Discover more from Futureproofing
Futureproofing #7: YATTA's Palm Wine Music
An interview with the PTP artist about their stunning 2024 album, the meaning of folk music and how to find ease in your life while remaining political.
When I received YATTA’s PALM WINE earlier this year in an early promo email from PTP label founder Geng, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I knew that YATTA was something of a poet-performance-artist, whose past work included bracing electronics and fierce spoken word, and who had collaborated with Moor Mother. And PTP is home to a lot of intense, abrasive music. But PALM WINE offered something different: seduction. The album is something like a stream-of-consciousness religious journey, mixing the sacred and the profane both spiritually and musically—a sort-of cover of Evanescence’s “My Immortal” sits between a jaunty interlude and a sardonic spoken word piece.
What’s most remarkable about PALM WINE is the melody and songcraft from an artist who previously spurned those qualities. As it becomes more emotionally intense, YATTA’s melody lines start to curve at the edges—the first “whoa” moment is in the middle during “Fully Lost, Fully Found,” which feels like YATTA’s personal “Amazing Grace.” The melody navigates a queasy instrumental built around disembodied basslines and sped-up vocal samples, their deadpan performance outlining the ambivalence and confusion of the lyrics. And “MTV,” an alt-rock scream-along, is so catchy that YATTA put it on the album twice in a row, because why not?
Touching on personal and spiritual relationships, PALM WINE races towards an emotional climax that ends with a cover of the jazz standard “No Greater Love” whose choral arrangement, splitting YATTA into many smaller YATTAs, feels religious in scope and approach. (I described the album as “breaking up and getting back together with God.”)
For a DIY album by an experimental artist, PALM WINE is also unusually polished, thanks in large part to the mainstream artists they employed to co-produce. The moment when the strut of “MTV” breaks out into full butt rock riffage is thrilling every time, and the guitar is perfectly crunchy, the frequencies sawed off in all the right places for maximum impact on FM radio. The vocals multiply and retreat suddenly like split speaker wire, and the close-mic’d recording captures the nuances of YATTA’s expression—they sound bored or dismissive as often as they sound searching or loving. (My favorite lyric on the album? “I hate you / Come home.”)
The title refers to palm wine music, a style of guitar-based folk music popular in Sierra Leone and Liberia with a storytelling component, with roots in the Portuguese colonists who brought their guitars to West Africa. It’s an addictive and uplifting genre, even when it tells of hardship, and the music soundtracked YATTA’s Sierra Leonean family life, growing up with it without even knowing what it was. After researching in their adult life, YATTA discovered that they were actually related to palm wine music star S.E. Rogie, a personal and musical journey they wrote about elegantly here and talk about more in the interview below.
PALM WINE, then, is like a modern take on the style, only abstracted to infinity. You can hear hints of the lilting guitar and cyclical melodies, but YATTA is no guitar player, nor do they come naturally to palm wine music, having been separated by generations and ocean. But it makes a wonderful tribute, an album as haunting as it is funny, the sonic document of someone looking for something and finding themselves in the process. I was so obsessed with the album that I had to speak to YATTA about it, and over a funnier-than-expected Zoom session, they opened up about the making of the album and their personal circumstances around it.
Can you tell me about the journey to making this album?
I wanted to discover what my version of pop could be. I had a hard time focusing during Covid because of immense fear of the virus, the relationship that I was in, and negotiating whether or not I wanted to commit to being a musician in the way I had before.
It was a stop-start process. I spent most of my time writing—prose, poetry, and essays. I was writing about nature, ease, leisure, the white wander, and earth music. There’s an undercurrent of research in every aspect of the album. I remember approaching a label and they asked me, "why are you thinking so much?"
The early sessions happened in London and New York with felicita. I just love making music with them. It’s always been so natural. Amidst the journey, I made the album with Moor Mother.
When I had enough demos, I sought out the pop producers that I knew in LA, where I was living at the time. So Drove and Myles Avery. Though, I believe I fully re-committed to this path while in residence at Pioneer Works. I’m so grateful for that place, they’ve supported me throughout my career. I recorded WAHALA there too.
