Thanks to his focus on live experience over recorded music in recent years, Christ's work has become slower and more contemplative, more conducive to late night than crowd-warming. He approaches trance music less like a DJ weaving separate tracks together and more like the composer of a video game soundtrack who perceives sound as a spatial environment – Leary quotes the iconic PlayStation 1 racing game WipeOut, which featured big beat acts from the likes of Orbital and the Chemical Brothers, as a vital gateway into his love of dance music. The mammoth trap strikes in 2014 Chute EPs were simple in their construction, where Revanchist it's ambitious and structurally complex, trusting the listener enough to follow sounds that develop in unexpected directions. “The Beach” is an endless wave with no outlet, teasing a drop that never comes, as a distorted female voice bleeds into a rising tide of looping arpeggios and bass. The voices Christ weaves into tracks like “Silence” are bright and warm, but also strange, mutating into misty choral chants. Over the celestial piano of “With Me,” Swedish songstress Simply lays out her words, just as Leary's synths reverberate with streaks of echo.
“Nobody Else” opens with a punishing four-on-the-floor beat: It's like hearing the muted pounding of a rave in the distance and following the sound through the darkness. A chopped-up sample of Clairo's “North” ebbs and flows before dissolving into pure feedback. at times, the beat disappears entirely, almost drowning in a maelstrom before Leary brings it back. clearing in a murky forest, only to thrust you back into the thick of the rave without warning.
While Christ has reportedly reunited with Kanye West in the studio, Revanchist it positions him as more than just a producer working with a singer. Here, he's an experiential sound designer, drawn to voices for their textures. In its heyday, trance music was often derided for its overt sentimentality, fueled by nameless divas singing easily translatable lyrics about universal feelings. Although Leary flirts with this emotional honesty, his vision of ecstasy feels like a fading memory that finds its own distinct beauty in the murky edges. The “ecstasy revival” has been promised for years, but Revanchist proves that the species' comeback is not just a phase. He takes this music as its own language rather than a nostalgic artifact, a living thing that can always be translated and redefined.
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