NAME:
Leon Vynehall
ABOUT
As anyone pursuing a creative outlet will do at some point in their process; upon turning 30 in Los Angeles Leon Vynehall found himself wondering about what he’s trying to say in life, where he’s trying to go and thinking about his career to date. After bringing euphoria to dancefloors all over the world with the humid house of Rojus (Designed To Dance), he took a sharp left turn with debut album Nothing Is Still — a masterclass in subverting expectations that Pitchfork said in their 8.2 review is “designed to reward a degree of investment that goes beyond the passive listening experiences that define the streaming era.” With the entry to the long-running DJ-Kicks series that followed, Vynehall turned further away from convention, putting together a mix that naturally and creatively blended everything from industrial and techno to dancehall, soul and ambient in a way that Resident Advisor described in their 4.4/5 review as “brilliantly executed”.
Those who have spent time with Vynehall’s music over the past decade will know how much it is rooted in family. Nothing Is Still — which was part of a wider multimedia experience spanning film and literature — was dedicated to Vynehall’s grandparents and traced their emigration from London to New York in the 1960s, his own journey to Los Angeles striking some distant, ghostly parallels with theirs. Music For The Uninvited was inspired by the funk, soul and hip-hop tapes his mum used to play on car journeys to and from school. But on Rare, Forever, Vynehall is showcasing all the strings to his bow - creating music that’s borderless and unbound.
“After writing those ‘chronicle-heavy’ releases I started to think about what I wanted to do next. I wanted to write purely from the standpoint of free expression: whatever came to me is what I’d go with,” he says, but it soon became apparent that Vynehall is drawn to theme or narrative in his productions. Rare, Forever sees him for the first time investigating who he is as a person and artist in the very moment, rather than looking to the past to discover what and who has shaped him. The result then contains multiple sides to him, but variety in his art is something Vynehall is used to - he described his 2018 Resident Advisor Podcast as taking the dancefloor “left and right, up and down." On Rare, Forever, he’s taking a victory lap. The album is a beautiful marriage of everything he's done so far while remaining genuinely progressive; the end result sounding like Nothing Is Still but with the narrative toned down, and the dancefloor dialled up.
Rare, Forever will feel familiar for fans of Vynehall’s DJ-Kicks mix or his eclectic excursions on NTS, while simultaneously sounding unlike anything he’s ever done before. As much as there are dancefloor memories and moments, it’s not strictly a dance record — instead, Rare, Forever is the clearest representation of the broad spectrum of music he’s made to date, deftly weaving newer shades of post-punk, ambient, techno and drone. Opening track ‘Ecce! Ego!’ picks up where Nothing Is Still left off for just a minute, its sweeping strings and ethereal atmosphere quickly giving way to something much darker and sinister — “like ‘Envelopes (Chapter VI)’’s fucked up cousin,” as Vynehall describes it.
It would be unfair to say that Rare, Forever isn’t a multimedia project like Nothing Is Still. The songs first debuted on A Little More Liquid, the stunning audio-visual exploration/livestream project that Vynehall collaborated on with Eric Timothy Carlson and Aaron Anderson, and the record’s themes were brought to life throughout it. What’s more, ‘In>Pin’ sees Vynehall utilising words as instruments — an additional texture that adds depth that already takes a deep-dive into the human psyche. Playing with words borrowed from the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa and Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, as well as Vynehall’s own, the song explores what it’s like to spend time inside your own mind, brilliantly setting up the course of the album: “Is it strange to feel it? / To lose one’s self / Occurring quietly in the world, / As if it were nothing at all.”
And while Vynehall has chosen to focus on his own inner workings, there is the spectral outline of a character — known as Velvet — scattered throughout and acting as a guiding force. “Velvet pops up in this LP a few times, and I wanted its ambiguity to be alluring. Is Velvet a person, or a thought? Human or metaphor?” Vynehall explains. ‘Snakeskin ∞ Has- Been’ is closer to paths of house and techno that Vynehall as trodden before, all stabbing synths and acid flashes - but is deconstructed and warped in a way that’s completely in tune with where Vynehall currently is as an artist, and sounds resoundingly fresh in the scene-at- large.
With that said, there are opportunities to take a breath too. ‘An Exhale’ precedes ‘Dumbo’ with exactly that - a long, cathartic gasp of hyperventilating synths and distant vocal cries that acts a sort of calm before the storm. ‘Dumbo’ itself is another playful moment on a record that packs more of them than you might first imagine. A tough, percussive track that leans on the syncopated rhythms of hard drum, it becomes royally unhinged around the three-minute mark, dancing more ecstatically than anything the first post-lockdown ravers could pull off. “I wanted to put this on to serve as a reminder that these experiences are like saging yourself, and can be really fucking fun!” Vynehall says. “The vocal “If you know what I mean?” is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek poke at the fact that I always do these fairly in-depth pieces.”
