Their debut album, Forever, sounds like temporarily regressing to your childhood self while tripping—a kind of gleaming innocence desperately fending off the darkness of adulthood lurking at the periphery. “That’s something we recognize in each other—we’re not really grown up,” says Clateman. “The goal is to get to the ‘child place’ when you’re making music.”
The album’s messy yet seamless scatter-spray of instruments—cello, hand shakers, piano—gets torn apart by the foulest plumes of bass. On the eco-cult anthem “Grass Is Greener,” Manow’s voice doubles and splinters like Mother Earth crying out. Clateman screws and scrambles the tracks like a DJ, glitching her voice out and giving traditional sounds a sparkly, psychedelic tint; on “Mr President,” the piano swirls like crystal vines growing around every key. My favorite is “Final Song,” which sounds like a hauntological take on 2010 recession pop—a simulacra of EDM excess where YOLO mantras are replaced by Manow pleading into the void and the beat winds down like hardware that knows it’s being sunsetted.
Bassvictim recorded Forever in two weeks in a residential sauna-studio called The Betty Fjord Clinic, located in the woods of Randsfjord Valley about an hour from Oslo, Norway. Clateman tells me it was so cheap it was almost too good to be true; the free-spirited idyll came with “three 70-year-old Viking hippies high on speed,” a studio packed with amazing equipment, and a “mad engineer” named Carl. “Their unprofessional vibe suited us,” Clateman smiles.
Clateman cites Brian Eno’s “The Big Ship,” Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s “Music for a Found Harmonium,” and the wonderful phrase “Lost in Translation with 808s” as guiding lights for Forever’s peripatetic sonic palette. There are diss tracks (the alluringly barbed “Dog Tag freestyle”) and love letters, such as “27a Pitfield St,” an ode to a house in Shoreditch that’s set for demolition. It was where their collaborator Ngahere Wafer and others lived, a “really special” spot where Clateman mixed much of Basspunk and they made many friends partying. The kinetic opening song, “It’s me Maria,” is partly about how people mispronounce her name, something I immediately fuck up when I ask them about it. “See, you’ve already made a mistake,” she says. “It’s so easy—it’s not Muh-ree-uh, it’s Mah-rya. Instead of putting three long ass syllables into this tiny ass name, you just put two… From the first time I landed in this stupid England world, I’d be like, my name is Maria. Then a fucking librarian from my school [would be like], ‘You mean Muh-ree-uh, right?’ I’m like, ‘Fuck off, no, I just said my name! Maria!’”
The duo originally planned to finish older material in Norway, but after three days messing around in the studio, they committed to a new project. The older music isn’t being shelved. They say it’s much darker, more minimal, with an ashy, gray atmosphere: the sound of a “girl about to be broken up with,” compared to Forever’s girl-who-has-slightly-processed-the-breakup feeling. As we talk about it, they start bickering over whether to add a date to the unreleased project’s title.
