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“Argo (For Maggie)”

Vessel “Argo ” album art
  • Genre:


  • Label:

    Tri Angle

  • Reviewed:

    September 21, 2018

The experimental producer nods to a genre-defying memoir

Attaching a conventional narrative to experimental music can be a tough sell. If an artist claims that a track is about, say, the intractable failures of late capitalism, we usually shrug and move on. But occasionally, a producer’s intention can inform and uplift, adding subtext that truly enlivens our experience. William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops will forever be linked to 9/11; Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports is still best heard in, well, airports. Sebastian Gainsborough, the London-via-Bristol producer who records as Vessel, is also the sort of musician whose work benefits from additional context, but doesn’t require it.

“Argo (For Maggie)” is the first single from Vessel’s third album, Queen of Golden Dogs; it is dedicated to Maggie Nelson, the poet and academic whose genre-disintegrating memoir, The Argonauts, is a love letter to her partner Harry Dodge and the story of how she grappled with Dodge’s changing gender identity during her pregnancy. It’s a truly life-affirming work. Like Vessel’s forthcoming album, the book is informed by scholars who have influenced Nelson, largely queer and feminist theorists and philosophers. “Argo (For Maggie),” like the book and author it was inspired by, resists categorization. Over the years, Vessel has evolved from an eccentric techno producer who flirted with noise to a pioneering artist who pushes past the edges of club music. On “Argo,” his use of organic beats, classical strings, and degraded textures make for dance music that sounds as primal as it does futuristic. (Gainsborough is known to make his own DIY instruments, whose rough, industrial sounds are the virtual opposite of techno’s usually slick veneer.) The track hurtles with cyberpunk synths and syncopated percussion that is overwhelming and ecstatic. Nelson borrowed the metaphor of the Argo from the literary theorist Roland Barthes as a metaphor for changing human bodies (the ship of legend replaced each of its individual pieces during its voyage, returning completely remade), but it could just as well describe how Vessel’s scope has shifted and widened. As Nelson wrote, “Evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.” Just something to think about while you’re dancing.