Pre-Covid, I was a full-on DIY performing artist. I ran Silent Barn, I played like twice a week wherever I could. I didn’t think about producing. Instead, I would play improvisationally until I had "songs," then I would record tracks from that. There was no preciousness. Covid-19 forced me to come up with a way to be a recording artist and also gave me fear, which looking back, I straight up didn’t really have.
I moved back to New York while finishing the album, with Carlos Hernandez who executive produced the record. He used to run his studio, Gravesend Recording, in the back of Silent Barn. Now it’s in Dumbo, it’s so beautiful.
What do you mean by creating a way of recording music?
I needed to identify my process. Prior to this album, my work was more about expression than communication. I wanted to create structures that felt aligned with my essence as a creator yet honored the pockets and the repetition that could invite listeners in.
What does 'repeatable' mean exactly?
I would start things on Ableton, and I've always worked in a loop form with Ableton, with a loop pedal—so I thought in loops rather than linearly. By repeatable, I meant bops. Making "songs" as opposed to pure improvisations.
Was it difficult moving from what was essentially a poetry/spoken word format to making songs?
It was difficult, yeah. I think music forms relate to mental states. I think about movement and rupture. Free jazz feels like a ruptured sound to me. I come from that tradition out of Houston. At the root of jazz, I think of psychological ruptures caused by forced migration of African people. There’s chaos, there’s searching, and there are jokes of survival.
I moved around a lot during the onset of Covid and directly after. Perhaps I was trying to counteract my motion by seeking a more grounded sound—that was difficult. It made me think about my relationship to stasis, stability, and sound.
Did you have an idea of what that grounded sound would be when you started working on this?
I wanted it to be folky, because that's what I think of when I think "grounded," and I find humor in that. It feels really earnest, which, at this moment, is funny to me, because we live in such a deranged time. But folk sounds like it knows what it is even if the content itself is asking questions. And so to make music that knows what it is right now feels strange, and I'm not sure if I did that, but I wanted to.
When you say folk, what are you talking about?
I guess I'm thinking about I'm thinking about palm wine music. Fingerpicking—and there's no fingerpicking in this album, but I wanted that feeling. It's almost like a self-soothing mechanism. A repetition, a balm.
You've written about it before, but can you explain what palm wine music is and how you came across it?
Palm wine music is a guitar music from West Africa, a fusion of Portuguese settlers coming to Sierra Leone. I've spent a lot of time around people who grow things or work on farms, and so I always relate that to folk music. And often, those people have been white. So I thought, like, okay, what is folk music for me—what's that feeling for me? Palm wine music.
It's the Iron & Wine thing, which I'm somehow avoiding, because I've been thinking, like, "how did I happen to bring him into this so deeply?" He has no clue. When I was living in Upstate [New York], I grew close to Meshell Ndegeocello. I didn’t know until deep into my writing that they went on tour together. They are dear friends, and to me, he [Iron & Wine] has been a stand in. But he's real, and they're friends. I grew up listening to a lot of that type of folk music, and I liked that levity. I was thinking about Iron & Wine, which led to Iron & Palm Wine, and then I learned more about the genre, which led me to my grand uncle S.E. Rogie, and then my parents acting like that relation was totally normal.
How did you find out that S.E. Rogie was your grand uncle?
I was just researching the genre, and I was talking to my mom about it, and then she said, "Oh, your grand uncle!" I started posting about it, and then my cousin said, "Oh, that's our grand uncle." But I was like, "No, that's my grand uncle." But it's like that sometimes with West African families—it’s like, who am I actually related to? [laughs]. But the relationship just started. I still need to reach out to his son. I haven't done that yet.
Did discovering that you were related to someone so involved in the music change the way you looked at it?
During Covid, I was deciding whether to commit to music or whether to let it go. And I think that discovery got me to recommit. I went through a time where I was pretty blocked musically, and so somehow writing about music is what got me out of it, and then that discovery kept me going.
Do you see yourself reflected more in palm wine music than, like, Iron & Wine-style folk music?
I feel like it's like a spectrum. I'm trying to walk towards the palm wine and exorcise myself of the other stuff—or alchemize it. It's so funny telling the same story over and over again, because it's committing myself to a narrative. But I guess the end game I was thinking about was getting palm wine musicians collaborating with these white folk musicians.
Why is that an end game—why not just try and do it?
