Review: Sarah Rasines - Tommy Hilfiger

Your first listen to Tommy Hilfiger will pass you by. A rumble of thunder, a steady throb of electronics, an accordion jaunt. Gone. What just happened? It’s like a cryptic voicemail message, building up to a deep confession before bottling it and cutting the line dead. Rasines leaves me with 10 minutes of half-articulated thoughts and poetic inferences. I replay them over and over again, desperate to pull together a meaning from the scraps of sound and the way they interrelate. I hyper-analyse each gesture in search of signals and veiled attempts to communicate. It doesn’t make sense to talk about Tommy Hilfiger being 10 minutes long when I spend an hour deconstructing it.

Every idea is tentatively started and promptly abandoned. There are unfinished loops of synthesised bells dancing in rain puddles; the agitated tick of a gas hob; tiny pockets of techno which never leave their tense, ticking starting blocks; vignettes of accordion polka, which vanish as though recited from a single page of sheet music extracted from a much larger piece. There are ambiguous electronic sketches that place squirming synthesis in front of grubby, blurred lenses; agitated tides of static clasping at crushed up extracts of music. The end of the title track seems to gather itself towards a glacial synth pop track – Rasines voice comes muttering into the frame, and I brace myself for Tommy Hilfiger’s full materialisation – yet it fades out quickly instead, with another brief blast of accordion music bounding into its place. I want answers from Tommy Hilfiger, but there’s no time.