There’s been plenty of talk in the last year or two of a genre-less musical landscape. Thanks to the internet’s innate ability to connect everyone with everything and the coming of age of a generation that has never known life without it, it seems inevitable that the walls between musical worlds would break down. However, as the new generation settles in it’s become clearer that rather than eliminating genres completely, they’re fusing them to create new, often nameless ones. Whether it’s bedroom pop or SoundCloud rap, these new genres are taking the place of the old in the same way that punk birthed indie and disco gave way to house.
Vasser’s new self-titled EP is the perfect example of this. However, rather than serve as a comprehensive journey through one of these new genres, it’s a showcase of three. Each track on Vasser takes a different path through the boundary-less wilderness of the internet. Opening single ‘Valerians’ is a late-Blur style surreal indie- meets-electro track that also recalls the likes of Superorganism’s oddball indie-pop. Previously unreleased tracks ‘Blind Faith Talking’ and ‘Nearby’ head in more R&B and garage-meets-indie rock directions respectively, the former echoing the likes of Mura Masa’s icy internet R&B, the latter taking cues from James Blake’s fusion of dance and indie but spinning it into a much more upbeat track.
Overall it’s the work of a young producer who’s not defying genre so much as helping define a series of new ones. Inspired by a multitude of producers and artists hailed for maintaining their accessibility while experimenting with their sound, it’s an impressive and surprisingly cohesive body of work that also marks a blurring of the lines between producer and songwriter. Listen to Vasser below.