Over a career that’s lasted 15 years, Alan Abrahams has kept mostly quiet. This is not to say that he’s the Frank Ocean of the underground South African electronic scene; Abrahams is prolific, to the point where his releases seem to mark time’s forward movement, like the arrival of a full moon or the perennial surfacing of a lo-fi Dylan bootleg. Rather, it’s to say that Abrahams has historically let his beats — schizoid tracts of quick-footed polyrhythms and mechanized melodies — do the talking for him. However, on his latest LP under the Portable alias, he finishes what he started on 2014’s sobering “Surrender” and jettisons his self-imposed vow of silence: Alan Abrahams marks the symbolic debut of a new singer-songwriter, one who has lived in his own soundscapes long enough to know what kind of voice will anchor their oddities and compliment their effusions.
Indeed, since he first gained notoriety, Abrahams has been electrifying dance floors, impishly juggling monikers (i.e., Portable and Body Code), and dropping records like they’re perishable goods. But it wasn’t until “Surrender” that the Cape Town-hailing producer and consummate mood-weaver reached a wider audience. The acclaim made sense. The track felt direct, accessible, even universal.
“Hands up / I surrender,” he bellowed, his voice an operatic baritone not far removed from Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan, and as he passed through each chorus, a small curlicue of invisible synth-color seemed to float past his face, bringing his eyes up toward his outstretched hands, toward the sky, toward a vastness that made his love seem both microscopic and world-spanning at the same time. Lyrically, the song relied on lover-boy mundanities (“Let’s go to the movies / Get a coffee”), but it managed to communicate a kind of tragic longing where love signified life and loss, death. We have to go to the movies — we have to get a coffee — Abrahams seemed to sing. On his tongue, they weren’t suggestions, but imperatives.
His vocal wasn’t the only thing that made “Surrender” so powerful, though; it was the way his vocal meshed with the production, heightening the mood that was there before a word was ever added. The resultant sound closely resembled what fellow South African Petite Noir has described as “noir-wave”: a cerebral fusion of modern African music and moody, retro-futurist synthpop. This sound was present throughout Petite Noir’s excellent 2015 debut La Vie Est Belle, and it’s also present throughout Alan Abrahams, in its sprawling electro-ballads (“Your Warrior”), avant-funk confessionals (“Bondage”), and glitch-ridden instrumentals (“Séraphin”).
“Say It’s Going to Change”, perhaps the strongest track here, represents the fullest embodiment of Abrahams’ “noir-wave” vision yet. Paranoid, texturally dense, and replete with bursts of noise that sound like errant alien signals, it’s a perfect showcase for the new Portable persona: a lovesick warbler surrounded by ricocheting bits of high-speed electronic detritus. “Say / Say it’s going to change soon,” Abrahams urges his partner, and while he doesn’t explain what will happen if this change doesn’t come, it’s clear that it scares him to death.
While tracks like “Say It’s Going to Change” attest to Abrahams’ fascination with synthetic textures and frenetic 808 patterns, the new LP is also steeped in organic sound choices. “As For Me”, another mid-tempo tearjerker, uses beseeching strings to reify the long stretches of time Abrahams sees between himself and his next relationship. “It’s a mystery / If I’ll ever love another,” he sings, each word heavy, like a strained step forward out of the morass of a deteriorating love, and as each step is made, it’s easy to picture him as the same protagonist from “Surrender”, only now he’s learned the head-splitting anguish that can come from totally subordinating yourself to another. In “Standby” and “Closer”, meanwhile, he deploys stirring piano chords that turn each track into a miniaturized romantic epic.
Abrahams himself has described the LP’s sound as “a natural progression from dance music into something akin to a mutated musical style that incorporates stuff I listen to all the time such as classical, African and new jazz.” While this heterogeneity of influences is perceptible, Alan Abrahams sounds more like the work of a meticulous craftsman than a cross-cultural collage artist. In his hands, the short-circuiting minimalism of “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Drinker” and the ghostly sotto voce freak-pop of “This Frozen Lake” seem yoked together by some common core. It’s hard to put your finger on what exactly this core is, but one thing is certain: it continues to urge Abrahams to plug in his keyboards, open his mouth, and let his voice be heard – something we should all be grateful for.