PeridotPerfume

SFV Acid, “As Is (Part 2)” (UNO NYC video version 2013)

Commitment issues are only a problem if you can’t find anything to commit to; but once you’ve laid down some honest roots, chances are good that more will take. If you want them to. We all know SFV Acid is committed to “place” like a punk rep’ing his local scene; it’s in his very stage-name. Yet how San Fernando Valley manifests itself in the art he makes (by his own admission, music is a secondary pursuit), and how he uses its mythical middle-class characteristics, has a lot to do with what makes his music an oddity this moment. 

The generational detachment is upfront, but it is carefully constructed, and the rest of the filled-out frame exhibits precise (if not quite strict) pains. The music is organically intelligent, of the early-Aphex/ambient-electro-techno variety, 303s and 808s programmed with emotion, the melody and melancholy churning towards a never-reached horizon. Making it very much a third-(fourth-?) generation off-spring of Detroit. This last point would not be worth dwelling on, if these videos didn’t harken back to something specific in how they soundtrack the Valley landscape: exactly in-fashion with the way Detroit’s techno underpins an endless stream of Motor City ruin-porn and attitude videos, clogging the documentary and art space. 

In our time of the ‘nets, this is hardly an unheard-of juxtaposition, but a strange one nevertheless. Yet in our post-truth days of how underground house over-peddles American-inner-city attitudes all around the world, SFV’s interpretation of authenticity is a motherfucker.

He applies a specific language to an intentionally misapplied subject, just the kind of thing that might be dreamed up by a kid who by his own admission mopes around art-schools for fun, and without commitment. Same as it ever was. Even the post-script scene (a brown worker scraping off graffiti, while in the background church-bells ring) speaks to the non-permanence of whatever you may have just heard and/or seen. In fact, this isn’t even a real track, it’s a version of the one released as a video last week, and not the one that carries its name on the UNO EP. So, “as-salamu alaykum!” SFV Acid, may you live to not commit another day.

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