Crisis Make Up!

On Crisis Make Up!, the long-awaited second album from Slaylor Moon, we go deeper into the intimate sonic world of Canadian musician Sydney Koke (Tristwch Y Fenywod, The Courtneys, Two Form a Click, Shearing Pinx). Her sensual minimalism and disjointed abstraction address electronic music’s quandary of the human presence in the synthetic world of the machine.

Eschewing computerised arrangements in favour of physical gestures, and drawing on recordings of rare modular synths from her 2024 residency at Marseille’s GMEM, the music feels uncanny and implacable: cyborg, outside time, neither wholly discrete nor continuous. The rhythms are corporeal, seductive, boldly queer and tactile in their psychedelia.

Koke’s background as a neuroscientist informs songs that evoke the musicality of bio-machinery. Her vocals shift from intimate directness to abrupt electronic mutations, blurring the boundary between real and imaginary. In the tradition of Anne Gillis and Todd Dockstader, tracks like Assign hit like raw qualia.