Impact: Abyss X

Impact is a series that's dedicated to profiling raw talent that's about to turn dance music on its head. Next up: Abyss X

Evangelia VS, the Crete-born, New York-based artist who produces as Abyss X, has a knack for turning raw, indescribable emotion into something immediate and tangible, music that you can truly feel and see. It’s safe to say that the visceral quality of her work comes largely from her background in performance art and theatre – she knows how to cultivate a mood for an audience, both onstage and behind the scenes.

Though she only started producing a few years ago, the scope and quality of her records suggest otherwise; her first EP, ‘Echoes’, dropped last fall on Lao’s Mexico City label Extasis, comprised of swirling, immersive takes on pop and r’n’b. Rabit’s Halcyon Veil imprint released her second EP, ‘Mouthed’, just two months ago, an eerie sprawl of hypnotic sound collages that she cited as an ode to her Minoan heritage.

Now, she’s back with a third full-fledged record, ‘Nüshu’, to be released on innovative Montreal club label Infinite Machine. This new EP entwines the ideas behind her past two records together in unexpected but seamless ways: jagged vocals blend with distorted beats for a relentless, noisy conglomeration of sound. It feels like the moment you hear the bass seep through the walls while descending into the basement of a dark club, when every sense is heightened and you’re ready to lose yourself in the dance. Urgent and unconstrained, this is music that is especially fitting for our current moment – it acts as a much-needed escape, while simultaneously bringing you into your body in just the right way.

Her mix, tittled 'Φλαμπέ' and embedded below, further demonstrates a mastery of timing and momentum. It’s a sonic tour through her clubbing experiences of the past decade, spanning genres and geography. We move from Velvet Acid Christ to Laurie Anderson to Claude Debussy, with a few cuts from ‘Nüshu’ to round out the vibe. Take a listen, and read on to hear about the inspiration for her latest record, what it’s like to be in the audience at a live Abyss X performance, and the importance of riot in dire times.

You’re from Crete, but you’ve lived in Berlin, London, Los Angeles – how does place shape your music and your process?

All these cities are always inspiration. My environments have always been completely underground, and deeply queer. I was a part of the queer community in Athens, in Berlin and London, and I think that has had an influence on my art, but I have a love and hate relationship with all the cities that I've lived [in] before.

On another note, being an immigrant is also something that affects me a lot personally, [like with] this new album coming out on Infinite Machine, which was not designed to be cute sounding or ear pleasing. Some of the tracks are just like, "What the fuck?" These tracks are exposing my feelings towards immigration and being treated as an immigrant for the past 10 years of my life, and also all of the unfortunate social and political events in Greece. Even if you're not in Greece, your family, all your friends, everyone is impacted by that. [Me and all my friends] had to leave eventually. I was one of the first people to leave for completely different reasons, but now [all of my friends have] left. This is more of a riot kind of album, and being in this space for the past year, as well as seeing and witnessing all these events against the black community, has triggered all this anger and all this emotional distress that I had to let out on the record.

Nüshu is a code language that women who were denied education in [the Hunan Province] of China created in order to be able to talk to each other. No one else knew how to write or speak Nüshu, and it’s apparently going extinct because very few women have learned [it] and carried the legacy. I came across that one day and I was like, this is amazing. I feel that women are being mistreated in the music industry, and I'm always about standing up for them and calling out people because I feel that people don’t understand how difficult it is to be a woman in the scene, still, in 2016. People don't understand that you need to work ten times harder. People don't understand that even your friends are bros, even your friends are not backing you up enough. I feel that I'm old enough right now to speak my mind as a mature woman, and be able to talk about all these things and be very upfront towards my male peers, so 'Nüshu' is all about all these things. I don't know if that comes across in the music itself, but at least I was trying to provide that emotion when I was writing these things.

The album definitely has a lot of riotous energy.

Being Greek, riot is deeply engraved in my culture. Greeks love to riot about anything, because people learn to live in Greece and have molotov bombs explode next to their houses [a reference to the Greek riots in 2008 after 15-year-old student Alex Grigoropoulos was murdered by police in Athens]; that was an everyday thing at some point. But I think that riot is a very important form of expression, of [calling out] social injustice. If people need to take it to the streets, if people have to stop transportation or stop people from going to their jobs in order to communicate a message, they need to do that because sometimes the state will not understand otherwise. People need to do something when crazy things are just ignored and repeated constantly. So it is a riot album.

