Oliver Belcher

Music Review: Milyoo, “Colours \ Games”

One can identify two moments when Tommy Wilson (a.k.a., Milyoo) matured into his signature apparitional sound. The first occurred in the development of his set for Mary Anne Hobbs, in between the masterfully playful rendering of his own “Multitude” and the subsequent devolution of the movement into a rhythmic theater of decay (listen 4:34-13:35). It was within this decay that Milyoo created his quasi-schizophrenic voices—a well-known hallmark of his music—that always emerge with a subtle paroxysmal fury: maniacal laughs, voices perhaps from one’s past, vampiric whispers and incomprehensible murmurings, “concluded” by the tragicomic relief of Bill Cosby, confessing to his audience that its his covers that save him from the monsters in the night. (Cosby maintains a prominent place in Milyoo’s repertoire). In many ways, this is an early Milyoo, a wilderness he had to wade through before he took his line of flight to the next moment, a solid Dilla-inspired tangent into the margins of hip hop, captured most beautifully in his “You are You,” his best song to date (listen 27:15; compare to “Don’t Cry”).

Its important to call the transformation between these two movements a “line of flight,” because Milyoo’s work is overtly inspired by Gilles Deleuze. I mention that not to bring theory into the discussion for the sake of it, but rather to underscore how Milyoo has tried to manifest, in sound, those nuances in Deleuze’s theory which cannot be easily captured in words. Milyoo’s sound is an insurgent sound: it defies predictability; (and) its haunted with both painful and loving memories at the same time; (and) every repetition fails to repeat itself, or more precisely, is saturated with an excess; (and) the oeuvre cannot and will not ever be considered a totality or whole; (and) it utterly lacks any moment of decision, each sound constituting a vanishing trace that leads nowhere and everywhere; (and… and… and…) Milyoo’s brilliance lies within these ambiguities, within those lines that tether multiple, discrete categorical sounds, without ever being categorical themselves.  

Even Milyoo’s new release “Colours \ Games” (July 2011; Opit Records) fails to be definitively categorized. On the surface, one is tempted to say that Milyoo has unapologetically delved into the genre of house, especially in “Colours.” But Milyoo even has the talent to turn house, which barely constitutes a minor art in itself, on its head, orienting the listener not toward the monotonous beat, but rather to how the compulsive secondary sounds can overcome the tyranny of the beat, almost rendering it completely mute. Milyoo has that rare ability to make you forget that you are, in fact, listening to house. The same can be said for “Games,” an exercise in sound inversion that makes one inclined to reach for a Q-tip. I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or not, but it’s ultimately a metaphor for how Milyoo wants his listeners to think about thought itself: as something inverted, interrupted, always failing to fully coalesce, a semblance of continuity that is always obstructed by games.  I’m looking forward to seeing where Milyoo takes his sound in his later releases this year.

RATING: A