Well, maybe I don't know what end game means [laughs]. I think I'm gonna try, once I get some rest. I've been collecting the contacts, so I've got, like, Ezra Koening’s contact, I've got Iron & Wine too. I'm hoping that guilt works. Race guilt is really helpful. [laughs]
Did you already have an idea for the album in mind, or was it after that moment about S.E. Rogie that you decided to recommit? How did the album take shape?
I had concepts of an album. [laughs] I had little sprinkles of things. Having the residency at Pioneer Works is actually where I started to hear the shape of the project. It took forever to get the styles to make sense together for me.
How did you do it?
Just listening again and again and again, asking God for guidance, and going to my dear friend Carlos Hernandez who became the executive producer of the record. He’s the best.
So, to you, how does the album incorporate, or at least reference, palm wine music?
I feel like palm wine music is a portal towards some sort of ease—that's what I want it to be. That music takes me to that place, and there's humour in it. It feels like acknowledging sorrow but also alchemizing it into play. That, to me, is what keeps me alive. And if I can make music that does that, I'll keep doing it.
Is it hard for you to feel at ease or relaxed? You talk about these things as struggles, but they come naturally to some other people.
It's funny because I feel like at my core that's who I am, but I think just living in different environments makes it hard to maintain. And politically it's hard to maintain. I don't even know if it's healthy to seek that when the environment is… what it is right now. Is it healthy to seek ease and relaxation, or is it healthier to sit with what you're witnessing?
Can you do both?
Yeah. I think you do both.
Did you do both? Did creating the album help you get closer to those feelings or those states at all?
It helped me. So did the collaboration. After being alone a lot, the collaborations reminded me of the many creative communities all over that I’ve been a part of. I feel like I literally forgot to record music pre-Covid because I was going so hard with shows–playing them, seeing them, booking them, promoting them, recovering from them. Reconnecting with the people I met that way has helped me get my joy back. I feel like there is movement again.
Who was the first person you started collaborating with for what became the album, and how did that happen?
It was felicita. This was so long ago, like 2018, we met playing a show at a castle in Berlin and then kept in touch. Their music is so kinetic and electric. The music we made together somehow turned out cheeky, curious, and swelling. We still have several unreleased tracks.
What did your collaboration with them look like? Who did what, what came out of it?
One of the first times we played together it was pure piano, singing, and co-production—just a lot of improvisation. That's where that Evanescence lyric came from. Later on we added textures, back and forth. Then we had another session in some strange mansion in LA, that’s where the foundation of "EPKWY” was recorded. There are lots of dark vocals from that session I hope never get heard because they scare me. I was looking at the darkness and trying to find the lightest way to expose it.
Who else did you work with on the record?
I worked with Carlos Hernandez. We met when I was manager of Silent Barn. He had a recording studio in the back, and that's where I recorded my first EP. I reached out to have him help me make sense of the album, because he's seen my whole trajectory. We spent a lot of time together, just talking, and he saw a narrative beyond what I conceptualized—because I had been with it for so long. Carlos plays so many instruments, so it was a lot of just trying things out. And we brought in an amazing drummer, Buz, who played on some of the tracks.
I know there are other collaborators. Tell me more.
Myles Avery, who's in LA, we've known each other for like ten years. He is an amazing producer. He's worked with, like, Megan Thee Stallion and Tate McRae. And honestly that is the kind of stuff that I listen to. I never really listen to noise music. When I was making mixes and performing more often I would listen to more experimental music, but now I listen to pop. So that was cool. He has a wide range of sonic influences.
So were you trying to make pop music?
Yes, though if I listened to it and I wasn't me, I don’t know if that’s what I’d call it, but there are a couple bangers.
How did you end up mainly listening to pop music?
I think it was just wanting to stay sane during Covid. Pop music is engineered to keep listening on loop. I went bimbo mode when I moved to LA. I got apolitical and isolated. I don't know what happened. I got a personal trainer. I started working out a lot and listening to Ariana Grande. I like pop music with production that has a lot of tiny sounds.
What do you mean by tiny sounds?
Little ear candy in the mix. Maybe like, if someone's a really good dancer, you would call it musicality when they can latch onto moments that someone who isn't a dancer wouldn’t hear.
Do you have those tiny moments in your own music?