There's a lot of darkness and agitation in club music nowadays, how does that play out in your record?

To begin with, I'm not using any explosions or glass breaks or sirens. I felt like there was a point where everyone was using some specific samples, which was cool because it created this subgenre, but it almost became too graphic, too descriptive. I was trying to use more distortion, and more weird layering and alternative beats. I was trying to push the beatmaking to a different direction. That's why I think that it might not be the first choice for a DJ to play in a club, or mix with other people's work, because it's not as compatible in the beat pattern as other tracks are.

I wanted to try and maybe even go more old-skool. I don't even know if this album sounds new, or sounds older, or is somewhere in the middle. Basically, I was trying to blend all these elements that have influenced me, from the club scene and the past 15 years of my clubbing experience. Being a bit older than what producers are right now, I was lucky enough to be in my late teens when there was this techno, and this electroclash, and electro techno explosion, so I felt that I should bring some of those elements, even if they sound outdated or strange to all the 19 year olds right now.

What were your musical influences before you started going to the raves?

Well, I was a goth always. I had my own radio show in Crete when I was like 13, so I was vibing off of Marilyn Manson and Suicide Commando, Front Line Assembly and Christian Death, I was also part of that community. As a teenager, it was also German bass, and Aphex Twin and Warp Records and Future Sound Of London. I think I borrowed elements from all of these people and I've just thrown them in a manic way in this album. I don't know if that sounds chaotic to the listener, but it's all of these influences and obsessions that I've had so far.

I don't know if that makes sense to the young listeners nowadays, that's why I feel like I’m taking a risk with this album. I'm happy that Infinite Machine decided to release it, because their releases so far have been great for very slick productions and very fully formed pieces. I feel that my album is like a vomit of sounds; it’s just crazy.

Did Infinite Machine reach out to you or did you send it to them?

I sent [label founder] Charlie a message that was like, "Hey, I have some tracks but I'm not really sure what I want to do with them, do you want to listen to them?" That was in the beginning, probably July. I had already posted [some of them] on my Soundcloud, and people were really vibing, and I was thinking maybe I wanted to do an extended version for an album, so I sent him all these tracks. And then I started taking out so many, and in September, I was like, "You know what, I'm redoing the whole thing." But I think he's happy with the result right now, and even though I feel it's kind of a tricky release, for the label and its followers, I'm really happy that they decided to release it. ['Nüshu'] is a very fresh thing that I was happy to rework, and hopefully people will dig it.

Was there a particular impetus for rewriting the album?

I feel that with club music, my taste changes constantly and I was getting kind of fed up with all these oversaturated subgenres that are getting repeated and repeated. And I just felt, fuck that. I want to make something that is different, and even if people find it hard to vibe or listen to, or if DJs won’t be able to play it in the club, I don't care. I needed to do it; I had to rework.

You’re an incredibly intense live performer. What are you trying to do for yourself and your audience with your live shows?

A little throwback here – my background is not in music. I started producing two years ago, but I was always in theatres and I was always in performance art. I was a professional dancer, I was an assistant director, I was a director, I was a video projections designer for theatre pieces. I love DJing, but for me, being behind decks or gear without bringing the extra performance element would not have been enough. So I had to somehow bring it on the stage with me – for my tracks without vocals, I decided to write lyrics solely for the live performances. I've created vocals and spoken words, and I've borrowed lines from my previous theatre pieces that are still relative to what I feel and think and want to say right now. It's like MCing, but it's not MCing, it's kind of like an in between. It's very aggressive though, and very powerful. I like to get offstage and go into the audience, I like to grab people and bring my face right in theirs. There's so many people that try to keep their distance from the audience, but I'm all about bringing it in and breaking the fourth wall when I perform. It's a highly emotional set. It's very angry, it's very aggressive, and it's definitely not about me trying to keep an image of myself. I'm trying to fight against that.

Nüshu drops this Friday on Infinite Machine. Abyss X plays Split Lip Service Festival at Miami’s Art Basel on December 1, and Boiler Room in Houston on December 3

Nina Posner is Mixmag's Bass + Club Music Editor. Follow her on Twitter