Vol. 10
We did it, the big ten, double figures. Nobody said we couldn't do it and we proved everyone right in the end. Still, nice to use the occasion to bust out our first real "theme" volume, and what better place to start than asking people to talk about compilation records. As somebody fascinated by curation and stupid enough to go to school for it, compilation records really get me going, not just because they are yet another excuse for me to explore how different songs transition between each other. This year has also felt like a really good year for comps, stuff like Mzansi Bass, various works by Death Is Not The End (I've written about the Alwin Nikolais comp but the recent Gamelan one is great as well) and Habibi Funk deserve all the year end accolades they will get, to say nothing of Kaiso Power or Aftermath and Transitions. Or to veer into everyone's favorite big of shopfront based genre management, some reissues bring in a bit of that compilation flow, with "new" Miles and Coltrane releases highlighting that. There's been some fraught releases of course, whether it's from issues with crediting like that recent Bengali Soundsystem release, general senses of culture vultures at work, or potentially worst of all: feature the music of Mac DeMarco. Still though, love a good comp, glad I've never felt like they are something to "out grow" and that they have their own craft to them as well.
If I wanted to be particularly annoying I would position that the newsletter in itself is a sort of compilation effort, but I imagine everyone still reading WYGAS understands I would save that sort of comment for when I am begging people to please meet the deadline (and also that I don't find that an interesting line of thought, like when people try to position X thing as art when like sure anything can be art thats not all that challenged of a claim, not all art is good though so lets still try to analyze X), and that I still haven't annoyed enough of my friends with various DJ sets as curatorial practices thoughts yet to get to that level of navel gaze.
Anyway enjoy the music this week!
Boo: Look she's talking about Café del Mar
so i was having a pretty terrible time of things leading up to this entry, and thought it smart (or at least just clever) to try and throw that into writing Nahhh she's leaning into expressivism again omgA LOT about how i am currently processing the aggression and anger i'm feeling through music, and how those would be refracted into original nomination Ed Rec Vol 3, but then i started getting a bunch of good news about my life very very quickly and then i was like, well wait, there is a much easier line here and i don't have to write about that awful Busy P feat. Murs track (but shoutout when he celebrates black rioters in France at the end)the thing about Murs is that he really is a good dude who gives a shit, which makes the music, well so i would like to use my time for something more fun instead - schooling you on some Cafe Del Mar compilations!!! yaaayyyyyyyy go boo yaaaayyyyyyy
before we begin, RIP to josé padilla, whose mixed all of these records with a technique so weird and important it practically birthed chillout as we know it today, one i study and try to emulate with a religious fervor it really is crazy how you just hear the sunset in the mix with how the low end sounds; he got his start just hocking tapes of shit he was dj'ing in the actual Cafe del Mar bar in Ibiza proper oh so it's just selling 500 tapes a night?, and what a gift it must have been to be able to see every sunset and capture it as a perfectly-synced moment of emotion, lining up time & place as objects with calculable physics and forcing a cold fusion reactions for an affect ancient and huge. i also hope it's clear these compilations are nominated on my part not as permission structure to promote or litigate Cafe del Mar (the bar)'s role in their production (if you don't know, the tl;dr is he put them on the map and never got paid for it - fuck them, open shut)Trueeeeee, but rather as simple proof of josé's genius and what his work means to me. let's go!!
Aura Collection
for josé's first proper Compilation del Mar, the groundwork for the genre hasn't really been set in stone written in the sand?yet, and so this feels a lot like the mixtapes he was selling before he was hired by the bar proper, durations of eclectic scavengery, sunset vibes with maybe a little more electronic and budget than he's used to. i will admit josé's sequencing (as well as his own track production, putting his own delightfully triumphant and clunky dj tool first, natch) is an... acquired taste... but you try mixing for sunsets every day for however many years without trying to fire off profundity in the smallest and weirdest places. We love avant garde noise jazz here tyvm Obiman and Sabres of Paradise bring that dark and sedate ambient trance shit i love right to the front door, and it's cute hearing those tracks at the exact moment of time where they could overpower lower-key selections from some guys named William Orbit and Underworld.
