The Vegetable Kingdom is an extreme electronic music deconstructor, and he’s got a new track for you.
For those that aren’t familiar, Vegetable Kingdom typically makes tracks (a good many of which are found for free on his SoundCloud) that are heavily abstract and minimal in their elements. His songs are low on concurrently running parts and high on making those parts each play out together exactly. The result is a song-creation style based in rich and complex soundscapes that play on the idea of electronic music by breaking it down, which for some of us is a form of the genre that plays right into the kind-of intellectual and artistic edginess that, for all of its other good qualities, the poppier sides of the medium don’t generally have the capacity to reach.
The new track we’ve got for our listenin’ today is about as solid of a connection to more well-known and regularly structured stuff that The Vegetable Kingdom gets- a “remix” of Sufjan Stevens’ “Drawn to the Blood,” but you get those quotes because the VK version of the track warps the living fuck out of the original song. Vegetable Kingdom takes Sufjan’s melancholy indie prettiness and makes it into a heavy-hitting melodic electronic tune that’s overwhelming and badass for being so. It kind-of reminds me of the power in the darker, more complex hymns out there (I just heard a bunch at a funeral, so they’re on the mind), with both those and this track going for a really sensory attack and a mindset that’s all big, crashing, cosmic and dangerous.
This track is definitely from the school of remixing that produces an artist’s impression gathered from a song’s parts rather than a repackaging of the song; for instance, for a whole song fully of syllables (that Sufjan sure can stuff a song with words), the VK remix features just one small snippet of singing repeated infinitely over the wild and unhinged reworking of the instrumentals. Doing that with finesse enough to create a track that stands alone as a more abstract piece is hard, but The Vegetable Kingdom does just that with this entry. It’s good weird shit for sure, and music that is probably best experienced when talking isn’t going to happen for a while (Grade A thinking tunes), and we highly recommend that if you weren’t familiar with this artist’s music before and if you’re also into good weird shit, that you use this track as an introduction to a ferocious electronic artist.