Vol. 1
I know a lot of newsletters and blogs love having a long preamble, especially for important posts, like say the first proper release of a newsletter, but I didn't realize how much of my time would be taken up by Japan Cuts opening night this year. I could just post one of the Lukaku videos again? I think in the future I might pare down the number of things I talk about to give more each one more space, there's just so much I want to share right now. Let's get into it shall we.
Max: Ángeles Rojas - Open The Windows And Let The Spirits In And Out
Maybe it’s a result of being jokingly pegged as the blog’s “Boompala Correspondent” (I listened, it’s bad) that whilst I would happily talk about how the aespa “row row row your boat” song “is good actually”, there’s plenty of time down the line to get myself pigeonholed and for now I feel like going against that grain.
The truth is, it feels like there has been a ton of interesting new music and reissues over this past month (particularly in dance/experimental circles), so much coming down the pipe in fact that I’ve barely been able to give anything enough time to get thoughts together on records I think are uncomplicatedly great. So who knows, perhaps those thoughts will come later, or perhaps this barrage will continue and a shiny new thing will catch my eye.
With all of this in mind, I wanted to spotlight a release that I have managed to spend some time with and whose pleasures I feel confident I’ve got a good grasp of. Berlin-based musician Ángeles Rojas’ superb latest is a recording of a live performance for organ & ensemble- a single half hour drone ambient piece akin to the work of Kali Malone.
If I were smarter, I could talk about the technical side of the composition, or the headier works and ideas it might be in conversation with. If I thought it needed it, I could map out the progression of the track, the steady introduction of the ensemble, the gulf in emotional resonance of the opening and closing drones. In the end I don’t really feel the desire to do either. One reason I love durational music like this is similar to why I love avant-garde cinema. Yes, there is most likely formal / conceptual background waiting to be exhumed if that‘s the way you like to play, but more often than not these are extremely accommodating works of art that don’t demand any research to be experienced, willing to meet you on your level and gently watch you react. In short, they speak for themselves.
When I’ve thrown this on over the past couple of weeks, during some listens I’ve let it wash over me, whilst there have been other times where I’ve had the urge to get out a magnifying glass and pore over the track front-to-back, mapping out its undulations like topography. The thing that has been constant throughout is how much it makes me feel, not just in terms of emotions but also physically. The beautiful contradiction of drone music is how something so dense and unmoving can still provide so much space; room to hear, room to interpret, room to let your mind loose. So when I look back up this post and realise I’ve barely talked about the music itself, I’m not worried, I don’t know that I’ll feel quite the same way again and I sure as hell don’t know what you will find.
But to throw a bone and briefly do this properly, just one line: right now as the music seeps through my headphones the drones feel impossibly enveloping and glacial, still enough that I can’t remember quite how long I’ve been here, but I know in just a few minutes they will break open like the sunrise of an uncertain day- lush, warm, lonely light glinting off memories of places and times far in the rearview of a life constantly lurching forwards. Isn’t that fucking cool?
Jay: SML - Spontaneous Music Live
It sucks LA got the cool experimental Jazz scene. I'm happy for Jeff Parker and everyone in it but Chicago lost out damn. The SML blow up is worth it though, having one of the more IYKYK things in music being Jazz Yo La Tengo one of the highlights of my year so far. I was initially hesitant about the release, with it being self consciously the most traditional Jazz record SML have made, down to the 2 track A/B stylings. The editing and processing had been such a draw to me, Clicks & Cuts to Jazz is as intuitive as it was revelatory, would it work without that hook?
I listened to the album five times through the first day it came out and it's still been the first thing I put on in the morning every day since. I've been doing it flipped, with Roundabouts before The Drums since I find that becomes more of a narratively compelling loop for me, and just is so beautiful. This is music to make my coffee too, eat eggs and read a bit before work to, check in on my parents and forget how much everything sucks right now to. It's a gift. Anna Butterss gives a masterwork in the bass as lodestone here, with Chiu's live sampling giving a recurring Kosmische tinge that feels like something Herbie would love.
