Pilo - Relax EP

May 25, 2018 - Twin Turbo

LA-based phenom Pilo’s new Relax EP is “pitch darkness.” It’s spelunking alone in the forbidden cave while being stalked by some unknown predator who is actually lurking within you, an inspired vision that even children are only capable of dreaming up to scare each other on Halloween. I guess this means Pilo is a child at heart. Or, at least, Halloween is his favorite holiday. Who did you wear last year Pilo? James Cameron?

The two tracks on Relax are so crepuscular it’s cheesy, but they are both crafted out of the same stardust. The instrumentation is similar on both for continuity, a professional choice. Besides, you can’t be a member of the elusive Turbo/Twin Turbo club without a bit of cheese blended into your pot. They certainly like to sample fine cheeses. And Pilos’s latest indulgence comes in the form of a guided meditation vocal sample distorted and pulverized into a melody of chromatic half steps and dropped in a never ending cavernous void. 

The first and title track ‘Relax’ has an active beat, with bass like a heartbeat in a Nike television ad. The voices coax a meditative dark techno dream face-first past the event horizon into a haunted musical theme supported by expansive echoes and urgent knocking sounds. The voices and the anxious heartbeats are the driving emotional forces in the song, powerful minimal techno. Yeah, ok, guided meditation is weird when you think about it too much. Pilo’s punchline is simple—take an object intended to be wholesome, nourishing and healthy out of context and use its vulnerability to create something menacing. But this wouldn’t be dance music if it didn’t have mass appeal. Everyone in the club likes to feel in on the joke. It makes them dance harder.

The second track, ‘Requiem,’ is slower and more abstract. It’s set in a gymnasium instead of an infinite cavern. The bass and many of the synths bend down with each note and induce a vertigo effect. There’s a stick tapping and skipping on disheveled wooden floorboards, and digital glitches transform that gymnasium into the core of a crashing computer. As the vocal sample repeats “And Relaxation” over and over, the brain starts to distort it looking for further meaning. It morphs into other phrases, such as, “I really like Satan.” Perhaps it’s because the tempo is slower than the first song, or perhaps it’s because the vocals are sampled at the end of a spoken sentence, but the small enclosed space of ‘Requiem’ is oddly more comfortable than the first song, more resolute. 

If I were a philosopher, I would say ‘Relax’ is the praxis and ‘Requiem’ is the reflection. But, I’m no philosopher. And, in the end, we are all just animals in the night. ☔

Relax/Requiem, an album by Pilo on Spotify