A Man Called Adam and Penguin Cafe Orchestra deliver heaping helpfuls of uber-sunshine that threaten to overpower the rest of the energy, very clearly pet tracks from josé that feel only slightly too plain and airy for the rest of the vibe. closer Sunset At The Cafe Del Mar is the most obvious mission statement of all time it's like you haven't read Unlimited Blade Works omg - an entire track designed to replicate in miniature the experience of watching the night fall on the bar, with a quiet lull in the first third, and then the PERFECT tempo change underwater bass to shift an entire audience's gears, as well as maybe sending them out into the gift shop... i feel very little connection emotionally to this first comp - the whole thing is pretty dated and also weirder than you might expect for an ibiza bar, but that's josé - as far as "basically almost inventing chillout music" goes, there's clearly more than enough to chew on here she chewed a pill in Ibiza??? and in the comp at large.
josé opens with a delightfully video game options screen ass beat which in classic unorthodox fashion gives way to maybe the most beautiful and moody three-track run of CDM's entire list - Nova Nova, Pat Metheny, and Afterlife scoring a beginning, middle, and end credits to an Ocean's Twelve drumless ambient romance of me with a beautiful supermodel, having just realized, right now at this little island bar on the coast of Ibiza, that despite the amazing summer we've shared, we both know with certainty that our lives will end apart from each other. our oversized sunglasses and spy coats hide our emotions, our bodies, eyes flitting to our gloved hands and drinks. neither one of us truly wants to leave...
...and then fucking Miro and Nightmares on Wax show up in speedos and just start shaking ass and balls everywhere. come on man!!! everything else is pretty much great though; Alex Neri, Fazed Idjuts and Beat Foundation (MY FREEDOM!!!) are cool picks in a still-slowly-commercializing sound, and even though the creepy-girl-interlude makes it a pretty weird track to close on, it's not hard to see why a big weeping sax over a break on a song called Last Picture Show might show up on josé's radar. besides, if we let a bad interlude stop us from tapping into otherwise excellent ambient mixes then Gatecrasher Digital and that wack ass Moby song I feel like at some point we are gonna have to talk about the Moby ambient album from this year sadly just wouldn't be here for us anymore.
i love the fridge magnet cover. how can't i? it does the job perfectly, communicating what these comps are materially; constructed portraits of distant culture, understandable as a source of wellness, a holiday destination of dance and love. if i were to direct a biopic of josé's life, him looking at this cover would be a watershed moment - a muted look at a changing ibiza, one he's helped transform for better and for worse
josé's last mix proper before his acrimonious split from the Cafe (did i mention these guys never paid him?) is for my money toonie his best ever work. it's basically the equivalent to that scene in Amadeus when mozart is leaving the emperor of vienna'sBrutal appraisal of the lack of effective state capacity in the HRE omg office after getting shat on by salieri and all the boys and just opens the doors to the public's rapturous applause to stunt on them a little - this is what you're losing by forcing me out, assholes!!! sayonara!!!!!
just in time, jose has finally fully mastered the track sequencing for these records, and does he ever dump the fucking mag into this one to demonstrate: Kid Loco's mix of Talvin Singh's already-one-of-my-favorite-songs-ever Traveller as the intro track is sofuckinggoodholyshit that it could just be the "sunset" moment for the album right there on track one; smash cut to night time and torches on the beach the moment those drums hit, total nuts on the table maneuver.
