Duval Timothy - Help

August 7, 2020 - Carrying Colour

There are so many people out there talking about food, so much noise about what there is for us to eat. Though when we turn off our ears and look around, there isn’t much sustenance to be found for us who are hungry. The higher our scarcity mindset rises, the louder the planet gets. 

Now is a really tough time to be an artist. I know everyone says that in every modern age. No one ever approaches a career in the arts expecting it to be easy. But what we ask our artists to sell today—where the internet has created a false sense of egalitarian arrival in the availability of information and a flat mode of interaction between the audience and the creator—is high volume, a diverse offering of goods, imagery that’s easy to post to social media, and a complete surrender of the private self in the name of public performance. 

It’s possible to do the work you’re driven to do and to look professional while doing it and still remain unable to support your needs with the endeavor. And then there are the art critics and art world leaders that sit there and say, “Art is a privilege, not a right. Stop whining, work your day job and make your artwork in the night.” We, the exhausted, hear it, do it, burn out, then realize we’ve heard that same message before at our corporate jobs. We work during the day to deliver the moon and stars, then we work all night in a studio that asks us to stare at the sun. We go to sleep for a few hours wondering why we are blind to the food everyone keeps talking about. 

This assignment to review Duval Timothy’s new album Help is my first introduction to his work. Timothy is a multidisciplinary artist who spends his time in both London and Sierra Leone. With the UK as his birthplace and a father who’s originally from Sierra Leone, Timothy has an identity that’s rooted in both cultures. He has his hands in so many amazing projects at once, all of which explore his sense of self and draw connections between both sides of his family heritage. He runs his own record label and fashion line called Carrying Colour, on which Help is released and which sells his custom apparel designs, some of which feature woven fabric from expert Sierra Leonean weavers. He founded and runs a recording studio for local and traveling artists in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He has co-run a popup supper club called The Groundnut and even helped write a cookbook. 

I look at Timothy and I see my favorite kind of artistic hero, the one who fully embodies DIY and hard work and carves out their own place in culture to own. An artist who learns what he needs to know to do the projects he wants to do. Someone who isn’t afraid of the title “multidisciplinary” in a world that gets really confused by jacks and jills-of-all-trade because it’s hard to distill them into an elevator pitch. Success on this path takes mountains of judgement and support. It’s risky because, for most of us, it is very hard to exist outside of society’s strict strategies for the pursuit of successful business (e.g. “make only what is designed to sell” and “do one thing and do it well” but “make sure it’s what the market wants”). Not only has Timothy bucked those strategies completely, he seems to laugh in their faces while he continues to add new projects to his CV. He’s found success as a jazz musician, a designer, a producer, a fashion icon, and an industry leader all at the same time. He doesn’t seem concerned about the fact that he doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. Or so it appears.

Help is Duval Timothy’s fourth album, and it is, as its name suggests, a record of a journey of self-healing. Of the self-help department of a bookstore (or, nowadays, an endlessly scrolling e-commerce website or free YouTube therapy). Layers of minimalist jazz piano, moody guitar, percussive noise, and hip hop-like sampling overlap and underlap to create something dense and rich and full of substance. The album is also full of collaborations, with artists including Twin Shadow, Lil Silva, Melanie Faye, Vegyn and Mr Mitch. According to Timothy, it’s a body of work that came out of a time in his life when he struggled to make ends meet as an artist, struggled to keep motivated and working toward the vision of an art career that’s conceptually meaningful and financially sustaining. Sometimes the best thing we can do when bearing all the weight of art-as-life is to go and make something. It’s very easy for artists to fall into the space between making something and making a living. Many never make it out of there, and its danger never goes away, even with an onslaught of commercial (or optical) success.  

