Carmen Villain - Nutrition EP - The Fader review

Fader: Carmen Villain’s 2022 LP Only Love From Now On is a harmonically lush, though structurally minimalist, journey into the cosmos of the soul and the intimate reaches of the universe. 2023’s Music From the Living Monument, a selection of deeply textured sounds she created for a dance piece, explores positive and negative space, ebbing and flowing like an ocean tide over a sentient seabed. Her new EP Nutrition is tonally skeletal compared to her past two projects, but it never sounds undernourished. In fact, Villain finds some of her most fertile ground yet on the tape’s three tracks, which she describes as "dub studies born out of my continued fascination with the form.” The heaving synth tones that set the scene for “Disig” become a muted drawing of breaths as a lattice of percussion enters the frame. “Nutrition” is pure rhythm, with Villain deflating a bassline until only its atonal elements remain. On “Marka,” the final chapter of the trilogy, a voice-like synth returns as a death rattle over a disturbed skittering sound. It’s the barest of the bunch, its hollow drums vibrating like pulsars at the outer limits of deep space. —Raphael Helfand