That's what I want. I think I do. I have folders of tiny moments.
Tell me about this LA journey.
So I moved to LA with the person that I was dating. She was in school and I couldn’t say no. It was the first time that I had veered out of what I believed to be my own path. I think that was the first time that I let go of that, which meant that I tried a lot of things. I performed a comedy set at Flappers for my birthday. I was writing constantly–essays, prose, poetry. I took online acting classes, explored and got my ya-yas out. I surfed! Personal trainer, surfing, acting, comedy, writing. I better have a fucking theatrical performance next year. I was kind of training for that.
Did living in LA, with no direction, bring you closer to ease at all?
I found out about hobbies. I didn't know about hobbies before. I was writing a lot about Black leisure and Black ease, which I think was a trend at the time.
Do you still have hobbies two years later, after moving back to New York?
Not one! Literally no. The album and moving back absorbed me.
What kind of hobbies would you want?
I guess, right now, I'm around people working with the earth and with flowers. Doing something with flowers would be nice. Doing something just for beauty and not thinking about it so much.
Always back to not thinking.
I guess so.
Alright, so you went back to New York while making the album. And what sort of story does the album tell—if it's palm wine music-related, and palm wine music is storytelling music…
Well, can I ask you what story you think it tells?
I would say that, if you zoom out, it's like breaking up and getting back together with God. That's what it sounds like to me.
You literally nailed it better than I could. I'm glad I asked—damn. [laughs]
Do you feel like the album has a narrative. Is that how you built it?
I think it has a yearning. I built it with a narrative, and then I messed it up and just went with intuition. I made it with a flow, song-wise, in mind, and then the very day before I sent it over, I added "MTV2" because I just couldn't decide between the two. I think by the end the result was intuition. Now it feels like little cycles making up a larger cycle.
Do you feel that's more reflective of you as a person?
Yes. Wow, I said that like I was on a lie detector test. But yeah, definitely.
The last song sounds kind of like a hymn. Tell me about your experience with religion—is it important to you? The album sounds quite religious to me.
The last song is "No Greater Love," which is a jazz standard. I love jazz standards because they feel like templates for people to use and infuse their essence and histories with at any given moment. That song has been in my head for ten years, so I was finally like, "Okay, let's commit to it." And then there's the breakdown, which is "Let Me Love You" by Bunny Mack, which was a song that was played a lot in my childhood. Wait, what was the question? [laughs]
What does religion mean to you?
My dad's side is Muslim. My mom's side is Christian. I grew up with a grandmother who was very devout Christian, and that meant that she was singing a lot—singing hymns a lot—and her voice was like… one word that comes to mind is failing, like where each note just falls. It's very beautiful, but also kind of ugly. So I learned how to sing with her. My idea of religion is more of a personal relationship to God and a conversation with God. It has humor, it has trickiness, it has play.
Do you think that faith—and whatever that means to you, talking to God—helps you with approaching the state of ease?
Yes and no, because I'm always doubtful, too. I doubt all the time. But I think it's sort of like in the macro, yes, I think that's what faith does for people. In the micro, it's something to just tide you over.
Coming out the other end of this album, do you feel like you learned about how to feel at ease or more relaxed?
It gave me enough clarity to recognize my states—awareness of what states I'm in and which I'm not. It feels very selfish to think like this, but for me the point was figuring out what my sound is, and not trying to be anything other than what that is.
What do you mean by selfish?
Thinking about myself… I don't know. I feel like with identity politics and me just talking about love, God, all of these things. I think I'm trained to believe that that's selfish, because I'm not talking about, you know, post-racial dynamics.
Do you feel pressure to talk about that dynamic in your work?
I feel pressure to consider my work in an intellectual framework, because I'm around a lot of those people. But I'm committed to doing whatever the fuck I want, and so it can feel shameful—but I don't care. At the end of the day, I think that I'll make more interesting things if I fight against the need to please.
Well, do you think your music is "intellectual?"
I don't know. Do you?
I don't know either. I asked you!
Well, here's the thing. I was in grad school when I made this album, and doing that in the space that I was in made me feel like a jester. I don't have a commitment to seriousness. In fact, I like to be unserious. And I'm committed to that, very determined. It's rigor, but a different kind of rigor—like how a kid making a sand castle is rigor.
