Skip to main content

The Music of DVSN

Thirty-two tracks from a Toronto duo who took gospel-trained singing, put it over the coldest production in R&B, and made the contrast the whole point.

dvsn

 

dvsn

dvsn are the singer Daniel Daley and the producer Nineteen85, and they arrived on OVO Sound in 2015 with no photographs, no interviews and no explanation — just the music, which was an unusually disciplined way to start.

Nineteen85 was already one of the most successful producers in pop, having made "Hotline Bling" and "Hold On, We're Going Home" for Drake. What he does in dvsn is stranger: enormous amounts of empty space, drums that arrive late or not at all, and long instrumental passages that leave a listener waiting.

Daley's voice is the counterweight. He sings with genuine church technique — runs, held notes, real falsetto control — and putting that instrument into so cold an arrangement produces the tension the whole project runs on.

What to listen for

"Too Deep" is the essential track and the best introduction — nearly seven minutes, structured more like a suite than a song.

"Hallucinations" is the one that broke them, and "The Line" is the most gospel-inflected vocal in the catalogue.

"Morning After" and "Body Smile" come from the second album and show the sound at its most confident.

"Don't Take Your Love" and "Between Us" with Snoh Aalegra are the best-sung things here, and the Aalegra pairing is the most obvious good idea anyone has had on this label.

"Use Somebody" is the Kings of Leon interpolation, which sounds like a terrible plan and is not.

"Dangerous City" with Ty Dolla $ign and Buju Banton is the outlier and the hardest record on the list.

"Angela", "Mood" and "SEPT 5TH" are the deep cuts the devoted listeners name, and "Conversations in a Diner" is the strangest thing in the catalogue.

Go deeper

SEPT 5TH (2016) is the debut and the most complete statement; Morning After (2017) is the more ambitious record.

The OVO Sound roster — Majid Jordan, PARTYNEXTDOOR, Roy Woods — is the immediate context, and Nineteen85's production credits outside dvsn are worth tracing on their own.

Listening note: the space is the instrument. Nineteen85 leaves gaps where a producer would normally put a drum, and holds instrumental passages far past the point where a pop record would bring the vocal back. Played quietly it can read as unfinished; played properly it is the tension the whole project runs on.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more