- It’s hard to go past that title, right? A partner to previous EP Everything In Quotes “Dark”, what’s it all about? Why is Christopher Port putting everything in quotes?
To begin with, it’s a quote from fashion-designer Virgil Abloh who likes to make a handbag and then scrawl “sculpture” up the side, or a pair of boots and daub them with the helpful instruction “for walking.” It’s a disruption thing, taking an object and then ‘flipping your perspective’: is it a handbag, or is it a sculpture? Can handbags be art? It’s been described as a ‘fortress of irony’, the most effective way Abloh has found to communicate with his consumers is the biting power of irony, making them think subversively about what it is they’re buying and thus bonding them to it. Personally, it kind of messes with my head: a two-thousand-dollar pair of boots with “for walking” on the side communicates to me that some people, almost certainly including Abloh, have w-a-a-a-y too much money, are unlikely to ever have to walk a step in their lives if they don’t want to and are disappearing up their own asses. I guess that’s a different irony from the one that was intended.
The situation with Christopher Port is a bit more relatable. Another aspect to Abloh’s design philosophy is a rejection of the ‘who did it first’ mentality and an embrace of ‘the logic of the internet’. It’s postmodern: where you listen to Port’s music and you hear what he’s created, but at the same time it is your thing -because you are the one listening to it- it’s about what you bring to the music.
Thing is, you can more-or-less say that about any creation, which is, potentially, not very profound. It does have a special resonance with Port’s work however. He likes to be across multiple genres, from deep house to UK garage, to downtempo, triphop and beyond, but doesn’t like to think about it that way. Something of a musical bowerbird, Port loves to absorb music and then after throwing it haphazardly on to the shelves of his brain, it comes tumbling back out in his own creations with only one organising principle: as he puts it, it has to fit, with the feeling.
That’s never more the case than the way he approaches vocals and vocal samples, on the Light EP. A whole jumbled audio archive of voices finds its way into these four cuts. Sometimes they’re relatively recognisable as vocals and at other times they’re sliced up into tiny pieces and enthusiastically collaged into something musically different and new. Port guiltily admits he has trouble remembering which snippet came from where. It’s a very specific approach to deep house and has been compared, quite a lot, to the work of US producer Todd Edwards. Characteristically Port says, “well, maybe, I’m not really sure.”
I guess you could accuse this kind of artistry of intellectual laziness: shouldn’t you know where your music comes from? It’s Port’s music itself that manages to make a pretty happy case for the defense. These happy accidents just seem to work out. Elsewhere you’ll hear syncopated UK garage beats morphing into old-school, ‘90’s downtempo. Sometimes he gets compared to Bonobo, who took a legacy of downtempo and leveraged it into a career comeback in dance music. For Port, however, hey it just felt right at the time.
The easygoing uncertainty of Christopher Port’s approach to music makes me unsure of what’s “light”, what’s “dark” or, often how I’m supposed to understand any of this. While I learn to cope with my neurosis, however, Christopher Port is bouncing around the corners of the whole, great big realm of house music and beats in general and having a fine old time. It’s a feeling he’s becoming increasingly effective at communicating.
- Chris Cobcroft.