honestly it's easy to picture Volumen 6 as the wilder nighttime to the previous five comps' respective sunsets, a wilder and younger crowd dancing in the fully formed monoworld of nu-ibiza. progressive trance sound has very clearly hit the beach like an a-bomb at this point (skipping past certain CdM entries means we lose out on discussing classics like Sargasso Sea or Offshore, and for that i do apologize) u r forgiven so even the trip-hop classics get a real shot of 1999 euphoria in them. the 7' Canny Mix of Beautiful is a glimmering jewel which introduces a hardcore electronic vein that Humate and Endorphin fly into with their jacked up ambient mixes of 3.2 Bedrock and fucking Gymnopedie 1 lol. even running back into the lounge stuff stuff like Homelands and Oh Home keep the party going well into the wee hours of the morning, and then we're left with Dusty Springfield's cover of The Look Of Love, scoring the afters and indeed a sleepy walk back home up the coast as the sun rises.
Jay: Bangs & Works Vol. 1 (A Chicago Footwork Compilation)
Yeah look this is one of the most critically beloved compilations of the 21st centurywhy leave it there, and helped kickstart Footwork become the cool dance music for large swatches of the internet in the early 10's, buuuut sometimes you just have to play ball with god, and it's been a minute since I last peeped and it's still so electric. After an opening section with some trademark technical wizardly from DJ Rashad and the sort of vulgar enthusiasm DJ Roc's Fuck Dat is built around that became the shorthand of how the genre was marketed (no disrespect to footwork 9/11), I find RP Boo's Total Darkness sample clicking into the drum to really be where the compilation goes from "check out how sick this shit is" into giving the listener a true guide to how the genre functions. Tha Pope's All The Things and DJ Killa E's Star Wars further laser get it, Star Wars, laser, right in on how to nail life at 160BPM in less than 2 minute chunks. A testament to the sequencing is that I had just forgotten how even on this compilation the idea of what Footwork can be is being challenged throughout the second half of B&W, reminding you just how much this is a reinterpretation of house music, long before Footwork became victim to being marketed as deconstructions of itself the thing about the canon is it really is always so much weirder than it's most ardent supporters would have you believe. Mosh Pit, Compute Funk, Freddy Vs. Jason, and Yo Shit Fucked Up are already complicating that now standard vision of the genre. You get a very fun tour of Footwork through this, but a lot of the charm and enduring appeal to B&W for me is how, especially with that second half, it doesn't feel like it's trying to be authoritative or be a definitive guide, if anything it isn't shying away from how Footwork, like any conversation, keeps updating and bouncing off itself.
Revisiting Bangs & Works also informed me of all the more modern Planet Mu footwork comps, which seem vital works on their own merit as well. Elmoe's Battle Zone showcases that chopped not slopped juke he's known for, Traxman's various comps are great ways to see how he is so influential on non English language Footwork mutations, RP Boo keeps making heatYUUUUUUUP. At the risk of marketing a label, which between this and the Felt marking I might need to reassess how I pick stuff for WYGAS we here at the Short Span Fan Zine would never drop ass for a label, I think it's simultaneously important to acknowledge that they keep putting in the work. The reader can do the synthesis on this themselves I hope.
Graham: Crazy Clue - Where the Dregs Dwell
The careful reader will realize Graham is making the case that all albums can be viewed as compilations
Everything I had planned to write about this month comes out two days after the deadline releasing on a Thursday when most music comes out Friday is what they call an expert way of tapping into the zeitgeist, so we must got for the “new Fucked Album isn’t out until Friday” adjacent pick of Crazy Clue’s “Where the Dregs Dwell.”
I’ll be honest, not a great band name. A little cheesy, especially when you’re basically a supergroup comprised of people from Fucked Up and Annihilated. I suppose the more insidious option here is to lean into the “silly” name a bit more than is necessary by having obnoxious album art, but what do I know. Maybe they need to get it out of their system. The guys from Fucked Up that are in Crazy Clue also have a project called “Jade Hairpins.” Mike has another project called “Boy Commandos,” which is surprising as he didn’t seem like a Jack Kirby guy.
