For two South Londoners, Yawning Portal are oddly enchanted by the American Midwest. Their debut album Anywhere was originally conceived in and around Des Moines, Iowa: a land where AOR rock and country blast out of car speakers on drives across desolate Rust Belt towns and vast Corn Belt farmlands. Jess Mai Walker and Joseph Ware’s artistic and geographic origins seem like a far cry from this distinctly American form of vast nothingness. So why would they travel here to write an electronic album in response to, as they put it, “spending days driving around with no destination… just to get out of the house”? But as a young Ohioan born and raised just outside the Rubber City, these sentiments make perfect sense to me. A drifting odyssey through ambient and downtempo trance, Anywhere captures the romantic spirit of driving as meditation, using electronic music to conjure the affective release of being in constant motion, bringing new life to lifeless landscapes on the American backroads.
Midwesterners spend the most time behind the wheel out of all Americans, and so much of that time is spent going nowhere at all, and everywhere all the same. We trade the Heartland’s severe lack of “special places” for a sacred practice of drifting on wheels, a meditative state reserved to our region. When Walker’s powerfully delicate vocals whisper “let’s go out” on the refrain to “My City”—the album’s club-ready centerpiece—she’s ostensibly talking about speeding past a club that’s been abandoned for years rather than actually going out dancing, as she describes the distinctly Midwestern stimulations of “bleach and snow and gasoline” before calling “drive faster” as the track speeds to its finish line.
Anywhere evokes this meditative feeling in its sprawling mix of trance, downtempo, and ambient. Its organization as a continuous mix, where each track flows seamlessly into the next with no single genre taking precedence, gives it a distinctly modern feel, akin to the sprawling playlists us young Heartlanders used to soundtrack our drifts growing up. The pure ambience of “In Orion,” for example, bleeds into the chopped grooves of “In Iowa” before ramping up to complete downtempo trance glory on “My City.” The looping synth refrains and pounding emotion of trance-y cuts like “Magical Girl” blast as we speed down backroads; the metallic percussion and smooth loops of downtempo tracks like the Oli XL-assisted “Silver Plated” evoke our coasts through dilapidated post-industrial towns; the submerging ambience of “Meridian Drift” and “Light to Light” reflect the endless gaze of those pitch-black night drives where we could only see the road in front of us.