The tracks on Help are melancholy in nature with subtle compositional syntax. At times, the mood is very strange, made so by the choices Timothy makes with distortion of the sounds. He’s a master of applying a well-timed pitch bend to maximum emotive effect. The songs are all built around Timothy’s piano, the common thread which gives the entire body of work a sense of ambling forward momentum. The listeners are strapped in and carried along as everything moves, hypnotized by the feeling of the action and the repetition, primed for the strikes Timothy has planned along the journey to get his points across. For me, those strikes happen when he introduces vocal samples. Timothy’s approach to composition on Help creates a dreamy, dissociative environment for the listener. The songs flow together as one cohesive tenor. When the voices come in, I find it jarring, and I can hear the meaning clearly.  

‘Slave’ is a great example of this effect. Its beginning lures you in with the soft questioning jazz piano. Then a sample of the artist Ibiye Camp’s voice sings the word “slave” in a high note that rings in your brain like a meditation bell. She sings it over and over again until it becomes its own musical object in the song, and eventually Timothy layers it on top of itself like a one-word, one-person round, a loud haunting texture built from a label as a mantra. In doing so, he literally dehumanizes the voice that’s singing, rendering her completely as an instrument. The other sample in the song is a conversation with Pharrell Williams about the music industry and its exploitation of musicians. The artist supports the bottom of the tower of the industry, an instrument for capital for everyone else, a producer often tricked into selling ownership of the rights to their own work. Timothy—who just bought his masters back for a re-release of 2016’s Brown Loop—speaks to his experience of exploitation by drawing a direct comparison between that position in the industry and the position of a slave who is owned by someone else. The message is clear and overt and beautifully executed, pointing out an example of how the pervasive legacy of the slave trade is still evident in modern business practice.  

‘Fall Again,’ which features Lil Silva and Melanie Faye, uses a chorus of voice and rumination to build up from a soft piano riff to a sort of fatalistic rock opera nautical storm that expresses emotional turmoil readymade for the grandeur of a stage full of dancers and singers. The words ring around and around over muted brass and trailing guitar riffs, repeating, “settle down ’til the saints all fall again, said it’s you that made this way.” A heroic journey across the stormy seas. I also have a soft spot for the track ‘Like,’ which prominently samples those moments in speech where the mind is thinking mid-sentence, the subconscious “likes” and the “ums” and the “ands” between our words. The tone of this song is lighter and more endeared to its concept, luxuriating in a tempo that speeds up from start to finish and undulating synths and digital noise like summer rain on thirsty pavement. The song is loose and a little freeform, where sounds bloom in and out of focus. It’s an interesting part of human speech to beautify, so often it’s judged and misunderstood. But after all assumptions are stripped away, those pauses which represent the thoughts we think while speaking aloud are where some of our most important words form. 

Other highlights on the album include the drowned French mermaid singing with her favorite music box in ‘Something,’ the playful piano narrating all the things that happen on the floor beneath you while you are in your bed trying to sleep with your feet up in ‘Radish,’ and the sampled words of notorious minimalist painter Ellsworth Kelly saying “I don’t like decoration” and discussing the art of squishing butter on ‘Look.’ Timothy also includes several tracks of just him on the piano in intimate ambles through the night trying to organize his thoughts and pin them down.   

Overall, what I’m most impressed with about Duval Timothy’s Help is how he’s able to approach music making like a fine artist but keep it accessible enough that even my friends who don’t like hard edge abstraction or jazz piano will still be able to “get” it and enjoy “getting” it. His songs are like abstract paintings, with an affinity toward a certain auditory color palette, a loose structure, and a variety of moments that weave in and out and rely on each other. I don’t think an artist has a responsibility to be direct with their audience. But because he has chosen to inflict direct moments and set a consistent theme throughout the album, Timothy’s music is certainly more effective at communicating his specific experience and opening people up to stranger modes of sound expression than they are accustomed to, which I support. We’ve become very watered down in our tastes of late, with short attention spans afraid of boredom that need to understand something right away or else will move on to something shinier and shallower. Here we have an antidote to that mind, a rich exploration of the experience of belonging to multiple cultures, an openness with us about the truths of art-making, and a record of the self-healing discovery of freedom through creation and collaboration we can learn from. And it’s all available for free on YouTube. ☔