Kelela, Elysia Crampton, Adrian Piper

Final Exam is the fourth record in Anthem, the vinyl series made for the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art in 2016. It was produced by The Vinyl Factory with DIS, the New York collective that curated that edition of the Biennale. Each instalment set musicians to work with visual artists, under the direction of Total Freedom, the Los Angeles artist and DJ Ashland Mines, who executive produced the series. Here the singer Kelela and the producer Elysia Crampton wrote two songs to words by the conceptual artist and philosopher Adrian Piper. Kelela was then known for the 2013 mixtape Cut 4 Me and for Hallucinogen (2015). It was the first time Kelela and Crampton released original music together. Crampton had already sampled and edited Kelela's voice on several of her own tracks, but this was their first proper collaboration. The second set of Anthem releases, which this record opened, was announced in September 2016, with preorders through VF Editions.

The music is credited to Kelela and Crampton, the lyrics to Piper. Crampton made that attribution public in a Facebook post when the songs came out. The same vocal take runs through both sides. On side A, Final Exam builds stacked, slowly turning chords with the means of ambient and drone music. In its last moments it breaks into an abrupt key change. Crampton wrote that she would subtitle it Placer County Sunset, and that she made the instrumental in the bedroom edit style of her halfway house days. Side B, Reference Track TF Scrape, is an edit by Total Freedom. It pulls the vocal into a darker register of plucked synths, foley noise and agile drum programming, with a melody that recalls Three 6 Mafia's Late Nite Tip. Vice wrote that the A side "carries an air of devotional music" (2016). The Fader heard "a glittering free-association drone" (2016), and set the B side apart as closer to the digital chaos Crampton was known for.

This is the original Vinyl Factory 12" (VF243), cut at 45 RPM on 180g heavyweight black vinyl in an edition of 300 copies, with design by Meiré und Meiré.