Fennec

Fennec has the unique ability to make any pile of fucking ashes a dance floor. It's unfuckingcanny.

My first introduction to Fennec had me staring off into space until I realized I was dancing under my desk, and it was at that specific moment I noticed everyone staring at me because I was going in on the desk drums, HAWRD.

The constantly varied percussion and layering of rhythm, the whimsical thfloops and twinkles spread on top, and the white noise behind the background all combine to make every listen a concentrated holy shit, or a casual invitation to the aforementioned concentration. Seriously, if you stare at the source of the music while it's playing, seeing nothing but the track time counting upwards, you might have a better chance of pinpointing just when the magic instantly coats your fucking skin in goosies.

But doing your best to not focus on what's making your body move like this is so much more fun.

This new EP from Fennec is the distracted man's best friend. One minute your hands are throbbing from gripping your steering wheel too tight, and the next minute your thighs are burning from the incessant slaps on the 2 and 4, I haven't loved not paying attention to fucking anything since the last Fennec drop.

This Place Was Once a Palace contains a track called "Consumes You", which is an applicable title for nearly every song I've ever encountered from Fennec. Every track sounds like a perfect soundtrack for the last night on earth. This four song EP feels fucking dangerously magical while remaining percussively therapeutic, and more specifically, it's like the shit that would usher you into the afterlife with a sheen of sweat on your skin and a distracted smirk on your face.

While I don't hump speakers much anymore because of all these fucking responsibilities, "Nightlock" sounds like an entire night out when I was first discovering music as an escape.

With random strangers leaning a bit too far into your car, pointing o'er yonder while spouting cryptic leads regarding a dimly lit map point, then driving through winding alleys towards a nightclub fashioned out of an abandoned university in the middle of some dank metropolis. The doubt you feel as you stack every last dollar into the palm of a disinterested bouncer the size of a tank, who delivers that painful stamp on your hand you can only see under a blacklight, and then the push towards a door that doesn't look very inviting. Yet, once you've traveled a few hundred feet from the entrance you can start to feel the floor shake ever so slightly. There are people in various states of intoxication and exhaustion splayed out in random nooks, enclaves, and hallways along the way, but you just follow the glow tape on the walls as instructed by that mountain of a security guard. You take three more turns, fully convinced you're being led to your death, and you hit a stairwell without a single source of light.

Of course you go up. You always choose to go higher. 

Four flights of stairs up you can feel the humidity start to thicken, the vibrations you felt before start to take on specific tones. You can hear laughter now. 

Gradually your vision starts to adapt to the eerie darkness and just when you think your eyes have adjusted and you can see your own hand in front of your face you're met with double doors swinging wide and thousands of hands shoved up towards the sky as a wave of strobed light washes over your field of vision. 

Then the beat fucking drops out of the fucking sky and your fucking stomach is on the fucking floor but your hands are immediately in the fucking air and everything you just dreaded about the unknown events of this evening in front of you are forgetten behind you.

That anticipation, that fear, being met with that fucking beat, those lights. The sudden and complete removal of any other feeling besides introspective glee when you're finally able to enjoy nothing but the beat at a decibel level on par with an airplane landing, that's what Fennec sounds like. 

It's hilarious to me now that I'm older, that we would spend all this time, energy, and money to find our ways into the most creepy or exotic and oftentimes decrepit locations just to dance by ourselves because the music is so loud you can't converse with anyone besides a smile and simple hand signals. 

We fought hard to be alone together, the music might as well fucking murder.

This Place Was Once a Palace fucking murders.