[Written by Sopas; Isaw; Shingaling; Lugaw]
Like magma bubbling under the volcanic pressure-cooker of the bedchamber studio, ideas in the internet age have amalgamated across genre borders. The first generation of digital natives have grown at a staggering pace, and they’re not averse to reworking ideas from their contemporaries as they do their forerunners. Music is changing just as quickly as any other artform, perhaps even more quickly than all others: the ascetic Generation Z is primed to helm. The bedroom now dictates the rules of engagement, and its inhabitants are already breaking past it.
somniloquy details shuichi and their contemporaries erupting out of the four-walled enclosure bedroom music had found itself over the past ten years. In fact: the project doesn’t just break “bedroom pop” out of the prison the concept has found itself trapped in for the last decade; it emancipates the idea entirely.
It’s gen(re/der)-fluid: it really wouldn’t be fair to call the EP a large step away from shoegaze, as that assumes that it tries to fit into one sound in particular. Somniloquy takes various tropes of RnB, hyperpop, shoegaze, indie rock, and even a slight tinge of breakbeat; willfully disregarding each genre’s constraints and paradigms. Despite mixing and matching elements like avatar technomancers, shuichi and their co-producer, Haute Couture, still find a way to make it sound human at its core. Though the tracks haveincredibly varied songwriting structures and styles, it keeps a consistent mood through rock-solid and skin-tight production. The project paints itself a quagmire, and it does a damn fine job of making sense.
All five tracks have sentimentality, texturizing layers of iceblink atmosphere, all while maintaining a masterclass in momentum with smatterings of teases and pauses. Amid the brazen melting pot of sound and texture that birthed this project, somniloquy does not obscure its emotional essence. The artist defines one of the emotional pillars of the release: “I just want to be loved” as one that bleeds urgency and candor. This is the peak of the project’s sincerity.
The second half breaks down on genre-shattering catharsis, bordering on Daniel Caesar’s saccharine romanticism and Coldplay’s Viva La Vida’s musical caprice. Yet, the songs manage to sound more earnest than either example. Throw in a bit of breakbeat, midwest emo, and a splash of reverb, and you’ve got yourself one hell of a recipe — or alternatively, a genre-pigeonholing exercise in futility.
This record is still more than the sum of its parts. It is a coming together of adjacent and disparate ideas into one cohesive whole. As our walls grow taller, the connections we make in isolation grow even stronger. The bedroom is no longer a place that places constrictions and constraints on artists that create within it. The bedroom is now the canvas for the purest form of Generation Z’s mindspace. The bedroom is no longer just the artist’s sole dreamscape. The bedroom is now where the artist turns their reality into dreams, and dreams into reality.
somniloquy is for the children.
Yup.
TFL 