October has closed with (surely) one of the albums of the year. Its protagonist is a newcomer in this format, delivering her first full-length album, although she has been in the music business for years and her passport says that she was born 46 years ago.
We are talking about Quivering in Time by the High Priestess of Motherbeat, better known as Eris Drew. Tremendous debut, a full album without a filler groove, fresh yet revisiting.
Let’s do a little history about its author. Because of her father´s job, Eris moved around the country in his childhood: Minessota, Wisconsin, Kansas City, Missouri and finally Glen Ellyn, a predominantly white suburb outside Chicago. Her parents were party people, and as a child, her mother gave her a golden piece of advice: “If you want to hear real good music, Eris, you have to go to places where there are black people and gay people.
Her first sessions are said to date back to 1994, when Eris was alternating her daytime life of law school and a corporate job with her nightlife, where she began to discover raves, Breaks, Garage and Bass.
And so the rest of the nineties passed and the next century began for Eris, until a few years later, some events occurred that changed her life for good. According to her own account, she discovered herself to the world as a trans girl in the middle of the last decade, when she was 39 years old, something that is not always easy, adopting the name of Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos and discord. But her destiny was also marked by a meeting, when she went to pick up Maya Bouldry-Morrison, aka Octo Octa, at the airport to take her to a performance, which was the beginning of a loving and professional relationship (together they run T4T LUV NRG, their record label) that is still active to this day.
So much so that Eris decided to leave Chicago and move to New Hampshire, where Maya has a log cabin in the middle of the woods… and Eris exchanges the urban environment for the view of trees from her window. But when this change of residence occurs, the world is shaken by something that we have all suffered from and that is called a pandemic. It was March 2020 and there Eris was in a period of confinement, in an unparalleled natural space, in a studio with his subwoofer resting on a wooden floor.
Under these conditions Eris conceives and records this full-length album, based on a number of vinyl samples and sounds that make us travel back and forth in time. A true devotee of vinyl (always, always her sessions are on this medium, with her collection in tow), part of this album has had its musical foundations in samples taken from that collection.
Eris says that before the period of isolation due to her quarantine, she had sketched out three of the songs on the album. The hiatus in her touring caused by this was transformed into songwriting and producing energy, which she managed in this wonderful environment.
Quivering In Time is fresh. It is new, although its aromas come partly from other eras. It is danceable to death. It’s organic and analogue, warm and lovingly made.
There’s House, Breaks, scratches, effects-intoxicated guitars (Loving Claw), flashes of Acid and homages like the one on The Message/Ride Free, straight to the heart of the second summer of love, to Primal Scream’s Loaded and Weatherall with that legendary vocal sample that says “We wanna be free to do what we want to do… and we wanna get loaded!”. Hypnotic mid-tempos like A Howling Wind or bangers like Show U Love ready to tear up dancefloors. Delirious halfway between House and Funk like Sensation or the tremendous track that gives name to the album and closes the album, that leaves you wanting to play it all over again.
Thank you Eris for this refreshing musical blow. For giving us a debut album of this size, for bringing back to us longed-for sounds without having to pull out the hat some worn-out nostalgia, renewing with originality great concepts of dance music.
Quivering In Time has been released by T4T LUV NRG and is already available here.
