Happa - Party Chat (2023)

‘Party Chat’ is Happa’s ravishing full length debut, marking a decade since his prodigious beginnings with a strong suite of gurned, fractal dance-pop geometries starring Lafawndah & Blame, and supplemented by a B-side pièce de résistance inspired by DJ Screw and Graham Lambkin.

Samir Alikhanizadeh aka Happa has been around for a while; he released on our own Editions label a decade ago when he was just 18 and since then he’s worked with FKA Twigs, Shygirl, Dale Cornish and David Byrne. This is his debut full-length of sorts, hugely recommended if yr into anything from hyperpop to art pop and all the weird and brilliant ish in-between.

‘Party Chat’ is distinctive and shapeshifting, from an everything all at once maelstrom of ideas cadged from Braindance, hyper-pop, R&B, and doom, rinsed out with up-to-the-second sound design. To our ears it’s the freshest edge of a sound symptomatic of a new Yorkshire psychedelia that encompasses everyone form The Ephemeron Loop to Teresa Winter, Rian Treanor and 96 Back; one un-stititched from often stifling normality of cities such as London and Manchester who know how to sell themselves better, but often don’t live up to the naturally radical stance of music from the mutant county.

Happa’s dual Yorkshire/Persian heritage richly informs proceedings, which cleave between an A-side of inch-tight bullets, and a sprawling B-side that ingeniously recycles those elements to deeply warped ends. His aptitude for jaw-dropping levels of geometric complexity at the service of bigger pictures instrumentally flourishes between the jibber-jawed emosh jungle roiler ‘Only Light’ and a spiralling echo of Holy Other or Clams Casino’s witch-house in ‘Leaving The Club’, with Lafawndah an ideal vocal foil for the jagged R&B of ‘Ice Blink’, and punk band Shame lending John Balance-like, over-the-shoulder vocals to his bleak anthem ‘Only Darkness’, beside the TCF-like black midi stacking of his title tune.

No doubt the biggest attraction for weirdos lands on the B-side, though. ‘After The After Party Chat’ is a masterstroke of mind-bending chicanery that explicitly references DJ Screw and Graham Lambkin, and, perhaps implicitly, feels like Autechre clashing Klein. Barely recognisable stems of the A-side are re-spliced and propagated like a mad botanist into a devilishly dark and psychedelic smudge of gurned vox, hyper chromatic shred, anguished chorales and extruded, pitchbent strings that resemble the wildest Kye collages and share a certain aesthetic economy with the legendary B-side to Neu!’s 2nd album. Jeez lad.

Tracklist:
1.01 - Happa - Only Light (3:53)
1.02 - Happa & Lafawndah - Ice Blink Lost (4:01)
1.03 - Happa feat. Shame - Only Darkness (3:37)
1.04 - Happa - Party Chat (4:09)
1.05 - Happa - Like Me Like This (2:41)
1.06 - Happa - Leaving The Club (2:10)

2.01 - Happa - After The After Party Chat (21:45)