So are you back to being serious all the time after finishing the album?
I'm a very moody person, but I love to laugh. Am I back to being serious? No, I can't go back. I think I am deeply devoted, like I'm fully committed to this path of music and art. And if that's serious, then I'm serious.
You've mentioned Ezra Koenig and Iron & Wine. Do you feel like you're reclaiming what they've referenced in their work?
I don't feel any anger towards it. So I don't feel like I'm reclaiming. I think my strength as an artist is my curiosity, and it can lead me to stupidity. I just have a curiosity about interracial collaborations and “exchanges” through time. And the guitar. There are just certain objects in history that offer ways to look at the world and learn. The guitar is one of those, and I'm just orbiting guitar music and looking at it.
But I'm not reclaiming anything. I think there's some sort of healing that I see possible in finding different ways to look at race, and I approach that with play.
What are these different ways of looking at race?
Today I was listening to someone who was talking about how you can tell where different people were from in Haiti, based on what African traditional religion that they used. She was a Black, Haitian, Christian and she was talking about the complexities of the idea of ancestor worship within Black America, using these African traditional religions as a way to reclaim. And she was saying that it's not so simple. Like you can't just look at that and be satisfied. She sai, “our ancestors had a lot of issues. Why should we be worshiping them?” I see this kind of approach as breaking down A-to-B ways of thinking as generative.
I feel like that's similar to how you make music. The album is palm wine music, but it's not really. It's not retro or anything.
It's fragmented, it's zigzagging. It’s not yet done.
Weekly Listening
Shinichi Atobe - Discipline [DDS, 2024]
This is probably the most hyped techno release of December, and for good reason. The Japanese producer has been on a tear lately, with tracks that balance beauty with propulsion, and a generally original take on dub techno defined by dulcet melody and textures that are hard but supple—think pearl or opal. The tracks on Discipline are untitled and as the album name might suggest, it’s slightly more utilitarian than records like Heat or Yes, though no less pleasurable. The first track sounds like a spaceship showroom, all peppy drums and shimmering melodies, while the elliptical stabs of “SA DUB 4” are DJ Nobu on a tropical vacation. Need more subterreanean Shinichi goodness? “SA DUB 7” calls back to “Ship-Scope,” but with the polished sheen of his recent work.
Tonto - Cactus [Relics, 2024]
This is only one track, and it’s less than four minutes long, but it’s been in my rotation almost constantly over the past week. More dub than techno, it’s mixed down beautifully, with delay effects so crisp and intense they sound like water splashing off the rim of a glass. There are dramatic string-like chords, plenty of wacky sounds that dart across the stereo spectrum and a bassline that won’t quit—it’s almost like Objekt if he slowed way down. Not quite techno, not quite digidub, it’s some wonderful third thing.
Blawan - bouQ [XL Recordings, 2024]
My friend described a couple tracks off this new Blawan EP (derisively) as “music for furries”—namely, the strange vocal manipulations and zany sound effects—and while it’s certainly an unusual one, it really hits when it hits. The voice on “Fire,” stretched and kneaded into unnatural Autotuned textures, is almost annoying, but the drama is supreme. The misty-eyed chord progression weighing down the otherwise heavy rhythm section, while “Done Eclipse” knocks the burned-out techno of Karenn off its axis into something resembling dubstep. The sidechained-to-fuck title track has a garish melody that would have fit right in on Skrillex’s Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, with the tinny highs and spasmodic lows to match. This is supremely weird techno, huge chunks of sound whittled down into harsh right angles and strange curves.
Christoph de Babalon - No Favours [Sneaker Social Club, 2024]
Christoph de Babylon became something of an underground music darling with the reissue of his 1997 masterpiece If You’re Into It, I’m Out Of It.—a still mean-sounding collection of ultra darksided jungle and drum & bass. The newer work he’s made since his revival hasn’t gotten as much attention, but I don’t understand why. Take No Favours, his latest release for Sneaker Social Club. “For Nothing” has all the Silent Hill atmosphere and crunchy drums of his classic album, only bigger and higher-definition. My favorite is “Dearth Mill,” which pairs corroded Reese baselines with eerie synth horns and drums that come in and out of focus like a fighter jet weaving between clouds.