I spent the evening of Valentine’s Day at a listening party for one of the most fiercely internal electronic records of the young year. Enigmatic Bay Area producer Raven’s Gnosis had been released just that day; that night, Sutro FM hosted a session for it at their downtown space.
I arrived early and sat in a room draped with translucent white curtains and lit by dim blue lights, while a fog machine exhaled periodically. A vaporous, slightly menacing instrumental song played over the speakers; a group sitting nearby wondered if it was a part of the Metal Gear Solid soundtrack. The overall impression was slightly haunted, yet strangely welcoming—fitting for Raven’s music.
Earlier in the week, I spoke with the producer about the record over Zoom. When I asked how he would describe his music, he said, “I came up with the term ‘R&B science fiction.’ I incorporate a lot of instrumentation from the older music I listen to, but my music is sort of an abstract representation of it.”
While he used to play guitar in a rock band, he says he found himself gravitating toward less-physical ways of making music, even adding effects onto the basic guitar tone in the studio until it stopped sounding like a guitar. When I asked how he arrived at his current sound, he replied, “My earliest memories are of hearing synthesized tones on tape. Sometimes it would be stuff that had been recorded from vinyl onto a cassette for mix purposes, like dusty-sounding piano recordings. The overall sound texture of my music is really just a continuation of that.”
Gnosis demonstrates his fascination with dusty, dusky textures. The record’s swirling synth tones, ambivalent melodic progressions, and omnipresent tape hiss make it feel like a distant memory. Lead single “Gnosis Theme” is built around a restless, glimmering piano line, with high notes that seem to decay the moment they ring out. When a low bass pad glides into the song, its melancholic stillness overtakes every other element until it, too, is swallowed by white noise.

Other songs, like the slowly unfolding “Endless Edition” or the jittery highlight “In Loving Memory,” build on this soundscape, seeming to fade in and out of existence. While Raven’s previous full-length release, last year’s Secrets, felt like a sprawling exploration of different sounds and the emotional states they can induce, Gnosis is hazier and smokier, less confined to a predetermined structure. Paradoxically, this airiness also makes the record come across as Raven’s most assured work to date.
Raven said that this sense of assurance comes from the record’s gestation process. “Over the past 15 years, I’ve always worked with concepts,” he shared. “There’s a certain sound palette I decide on, there’s always certain themes and narratives. But in the case of [Gnosis]… I just wanted to make music without thinking too much.”
Help us save local journalism!
Every tax-deductible donation helps us grow to cover the issues that mean the most to our community. Become a 48 Hills Hero and support the only daily progressive news source in the Bay Area.
This contrast from his usual working process surprised him, “Because I felt like I was observing this stuff coming out, and really being a conduit and guiding it along… I learned a sense of patience, where I trusted that if it wasn’t perfect or coming together right away, I could come back to it and see where it leads me.”
These concepts of patience, intuition, and trust came to mind at the listening event. As I waited for Raven to play the songs, the room slowly filled up with electronic music heads clad in black boots and Discwoman hoodies; many attendees knew each other from raves and parties around the Bay, and I overheard some discussing Bored Lord’s concurrent set at Bar Part Time, just a few blocks away.
While some songs on Gnosis have the percussive thump of dance music, the album never ascends upward into that higher-energy zone, nor does it even seem to try. Even over a room-filling sound system, the songs felt calibrated to a more personal listening experience. As the record unspooled over the course of the evening, I watched person after person lean back, close their eyes, and let the music carry them somewhere else.
Rather than inculcating the communal atmosphere of a club, the music seemed to create something more ephemeral: a shared memory of dance floors past and a shimmering, distant mirage of dance floors future.

The question I was most curious to ask Raven was about what he hopes to capture in his music, particularly in his post-analogue phase. In answering, he didn’t reach for specific feelings, but rather an overall impression, saying, “I’m trying to, in a sense, capture what I see moving around in San Francisco. For example, when it rains, I like looking at the reflections of light on the pavement, watching water roll down a hill, or architecture, skyscrapers and things like that… I’d like to think that I portray what I see when I’m walking around.”
That resonates even now, as I listen to the record in my headphones. A city like San Francisco is made of steel and glass and concrete, sure. But I would add that it’s also made of the shared experience and vision of its living and working people.
These days, it can feel like that communal imaginary is remarkably unstable—more people than ever are marginalized by governmental neglect and societal inequity, pushed to the edges of the city’s physical and psychic space. This can make the city feel narrower and more forbidding, and I think often of what it must have been like in decades past, when (I hope?) the world was less harsh.
The warped and degraded textures across Gnosis seem to speak to this present-day reality, indicating the space between what was and what is. But underneath that textural mask, the album’s songs are serene, soft, and warm, articulating the beauty that exists in tandem with decay. Sonic effects like tape hiss and warbling, off-key notes indicate to us that the sound we’re hearing is old, distanced by time and space from the original performer.
From the vantage point of what is, Raven’s sound prompts us to consider what was—and to imagine what still could be.
Stream Raven’s album Gnosis here.