Live Review: CLYPSO's 'Pop Roll Flow' is a choose your own adventure track for the dancefloor
CLYPSO's ‘Pop Roll Flow’ is impeccably colourful & fun, like a streamer-strewn dancehall, confetti cannons blasting and balloons dropping from the ceiling.
There’s something wonderfully liberating about losing yourself on a dancefloor. On her new track, ‘Pop Roll Flow’, Sydney producer/singer/songwriter CLYPSO (who already has one of the best Australian tracks of the year under her belt with the KWAME collaboration, ‘Middle Ground’) finds that liberation in a joyous and colourful celebration of childhood.
“This is a choose your own adventure song. I’ve made the bass seedier and the beats dicier than ever before, with only one intention; to create a messy dancefloor,” says CLYPSO of the track. The comparison to choose your own adventure books is apt, as ‘Pop Roll Flow’ nestles itself between the unfettered imagined spaces of childhood and the physical adult spaces of the club dancefloor. Maybe it’s because many of us project dancefloors as one of the only sites left where the freedom and bewilderment of these choose your own adventure type of stories becomes possible in our otherwise constrained and orderly lives - a connection I’d never picked up on before.
So physically, you can find ‘Pop Roll Flow’ on the dancefloor, but spiritually it’s wandering wide-eyed through childhood. You can hear this duality on the funk-fuelled bass line, which has a touch of grit about it but worms itself throughout the track with a lightness that stops it from ever feeling downright, R18+ dirty. You can hear it again when the physicality of the drily produced percussion and the pure fun of the wonky synth line that carries the track ride up against the hypnotic qualities of CLYPSO’s floating vocals. Thus, like all of CLYPSO’s output so far, ‘Pop Roll Flow’ is impeccably, infectiously colourful and fun. It’s the sound of a vibrant, streamer-strewn dancehall, confetti cannons blasting and balloons dropping from the ceiling all at once.
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Threading together CLYPSO’s jungle beats, Afropunk and old school electronica influences, its eclectic mix of instrumentation almost feels like it’s built out of knick-knacks, like a craft activity you’d see on Play School where small trinkets and pieces of everyday objects come together through the power of curiosity and ingenuity to create something wonderfully new and novel. On ‘Pop Roll Flow’, CLYPSO takes you through her own Arch Window, bringing the unbridled joy and wonderment of childhood to the dancefloor.
IMAGE: Jonno Revanche
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