I used to bristle at describing music as "a place to start", as it feels demeaning to both the artists in question and a listeners own capacity to sit and listen to music, a fundamentally easy task. It's harder to bristle in your 40's though, and I've met too many people who ask where to start not just as a request for some tunes, but as a way of asking what you will talk to them about if they listen. So both in that sense and in the sense that it's just one of the coolest things you will hear this year, Spontaneous Music Live is a great place to start with Jazz when you get a second.(Andrew do we have to end our blogs with that tag?)
No but maybe we should.
Boo: Push - Strange World (Tranquilo's Chill Out Mix)
I love classic trance music a lot. chicane, airwave, sasha, bt, all of it is the most perfect shit for uncritical youtube-scavenging dummies like me, rewarding one's ability to let any given track overpower your mind and spirit to make you think of dope wizards shooting lightning or the oneness of earth's people or the matrix women smoking weed or whatever else. as a sometimes-ambient musician i also love taking plunges into trance's drumless/chillout endeavors as well, hallmarks of bright synths and angelic vocals blurring and blending until they sound closer to malibu than moby. of the many ambient trance artists out there i don't think anybody does it quite like tranquilo, an alias of perennial man-in-the-background steve andrews. there's never been a full-length tranquilo release, or even an EP, but what he's able to capture in a handful of remixes and loosies across 30-odd years feels more substantial than dozens of more established artists. tranquilo's sense of weight and control over trance's emotional power is imo at its most obvious when introduced to a track of equal proportions - having been commissioned to remix push's unassailable classic 'strange world', he turns it from the ultimate guy-chasing-you-in-the-city-and-you're-both-wearing-sunglasses track and unfurls it into an open field of magic, primal and wild. bass and synth become swirling reverberant winds, four on the floor kicks are now distant and infrequent, firing off like depth charges, cymbals now crash like interstellar's mighty gravity waves. he calls it the Underwater Kingdom mix, and that is only half as cool as the actual track itself. it's the kind of song you'd throw over drone footage capturing acts of nature, or a youtube amv of gohan going super saiyan. this shit is so goddamn cool, man. listen to tranquilo.
Andrew: DJ Plead - Please
Coming out right in synch to a nightmarish heat wave helped sure, but Please immediately hit as a summer soundtrack in the way few records do. From the knotty anxious excitement of Return to Deuce hitting that midday Friday almost done with work feeling, the woozy towering baselines powering the first half of the album in general is the Saturday bliss, and the late night melancholic "how do I get home at 5AM on Sunday" comedown of Traffic, each song really catches a different time of a summers day. It particularly feels like the Summer '26 album with how melancholic and bittersweet it can be at times, the hyperdistortion on Return to Deuce, enough negative space surrounding the flute on Sush to drive through, and the unintelligible crowd noise seeping in and out of Unforced Error that reminds me of what it was like that first year or so of going out as an idiot kid.
You don't need to spend too much time thinking about why a Lebanese guy making an album with Lebanese sounds might be a bit more distraught than the average person, but it does make it all feel a bit more personal and unguarded. To try to thread the needle away from Israeli war crimes... you will be hard pressed to find a song as sexy as pa700 the rest of the year, with strings you want to move your hands to and enough tricks unfurling over it's four and a half minutes to ever keep you from forgetting this is dance music.
As my multi month Hosono deep dive wound down I wasn't really sure what, if anything would be my next kind of arbitrary but deeply reverent deep dive. Thankfully Boomkat put up the Interstate vinyl (which only showed up yesterday, but oh my god) so I've spent the last few weeks chewing through the discography. Less on repeat than I'd like but what can you do when Archaeopteryx is 90 minutes long. It's been a lot of fun realizing just how much of a generative work each album is through, every other song you have a moment realizing a 15 second loop eventually got turned into some of your favorite songs from the last few years. Also funny seeing the Apple Music writeup of Ghosts describe it as witch house.
