Yves Tumor: Dangerous Music from Mysterious American Artist Hiding in Berlin

Photo: Vital Gelwich

Yves Tumor: Gefährliche Musik vom mysteriösen
amerikanischen Künstler versteckt sich in Berlin

Label: Warp

New Album: Safe In The Hands of Love

What’s cool about this?
Trippy, eccentric, disobedient music delivered by an elusive, sexually ambiguous black artist whose mad aesthetic is like Prince on acid or Grace Jones in a David Lynch sci-fi short. Did anyone see “Siesta”? It’s a surreal, erotic thriller from the 80’s, not David Lynch, but stars Ellen Barkin, Jodie Foster and Isabella Rossellini, amongst others, and Grace Jones. Just a segue.

Rant
I had heard just the one track before I got into Yves Tumor’s new record. (What a name? But he has gone by other names too- Rahel Ali and Sean Bowie, for example.) “The Feeling When You Walk”, from the 2016 album “Serpent Music” is mostly instrumental with a chorus buried deep in the druggy haze. But the music is hypnotic, repetitive, antidote for break-up blues, a blackbird seen through the window, climbing higher and higher into the sky, never to return, as you fix your cure and watch it disappear.

With this new album, Yves Tumor has fully registered in my universe. (What a name? But he has gone by other names too- Rahel Ali and Sean Bowie, for example.) I’ve read his stuff but don’t want to get into it. I’m just digging the warped dark badness of these songs. I haven’t gotten past the broken beats of “Honesty” and the plaintive, narcotic erotica of “Licking an Orchid”. The man/woman/alien/horror film visuals and promiscuous cross-genre experimentation disqualify “Safe in the Hands of Love” from being anywhere remotely safe. In fact, it’s cool, challenging, and dangerous as f*ck. It's what music needs to be; what art should be.

Someday I will write more about Yves Tumor. In the meantime, Pitchfork has a good read on him aptly titled The Disgusting Beauty of Enigmatic Experimentalist Yves Tumor.