In 2023, Canty was working on a somber dance-pop hymn called “Mirrorball” when they lost feeling in their legs. A doctor explained the mechanics behind the alarming turn, a sudden onset of multiple sclerosis. Canty’s spinal cord, the doctor said, was like a coated cable under attack by their own immune system. The description echoed a mantra Canty had been writing for “Mirrorball,” a song that alludes to “cables in my spine” and a crying bedside companion. It was a “harsh irony,” they wrote upon the song’s release, “like I’d got trapped inside the tune or some shit.”
Dim Binge, the East London singer-producer’s promising debut mixtape, feels eerily attuned to this cosmic resonance. “Trapped inside the tune” is just how Canty sounds within their own productions, blankets of ethereal fog pierced by a voice that writhes up like a stalk striving for sunlight. Their claustrophobic escapism shares a kinship with dance music, yet seems, at the same time, designed to cocoon against a world that demands decisive action and movement. Here is a place to wallow and rest; come inside, see if you like it too.
Dim Binge makes for an enveloping sanctuary, but is more intriguing for its thorns of textural and harmonic dissent. At its best and worst, the mixtape owes a debt to Thom Yorke, particularly his solo work’s olde folk cadences, beseeching soul swoons, and burnt-syrup glaze of ambient electronics. An instrumental called “blah blah blah” plays to Canty’s less engaging tendencies, swaddling strummed chords in diminished, vibe-heavy trip-hop; its twin is the sensational “hahaha,” presented here as a live recording that swaps navel-gazing atmospherics for the wonky, vaudevillian flair of In Rainbows Disc 2. “St Marks,” sprightlier still, lands just the right side of summer-festival fodder. Canty hurtles between louche croak and wounded wail, ducking in and out of the song’s largesse like an uncertain collaborator in their own melodrama.
A tug-of-war between the epic and miniature plays out across the mixtape. Celestial anthems like “Follower” suggest Sampha-scale ambition, but Canty often settles into a stealthier mode, lacing whispered dirges with strings that unsettle rather than stir. There are haunted ditties like “Pipps Hill” and “Estuary Pig”; the piano ballad “Mercy Street,” lamenting the cruel conditions of modern Britain; and an eerie cover of Arthur Russell’s “Being It” that would be cloyingly faithful, were it not for a gorgeous guitar motif seemingly exhumed from a Dunedin sound power-pop song.
Particularly in the UK, Russell’s lunar minimalism has become a North Star to post-dubstep producer-songwriters in the James Blake mold, indebted to the sensual tone but not the libido of contemporary R’n’B. Their strand of bedroom pop is full of Arctic mist and pregnant pauses, always raising its hand before making a point. The music tends to capture Russell’s amniotic alienation but misses his disconcerting offness. With the exception of “hahaha,” Canty’s melodies are precise, their intonation measured, lyrics stubbornly poetic, with flares of passion parcelled into little vocal embellishments. Something about it suggests a search for beauty within a psyche on the verge of ruin. While the contrast creates a tonal tension, some life force feels lost in the refinement process, some rage or dysfunction withheld. Dim Binge is a darkly beautiful record, but it makes me curious to hear Canty burst out of the cocoon and emerge a little uglier.
