Michael Valentine West :: culture is written on a forever 21 t-shirt EP (Ryu)

With a title pointing to a critique of a culture that commodifies fashion, packages identity as an aesthetic, and reduces meaningful social movements to marketable trends—MVW steers clear and continues to punctuate his own sonic language.

Balancing mechanical precision with organic disorder

 

Opening with heavily processed, hyper-glitched extrusions, the 35 seconds of “american psychosis” deliver an immediate, laser-blasted crunch of erratic activity—and a message—expertly timed by Michael Valentine West before a succession of rhythmic structures implodes on “blowout states.” A fractured beast of a track, it balances mechanical precision with organic disorder, as background drones and scattered tones spark in every direction.

“time is an insult” comes closest to Autechrean soil across this six-track selection, its ragged, modular clusters of brittle noise and pummeling metallic shards expanding and contracting with a distinctly dark edge. West begins to compress time and space on “flexing the rude boys,” introducing a minimalist glitch passage where fluid bits and bytes struggle to settle into any recognizable shape.

Penultimate cut “crystal math” shifts toward ambient electronic propulsion, allowing relaxed yet intricately tangled layers to gradually converge into a dense, expansive construction. The EP closes with “detroit,” a bumpy exercise in non-groove built around disheveled patterns and harsh, shadowy structural noise that resists easy explanation but bears West‘s unmistakable production stamp.

---

Continually refining his approach, Michael Valentine West—previously spotted on Adventurous Music, Mahorka, Evel, Polygon Network, 3OP, uvg212, Section 27, Urban Virus, Kaer’Uiks, Abstrakt Reflections, and Subcontinental—has also composed scores for independent films and theatre productions, while maintaining an impressive ability to deliver these otherworldly soundscapes in compact, concentrated bursts. With a title pointing to a critique of a culture that commodifies fashion, packages identity as an aesthetic, and reduces meaningful social movements to marketable trends—MVW steers clear and continues to punctuate his own sonic language.

culture is written on a forever 21 t-shirt is available on Ryu.