ki’s “tissue” conjures up a school of tiny fish. Flickers of maybe-phrases—“wanna be with you,” “what I’m saying”—stick out from the stream of pitch-shifting gurgles that adorn makkgin’s delicately pummeling beat. Trying to transcribe this song is a lost cause; it’s about the syllables and the feeling. The song combines underground sing-rap experiments over the last decade, from 645AR’s heavenly squeals to David Shawty’s ridiculous stutters to wokeups’ warbly plugg bounce. Imagine Duwap Kaine’s “Playin Wit Da Autotune” taken as the starting point for an entire style of wounded angel sputtering. The lack of dynamics and constant spray of broken consonants makes the track feel oddly subdued and mushy. ki sounds like they’re trying to exorcise some anguish or grab hold of an unwieldy desire. It was the same on last month’s “only a matter of time,” which sounded like someone running their fingers up and down the keyboard of ki’s brain, their voice cracking as they cried about being “not cut out to live” but also “not cut out to die.”
It’s not revolutionary, but there’s something refreshingly earnest about “tissue.” The artist isn’t vomiting rainbows as a viral gag; they probably grew up listening to Auto-Tune mischief and now when they’re going through something, it feels natural to process it with vocal fuckery. I can’t find much info about ki online, but they’re a member of gears, a collective packed with accordion-voiced tinkerers and vertigo-inducing beatmakers like sb, heroine, and 3c876. ki has been playing with this sensitive pixel-mouth mode for at least a year. Whenever a song like “tissue” escapes the confines of an experimental microscene, it gets a torrent of mockery. Squeaky oddities from “On the Floor” to “4 Da Trap” to “PRESSURE” have all been hit with reactions like “The song clearly got messed up mid-upload” and “It’s actual humans who wake up and listen to this bullshit.” I’m one of those actual humans, and you should be, too.
