Yves Tumor
I couldn’t get an interview with Yves Tumor. He’s notoriously evasive, an affected persona dressed up behind a malignant-sounding pseudonym, aesthetically shapeshifting with each new release so deftly as to elude definition. 2018’s Safe in the Hands of Love suited every mood from punk rock to Panorama Bar so it’s no surprise that “Applaud,” Tumor’s first single of 2019, would veer off (delightfully!) once again. Departing from the expected conventions of “experimental electronic music,” it slides into a Jameson-drenched riff shot through with nonspecific nostalgia.
1970? 1992? No matter, just pass the blunt and numb me in all my reflexive impotence—depressive hedonia, just like Mark Fisher forecasted. History’s collapsing to the tumbling drone of a trappy beat—it’s a three-minute odyssey of French and seductive spoken-word, four a.m. light and neighbors’ radio emissions streaming in through fissures in heavy oak panelling.
Directed by Gia Coppola, the First Family of American Cinema’s millennial progeny, the video pays homage to Hollywood masters from Hitchcock to Paul Thomas Anderson, shrouded in smoke and shot from unhinged, canted angles. The narcotized camera stumbles through a space that feels outside of time, cluttered with classic film’s lingering detritus. Referential, but it’s a lunatic nod, just shy of earnest endorsement. Impossible to imagine this coming from anyone but a third-generation Coppola.
Drawn-out fades and lethargic pacing outfit this whole operation like a bad comedown. The background is dotted with neon signs but by this hour, everyone’s too fucked up to use their depth perception anyway—the field of vision recedes into hypnotic fluctuations, all blue moonlight and red leather. Ambient groundlessness, with nothing but the lagging, repetitious beat to stabilize oneself against. Tumor’s vocals are moaning and confected, a drawn-out whinge: just want you to hold me, girl.
This all sounds desperately nihilistic, but there’s an obvious romance in the video’s neon despondency. It’s completely abject and, at the same time, undeniably seductive, teeming with defiance—one of the few consistent through-lines across Tumor’s whole oeuvre. It’s that same indescribable charisma that could compel me to sit through the 156-minutes of Boogie Nights, the hypnotic dissidence at the heart of its appeal. Nonconformity: that’s the only dependable pattern when it comes to Yves Tumor.
courtesy YVES TUMOR
interview ADINA GLICKSTEIN
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