Nourished by Time is Marcus Brown, an electronic artist who does the writing, instrumentation, performance and final mixing of all their tracks. They’re also a master genre syncretist, crafting a heady brew drawn from the continuum of lush electronica as it stood in the late 80s and 90s, with a particular focus on African American music. There’s echoes of Freestyle, New Jack Swing, R&B, New Wave and Electrofunk here, with clear nods in the directions of bands like SWV, PM Dawn and Tony! Toni! Toné! At the same time, Brown’s resonant vocals, which weave in and out of his ever-expanding electronic textures, evoke the cavernous sound of Depeche Mode and the Blue Nile – bands that experimented with matching the voice to the enormous voids of music video.
Yet this is no mere genre tribute either – Brown’s work doesn’t simply evoke the late 80s and early 90s but forms part of a pedigree of DIY artists who came into their own with the new palette of electronic options that entered the market at this moment. Above all, Brown’s oscillations between lo-fi and lushness, and the different kinds of yearning attendant on each, continue the project of Arthur Russell. The second track, “Shed That Tear,” would be the highlight of any Russell album with its crisp yet dreamy delivery that both luxuriates around and is propelled forward by Brown’s emphatic rhotics. Apparently Brown used Dogecoin winnings to buy a Roland Juno-160 synthesizer to make their sound even more authentic.
Time is the central theme of the album. In interviews, Brown has stated that he is musically “creating a world that I wish existed.” All the tracks seem to exist in what Jose Esteban Munoz described as the “then and there” of queer utopia. On the opening track, “Quantum Suicide,” Brown hopes that “in the next life, there’ll be better timing” and the other numbers all reflect, in their different ways, a temporality of hope. I’m not sure whether Brown is queer – although his/their pronouns are “his” and “they” – but to me there is something inextricably queer about this sense of an intensified present moment that remains jettisoned from past and future as they are conventionally construed.
My favourite track on Erotic Probiotic 2 – in fact my favourite track of the last few years – is “The Fields.” On this magisterial centrepiece to the album, Brown’s yearning seems to move backwards and forwards at once, envisaging pasts that never were and futures that could never be, at least within “realism” as we understand it in our late capitalist world. The latter pervades Brown’s vision, or perhaps more accurately his longing for vision, which only provides him with “signs and advertisements” on “The Fields” even as he aspires for something more, something that perhaps can only be formulated in music. On one of the album’s two interludes, he contemplates the legacy of slavery in the long history of American capitalism, singing “I can still feel the cotton/And the heat from the fields/Made the country so damn rich/Ain’t no way to heal.”
Yet this is more than mere contemplation, in the same way that the album is more than mere homage. It reminded me of Grace Jones’ “Don’t’ Cry – It’s Only the Rhythm,” where she channels the “Axe to wood/in ancient times” of past labour and invokes the “chain gang song” of her ancestors only to transmute them into her own synthetic landscape, where she is both disciplining and disciplined body all at once. Both Brown and Jones reimagine the black past through a synthetically science fiction present, and a mutable sense of their own bodies (Jones has always been she/they in spirit) as if the only way to unwrite the past were to refuse to let mere “realism” constrain the future in the same way. That refusal, and the plaintive, Proustian temporality that comes with it, is, one of the most haunting and beautiful debuts I have heard in a long time – and one that has touched something deep within me.