KERUB - APHANTASIA
Kopi Records
Released on July 24th, 2025
Over the past half a decade and so, Vancouver-born and now Toronto-based electronic and experimental music producer and singer Vi Ely Levitt has built a prolific catalogue of music under the name KERUB. Among KERUB’s releases, there are several EPs spanning from early pre-pandemic releases such as GUARD (2018), ASPECT 1 and Aspect 2 (2019) to more solidifying releases at the turn of the decade with GOLEM (2020), Is There Anything Left (2020), and Hypernormalized (2021). And in 2023, KERUB released their debut full-length album MIN (2023) which received coverage by New Feeling and paved the way for an appearance at Everyseeker 2023. Most recently, KERUB was featured in Sled Island 2025 along with Edmonton’s MORRISMORRIS and fellow Vancouverite pop icon Devours.
For those uninitiated to KERUB’s work, Levitt works conceptually through music by deploying Jewish unorthodoxy via mysticism and transgender allegories, often leaning on subversive emancipatory heresies — for example, MIN played on the translational aporias and undecidabilities of a Yiddish word derived from Hebrew oscillating between notions of genera, gender, kind, and species while holding some affinities for nonbelief and heresy in a manner reminiscent of Jacques Derrida (if someone had given him a MOOG modular synthesizer instead of a pen to conceptualize deconstruction). It is not surprising that KERUB leans into a posthuman affinity found in internet culture and experimental electronic music today. Sonically, this work of deconstruction reappropriates Levitt’s classical and formal musical training — for instance, MIN took the acoustic organic sound of the human voice and embedded it into electronic instrumental synthesis.
APHANTASIA continues this deconstructive work focusing this time on the cyclical processes of life, death, and rebirth as they stretch into questions of forgetting, forgiveness, and solace over the immutable around love, loss, and youth. Whereas I see that MIN was more of a Derridean work of mourning, KERUB makes references to Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return and amor fati when this new album is discussed — in short, Nietzsche challenges us to think of life-affirming ways of living by considering of life as if it happened in an infinite repetition: which fate would you devote yourself to? Musically, KERUB seeks to embody an expansive fullness of musical life in this album, as it stretches over a wide-range of sound design, composition, genre, and ambiance while retaining a heretical style that makes the sound their own.
The album with “Ankle Monitor” which kicks things off quite dramatically through a minimalistic instrumental based out of vocal loops, piano, and minimal drums that crescendos that thrive through wailing vocals. The fade of the opening track shifts into the rhythmic “Dreams” that gives off a dark chamber club aesthetic that despite its base repetitiveness, the panning and fading of different elements gives the track a dynamic sense of motion. In “Bottles,” KERUB offers an operatic vocal performance over an ethereal dreamscape of synthesis over the most minimal kick drum — a similar kind of vocal performance can be found in the reflective song “Calm” which comes later in the album. There are also some notable instrumental tracks like the iconic single “Cicadas” which hits us with breakbeats over nostalgic sounds that give its hauntological aesthetic of PS1-era graphical processing.
With this snapshot of what you can find in the deconstructive worlds that KERUB fleshes out, I encourage people to give APHANTASIA a shot since it is their most accessible yet ambitious release yet. This is a producer that you will see expanding their already prolific catalogue and getting more deeply involved in other people’s work (if you haven’t inadvertently stumbled across this already).
