time energy. But under the rave theatrics, you’ll find that HAAi is as much informed by Throssell’s psych past as she is by the dance music history of her adopted home, London. She opens her debut album, Baby, We’re Ascending with a collage of sounds and glitches, waves of ambience and static rips, an orchestra of noise that rises as it fractures, catapulting you through passages of breakneck techno and drones toward some sort of spiritual awakening. You arrive, eventually, at the glow of Pigeon Barron, looped and distorted guitar chords emanating from its thrumming core which bursts into Underworld style breakneck techno. The experience is exhilarating, transcendent even.
By applying the theory of pysch-rock’s trancey distortion to what are arguably homages to classic UK dance music, HAAi has arrived at a sort of intersection between club music’s corporeal propulsion and metaphysical qualities, using the latter to shape and intensify the former. On Human Sound, what starts as a guided meditation intensifies into a grime-adjacent spoken word bit above throbbing, dampened breaks and bass. A garage vocal refrain grows more mercurial, more rapturous. The turning of a radio dial on AM surges into the murky drum’n’bass of FM, which itself switches course toward hard, relentless techno. On the title track, she enlists one of dance music’s most prolific psychonauts, Jon Hopkins. Surprisingly, it’s possibly the album’s most straightforward moment. Mostly, HAAi is working in contrast and quite masterfully at that, seamlessly shifting us from one aesthetic mode to the next. The unbridled acid rave of lead single Purple Jelly Disc gradually becomes more blissed out, shifting from abysmal thuds to done led euphoria. The gorgeous Orca, an eight minute odyssey, is one of the album’s most magnificent. HAAi takes us from sparse and mercurial techno stabs into a whirring rave vortex, delivering us on the other side of an extended passage of an ethereal and utterly gorgeous soundscape made up of ambient club sounds.
Download and stream Baby, We’re Ascending here
But perhaps most striking about Baby, We’re Ascending is how Throssell handles its contrasting tonalities, particularly when considering the spacier moments folded in between the heavy hitters. It would seem that Throssell is really mediating over what she wants her music to make people feel, and this pivots her away from the somatic toward a more ambiguous dreamspace. The sharp takeoff of Pigeon Barron is followed by a gradual decline, with tracks like the Burialesque Bodies Of Water shifting the tone toward the introspective and at times, melancholic. Biggest Mood Ever is epic in scale, a sort of blurry-eyed dream-pop, psych-DnB hybrid that sees Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor crooning over swelling, stirring strings and crunchy breakbeats. There’s more spectral Burial breaks on I’ve Been Thinking A Lot Lately, which knells with a sort of shamanic energy before launching into Purple Jelly Disc. The effect of these juxtapositions is one of tension and release, so that the album as a whole functions as an entire journey from top to tail that often culminates in soaring acclivity. This makes every moment, including the glitchy and scattered interludes, absolutely essential to the whole.
Baby, We’re Ascending is a trip. By weaving her psych-rock roots into the DNA of her present club interests, Throssell has landed on a formula that plays incredibly well to her strengths. But it’s in her skill to world-build where HAAi shows the most promise. Baby, We’re Ascending is a journey so fully realised in scope that the album feels distinct, so much so that we’ll follow HAAi wherever she may go next, without question.
Listen to Orca from Baby, We’re Ascending below.
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