Interstate though, what a record. Everyone rightfully loves Hong Kong and Silence, but this is the one for me. From the shitty not even skull candies I had as a teen to my occasionally life ruining HiFi of today, the texturing on all these songs is so deeply arresting. Alexis and I have talked about how sometimes an album just Sounds so good it makes you feel stupid trying to explain it, with Henke & Behles really exemplifying that here. Monolake were one of those first "serious techno" acts I got into as a teen who was overly self conscious about their music taste, I had to skip (most) of the Warp Records stuff and head straight to Germany. While I was too young to understand Gas or the many forms of Roman Flügel at all, Interstate immediately clicked. One of the first things I tried to use as a "can I be one of the people who watch Gundam on mute" test (I can't but it's still worth a run to see if you can).
The Boomkat listing calling Interstate's attention to detail insectoid captures the mood even before you hear the whirs on Gecko, each little detail makes the overall soundscape that much more massive. "Oh yeah the lads made Ableton" can be a bit of a crutch when describing Monolake, especially Interstate, but it's an unavoidable piece of context, the entire album is a manifesto on how to push electronic music forward both in the club and at home. If you have access to anything resembling surround sound you owe it to yourself to hear Perpetuum slide around the room, you'll hear Interstate in everything for a while.
goat (JP) - Without References / Cindy Van Acker (Ricardo Villalobos Variations)
Turning Orin, that aggressively brittle highlight of the original Without References, into this masterpiece of house music is hilarious. I am so angry this exists, it's perfect. Somehow the triangle is still the centerpiece. Yu Su could only describe it as insane for NTS, and sometimes that's all you can do, even if it makes for non viral artist interview. Two of the three songs here are Factory reworks, and fuck it, no complaints. Hop on. It's time you started feeling bitchy.
adobeprincess & deepcreep: Horst Festival b2b set
I wrote and edited a decent amount of this newsletter to this set, two hours of moody, nasty spaced out techno with more than enough friction to keep you locked in. Lot Radio, pride of New York mind you, became really important to me in my time in bed, choosing music was upsettingly hard when my brain was fried and even when I could actually decided on anything I found out lyrics just made me really sad. I don't think my relationship with vocal tracks will ever quite be the same, but hey, that's life. Back to this set though, I've been really drawn to it over the last month, probably spun it back half a dozen times now, including as a cool down set during the 4th. The chemistry and friendship the gals have makes for such a dynamic set as they push and fuck with each other. And we are ignoring the cat shaped elephant in the room when it comes to other girl DJ group sets I could have written about here yes.
Doo Records Label Showcase at DIY Venue
I got put onto this whole label from a guy I met at a party recently, and as if often the case the Bandcamp is fun but the highlight is seeing the crew live. The show ended up being at one of New York's "secret but still on google maps" venues, where the spirit of DIY fog machines still reign, and seeing the three members just bounce off each other in the booth, occasionally literally in this cramped Brooklyn basement, making the drum patterns break in every which way except four on the floor, was a delight. Say what you will about the label name (I realize it's a glass house for me here yea), the Quebecois have done it again.
A Guy Called Gerald at Nowadays
Really was not prepared for how many people would be thrown by a name I've always just clocked as a riff on A Tribe Called Quest, but seeing just how white Gerald's afro is now made me a little more sympathetic to my friends. He's so impressive live though, with a mastery of the dance floor on a Thursday night you always hope for but rarely actually get the chance to lose yourself in. He flipped between more traditional House and Techno for the first few hours, getting harder as the night went on. Once it got to be 2 the lights went red and the Acid House hit, most of which he's either directly responsible for or deeply informed, and everything just fell into place. It's no secret I love going to see Grandpa's and Grandma's live, but you really should show them people still care. It does help when the set is phenomenal of course. Obviously some of the self mythologizing everyone does around sets telling stories can be a bit much, but hearing a long loud DJ set with a 100+ other people really is magic.