The album closes with one final gesture, a conclusion to the song-and-dance that Vynehall has played with his own mind — with Velvet — throughout. ‘All I See Is You, Velvet Brown’ features Vynehall’s interpretation of a poem originally written by Will Ritson named ‘Harbouring’. As hazy saxophone flourishes and beatless textures twirl around each other, a voice suddenly beckons: “I would do nothing differently in harbouring my errors / My small ships / Those battered vessels that will not sink / That never set sail / No longer go out to fish / But remain bobbing in the water / Meditating / Like soft words of advice.”
ExpandThose who have spent time with Vynehall’s music over the past decade will know how much it is rooted in family. Nothing Is Still — which was part of a wider multimedia experience spanning film and literature — was dedicated to Vynehall’s grandparents and traced their emigration from London to New York in the 1960s, his own journey to Los Angeles striking some distant, ghostly parallels with theirs. Music For The Uninvited was inspired by the funk, soul and hip-hop tapes his mum used to play on car journeys to and from school. But on Rare, Forever, Vynehall is showcasing all the strings to his bow - creating music that’s borderless and unbound.
“After writing those ‘chronicle-heavy’ releases I started to think about what I wanted to do next. I wanted to write purely from the standpoint of free expression: whatever came to me is what I’d go with,” he says, but it soon became apparent that Vynehall is drawn to theme or narrative in his productions. Rare, Forever sees him for the first time investigating who he is as a person and artist in the very moment, rather than looking to the past to discover what and who has shaped him. The result then contains multiple sides to him, but variety in his art is something Vynehall is used to - he described his 2018 Resident Advisor Podcast as taking the dancefloor “left and right, up and down." On Rare, Forever, he’s taking a victory lap. The album is a beautiful marriage of everything he's done so far while remaining genuinely progressive; the end result sounding like Nothing Is Still but with the narrative toned down, and the dancefloor dialled up.
Rare, Forever will feel familiar for fans of Vynehall’s DJ-Kicks mix or his eclectic excursions on NTS, while simultaneously sounding unlike anything he’s ever done before. As much as there are dancefloor memories and moments, it’s not strictly a dance record — instead, Rare, Forever is the clearest representation of the broad spectrum of music he’s made to date, deftly weaving newer shades of post-punk, ambient, techno and drone. Opening track ‘Ecce! Ego!’ picks up where Nothing Is Still left off for just a minute, its sweeping strings and ethereal atmosphere quickly giving way to something much darker and sinister — “like ‘Envelopes (Chapter VI)’’s fucked up cousin,” as Vynehall describes it.
It would be unfair to say that Rare, Forever isn’t a multimedia project like Nothing Is Still. The songs first debuted on A Little More Liquid, the stunning audio-visual exploration/livestream project that Vynehall collaborated on with Eric Timothy Carlson and Aaron Anderson, and the record’s themes were brought to life throughout it. What’s more, ‘In>Pin’ sees Vynehall utilising words as instruments — an additional texture that adds depth that already takes a deep-dive into the human psyche. Playing with words borrowed from the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa and Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, as well as Vynehall’s own, the song explores what it’s like to spend time inside your own mind, brilliantly setting up the course of the album: “Is it strange to feel it? / To lose one’s self / Occurring quietly in the world, / As if it were nothing at all.”
And while Vynehall has chosen to focus on his own inner workings, there is the spectral outline of a character — known as Velvet — scattered throughout and acting as a guiding force. “Velvet pops up in this LP a few times, and I wanted its ambiguity to be alluring. Is Velvet a person, or a thought? Human or metaphor?” Vynehall explains. ‘Snakeskin ∞ Has- Been’ is closer to paths of house and techno that Vynehall as trodden before, all stabbing synths and acid flashes - but is deconstructed and warped in a way that’s completely in tune with where Vynehall currently is as an artist, and sounds resoundingly fresh in the scene-at- large.
With that said, there are opportunities to take a breath too. ‘An Exhale’ precedes ‘Dumbo’ with exactly that - a long, cathartic gasp of hyperventilating synths and distant vocal cries that acts a sort of calm before the storm. ‘Dumbo’ itself is another playful moment on a record that packs more of them than you might first imagine. A tough, percussive track that leans on the syncopated rhythms of hard drum, it becomes royally unhinged around the three-minute mark, dancing more ecstatically than anything the first post-lockdown ravers could pull off. “I wanted to put this on to serve as a reminder that these experiences are like saging yourself, and can be really fucking fun!” Vynehall says. “The vocal “If you know what I mean?” is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek poke at the fact that I always do these fairly in-depth pieces.”
The album closes with one final gesture, a conclusion to the song-and-dance that Vynehall has played with his own mind — with Velvet — throughout. ‘All I See Is You, Velvet Brown’ features Vynehall’s interpretation of a poem originally written by Will Ritson named ‘Harbouring’. As hazy saxophone flourishes and beatless textures twirl around each other, a voice suddenly beckons: “I would do nothing differently in harbouring my errors / My small ships / Those battered vessels that will not sink / That never set sail / No longer go out to fish / But remain bobbing in the water / Meditating / Like soft words of advice.”