Rushil Sudrania’s, better known as Mixed Signals, new EP Right Place Wrong Time is a 5 song, 13 minute long record — and is meant to explore themes of “fate, determinism, and free will.” Mostly glitch-poppy in sound, it attempts to be genre-agnostic, although one can hear the more primary influences — bubblegum pop rock, Japanese future pop, and essentially multiple iterations of electronic music laced with an MGK-esque punk-ish dynamism.
Sudrania’s mostly earnest, and this EP has a distinct optimism in the midst of disarray only bestowed by the quality of youth — especially once you look at the vivacity of tracks like determinism (LIKE THIS!), and titles like new is always better. The tracks are pretty easy-flowing, and mostly linear, although the artist’s gravitation towards bending and distorting his voice add a layer of sustained interest. For the most part, the artist has an interesting relationship to soundcraft, which sometimes simulates videogame-y aesthetics, but at the same time manifests into a disembodied female chatbot voice, this is his Her, haunting him and egging him on before being eviscerated by a hailstorm of shootout sounds.
Something that one notices pretty early on, is that Mixed Signals, or Sudrania is very conversational in his lyricism — either he is talking to his audience, to a romantic interest, or to Her. It works — makes the artist sound more personal, friendly, close — and what he makes is quite accessible, relatable — even. The textured synths really give the project its body. My favorite, however, is the track forever — featuring tulip. The enmeshing of the two voices, their timbres work really well — and it feels like one has plucked it out of a teenage neon dream.
The EP is good, however, there is one contention. It almost feels like Mixed Signals, the artist, is holding himself back. There are several parts where you can feel the anger and the hollowness within, sometimes facilitated with the disembodied bot voice —, but these are things that can be tapped further into, and used to punctuate what is otherwise an oversaturation of familiar glitchpop sonics with a little less personification than one would prefer. The discontent, the disarray, the anger and the confusion are all emotions that can be used to further the sound — instead of containing them into this chamber of sugary synths. This is not an unresolvable problem, but an evolutionary feature — and with the passage of time and acquiring of more gravitas, the sonics will also fundamentally evolve — and that is what this EP requires, that nudge towards loss of hesitation, and a pursuit of the insanity that is very clearly possible and definitely welcome.
