Photo by Sarah Polenska
Artists who can sing rarely stop to appreciate how good they have it. They can express themselves, in their own words, in their own voice, whenever the urge strikes. That’s not a luxury that every musician has. For artists like Jordan Cohen, the Madison-by-way-of-Milwaukee producer who records as Chants, vocals need to be outsourced. “I’m a terrible singer,” he says bluntly.
Like plenty of producers before him, though, Cohen turns that limitation to a strength on Chants’ latest album for Seattle’s Hush Hush Records, We Are All Underwater, a downtempo, richly textured work that stays true to its title’s aquatic motif—this is what electronic music might sound like if it were recorded at the bottom of a stream. The vocals that pepper the record, from artists including Los Angeles singer Mereki Beach, Madison vocalist Jentri Colello and Milwaukee producer Riley Lake, are a big part of that aesthetic: They’re all to some degree obscured and submerged, often to the point where the lyrics are indecipherable. It’s as if since Cohen can’t use his own words, he won’t allow his guest collaborators full access to their own, either.
“I don’t really listen to lyrics when I listen to most music, except for rap,” Cohen explains. “I respond more to the quality of the voice as an instrument. I definitely notice there’s a certain kind of voice that I’m drawn to, though. I like a voice that’s a little androgynous and high, and singers that sound really good when their vocals are manipulated, so they almost sound like a sample. I like a lot of wordless vocals. There are some tracks on the album where I’m not entirely sure what they’re saying. Sometimes I know they’re not saying words and sometimes I don’t even want to know if they are.”
Though they’re not on every track, and Underwater goes instrumental for long stretches, those singers ended up defining the mood of the record. “I set out to capture a certain emotional vibe, but at the same time I had been exploring more physical, club-based rhythms on the remixes I’d been doing for other artists, so when I started working on the album the goal was to combine those two approaches,” Cohen says. “I really wanted to hook people emotionally, and that’s partly why I worked with a lot of signers on the album, just to have that element where it’s saying something and not just a dance track, but I think it ended up becoming a lot more of a headphone album than I expected. Sometimes you just don’t know how a project is going to turn out until it’s done.”
In the meantime, Cohen has been scratching his itch for making more beat-driven music with the rap tracks he’s been producing on the side. His single with WebsterX, “Doomsday,” helped put the Milwaukee rapper, and in a way the entire Milwaukee hip-hop scene, on the map, and the two have more collaborations on the way that Cohen expects will see daylight soon.
“Working with outside artists can be super rewarding, but it’s also made me appreciate being able to do exactly what I wanted to do and on my schedule, and not wait for somebody else to put something out or decide to use it or not use it or change it—turns out I’m selfish like that,” he says. “But I have been enjoying working with WebsterX; what he’s doing is amazing. It’s funny. Now that I’m done with the album, I’ve been putting a lot of hard work into that vein of beat-oriented music, while my own solo stuff is just turning out to be even more leftfield and crazy and physical—nothing I would ever give to a singer.”
Chants’ We Are All Underwater is streaming at hushhushrecords.bandcamp.com.
