Jennifer Vanilla

CAT #: BIS039
October 18, 2019

Jennifer Vanilla is pro-motion. For movement, evolution, elevation, lifting up. The alter ego and performance project of former Ava Luna member Becca Kauffman undoes linear formations of time, place, and identity in order to embody an essential enthusiasm, now broadcast to the world through the J.E.N.N.I.F.E.R. EP. Together with collaborator Brian Abelson, Jennifer Vanilla explores the multidimensional pathways that are available to us when we move constantly on a dance floor, and explicitly expounds upon these possibilities with two metaphysically banging tracks.

“Space is a position of bodies / Time is an accident of motion / Motion is a consequence of all activity.” Jennifer instructs lushly on the first single, “Space Time Motion.” The words are lifted from a physics textbook that Becca discovered in a former schoolhouse at an artist residency in upstate New York, but the message is so Jennifer in its principles and delivery that she may as well have defined the very properties of physics herself. The two anchors of “Space Time Motion” are Jennifer’s voice, which cascades in loose ribbons down your spine, and the pleasantly strutting bassline (laid down by Ava Luna member Ethan Bassford) carving a suggested route through time-bent percussion and melodies that bubble up like a potion cooking in an Erlenmeyer flask.

“Erase The Time” speaks specifically to the malleability of existence on the dance floor, or as Becca puts it, the “expansion and contraction, and sometimes if we’re lucky, obliteration of linearity and existential dread.” Propelled along by an acid-tinged synth, Jennifer spells out acrostic interpretations of J-E-N-N-I-F-E-R, candidly offering mantras to choose from like a display of jewels. One need only watch a live televised (on Queens public access TV) dance rendition of the song in order to understand much of the ethos behind Jennifer – a sense of ingenuity, movement, community, and timelessness, or rather, an encapsulation of multiple time-oriented artistic choices that are tied together by virtue of being shared in the present. In Jennifer’s world, the rules of human reality do not apply: there is no failure, no wrong, no shame; there is only space to fill and guide people through. Jennifer is an attitudinal tone setter. She is above, she is beyond, she is a state of mind; a perpetually unanswered question.

As well as the two original tracks, the J.E.N.N.I.F.E.R. EP features a remix of “Erase The Time” by fellow local scene stalwart AceMo. The EP will be available in digital and televisual formats October 18, 2019 on Tim Sweeney’s Beats In Space label.