RAISA K - Affectionately

Keep an ear on the most liminal releases of the independent circuits long enough and you start to pick things up; in London, for instance, there's a strange cast of characters orbiting Mica Levi and her various projects – the best-known name right now is Tirzah, but we can also fold Coby Sey and his brother Kwes into the mix, all musicians engaged, each in their own way, in redefining a lo-fi electronic urban language. There's a shared root to this poetics of barely sketched but evocative ideas, assembled with a typically rough, conversational flair, free of embellishment and distraction.

Listening to "Affectionately" is such a pure distillation of everything just described that it ends up being both irresistible to genre initiates and arguably a bit too derivative. But Raisa Khan isn't backing down; having already served as vocalist in Micachu & The Shapes (whose ranks also include Marc Pell, drummer with Mount Kimbie), after a few early releases hyped even by Ninja Tune, she's opted once again for a quiet life on the margins of the record industry. From its stark, unforgiving cover image onward, her debut album, released by Danish label 15 Love, is a particularly reserved and introverted affair.

Not that the record lacks a certain primitivist charm, especially in the construction of grainy, gaseous beats amplified by reverb, which recall as much the aesthetic of Elysia Crampton and Astrid Sonne as the more conceptual artists of the Pan roster. Such is the case with the opening title track, followed by the hypnotic "How Did You Know", typical examples of this kind of incidental songwriting, in which a handful of offhand phrases prop up the entire communicative framework.

In short, "Affectionately" is a continuous back-and-forth of oblique ideas and solitary textures; "Dreaming" brushes against vacant, vaguely Orientalist echoes (it's easy to think of "Asiatisch" by Fatima Al Qadiri), "Step" hints at drum'n'bass shifts, while "Come Down" is animated by an oppressive, unresolved post-rock. It's with the basslines of "Tall Enough" and "As It Seems" that the listening experience betrays, if anything, some wave influence, though without ever fully addressing the anemia that underscores every melodic weakness — but then again, song form isn't exactly a priority here.

It's easy, then, to place Raisa K within the same reference bubble, with yet another work typical of this circuit, at once inscrutable and deliberately chosen. There is, admittedly, a sense of missing some different kind of drive, something that might lift the dominant aesthetic toward a dimension that is, if not new, at least more distinctly personal — a nagging issue that stings the listener right at the moment the emotion is actually felt, thanks to the warm voice of the aforementioned Coby Sey: it's "Stay", a soft duet built around a rudimentary arpeggio, just enough to let the performers plead softly with one another with disarming simplicity.

"Affectionately" won't, then, be a release to shout about, partly due to the very nature of the work, partly due to its insistence on an aesthetic better glimpsed elsewhere. But anyone who finds themselves in tune with this poetics of deconstruction can easily lose themselves in it without reservation — Raisa K is here to stretch the boundaries of common perception.

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21/03/2025