Ivvvo

Halcyon Veil deliver the first IVVVO EP since Mark Leckey Made Me Hardcore - his soundtrack for Raf Simons’ SS16 show. RIYL Rabit, Actress, Zomby, Soda Plains, Mark Leckey, Lorenzo Senni 
 
On his thrilling, wide-eyed debut for Rabit’s Halcyon Veil, London-based IVVVO gets deep under the hood of rave music’s emotive mechanics and reasserts his crucial role in the borderland between lonely bedrooms and heaving clubs.  
 
Good, Bad, Baby, Horny is a distressing but necessary distillation of contemporary worries. Largely shy of beats but heavy on symbolic, contorted references to ‘90s and ’00s pop, rave, and video games, as much as the current ecology of effluent news feeds and rampant social anxiety, it plays out like a frazzled AI attempting to parse the confusion of memory thru state of infinitely up-to-the-second hyperreality.  
 
Its four tracks fuse visceral and highly visual sonic cues in synaesthetic rushes that mirror our sense of physicality within the framework of daily digital experience; somehow isolating the motion sick feeling of hurtling toward a shared endgame with life flashing before our eyes, whilst simultaneously remaining static at the centre of a rave and resisting the perceived tempo of reality.  
 
Scaling from the intensely queasy sensuality of the title track’s gasps and deathly synth drop, thru the the sky-kissing guitar licks off Self Rape, to the frozen Eski shoegaze burn of I Fucked It Up and an elusive glimpse of ecstasy in Tongue Kiss Crying, the mood is perpetually high-strung yet melancholic, violent yet compassionate, perhaps best considered in terms of MDMA as a bitter salt or prism for reflective, therapeutic purposes.  
 
It’s definitely Ivo Pacheco’s strongest work yet, and a hugely timely dispatch from one of rave’s visionary contemporary se’ers.