Where The Dregs Dwell is self described as both an 80s throwback, and “in line with modern greats,” which feels like a statement that amounts to nothing, and also a way that King Gizzard fans probably describe that particular…thing. It's really important to not ask them “My 70s throwback band are also surprisingly modern!” Whatever man. All this ribbing aside, the album is kind of a hoot-tracks like “Fighting” and “Control” in particular. I’m much more partial to this “type” or hardcore than I am the more meatheaded stuff that’s only getting more popular (let’s get Crazy Clue on SNL!), and I’ll really give anything members of Fucked Up are involved in a chance, as is my patriotic duty, and a mandate by the CRTC. How do we apply for a stipend for all this CanCon It is a little funny to me to be in a hardcore band like Fucked Up and go “I need a break from my hardcore band by being in a different hardcore band.” A guy in a Terror shirt is going to knock all my teeth out one day.
Max: So remember he's leading this off by saying it's quick.
Gonna be a quick one from me this time. I'd like to blame it on being on the back half of a truly silly 9 gigs in 9 weekdays (a compilation of sorts? highlight so far probably Wendy Eisenberg, though goat (JP) ran it close) Bang Dream It's Our goat (JP), but the bigger problem is that I've locked myself out of the flat on deadline night and am currently sat in the local Mexican joint, watching the lights of Roku City drift by on a mounted TV, so prepare for something even more Notes App than usual. Which I suppose shines light on a secret third issue- whilst the gigs haven't helped, the main reason I haven't started this until deadline night is because I haven't really known what to write about...
Compilation Week shouldn't be a hard one, there's SO MANY comps out there and quite a lot of angles to take, especially as compilations often serve as the easiest entry point into musical worlds we know little about. Case in point, it was just last week that craaaaazy Bengali Mayhem Stereo tape dropped and started online arguments about what it means to sell someone’s uncredited work that you found on YouTube. I mean was nice to learn the actual artists! But no, I have no agendas to push today, fucking Big Milk over here being agenda free and nothing was really speaking to me, getting to the heart of anything I wanted to say about compilations. I considered writing about GFOTYBUCKS, Degrees of Freedom Found, Nobody Here, England the Album: World Cup 2006, The Harder They Come, The Indietracks Festival 2012 compilation , the long-running Kompakt Total and Pop Ambient series, the list goes on and on. I was cursing myself that I'd written about Artificial Water Music less than a month ago, and before that Ayumi Hamasaki, which ruled out her Super Eurobeat remix comps. In the end, I decided to go back to a trusty source, the records that are actually lying around the flat, and lo and behold, it made for a nice opportunity to spin some albums I hadn’t in a while
Various Artists - Heisei No Oto: Japanese Left-field Pop From The CD Age (1989-1996)
Compilations often serve as a vantage point, a place to observe with a different perspective. Would you say that's an, advantage, they have, You might be looking at an artist, a scene, a moment in time, even something more nebulous like a “sound” (we giggled the other day whilst listening to a very nice record subtitled “Selected Sounds of Japan 1988-2018”- that’s THIRTY YEARS!) well hold that thought. In each case though, the hope is that through access and curation you might get an opportunity to view something you hadn’t before. Music From Memory are a record label that put out a mix of contemporary releases and retrospective compilations, and on the latter are generally a good bet to find some interesting tracks you’ve never heard of, curated by people who are genuinely in the know (I’m enough of a fan to have literally bought the t-shirt! Then spilled coffee or maybe red wine all over it! then bought it again! And now I kind of don’t like the fit but I’m thinking of cutting off the sleeves and then we might be back in action!!!)And they put out that new Ron Trent!. When I first heard about their “Heisei No Oto” record around its time of release, I was struck by their proclamation of it providing a look into “The CD Age”. The CD as a format feels incredibly ripe for the discovery of hidden gems, ubiquitous and cheaply produced at the time yet often brushed aside by modern crate diggers.Not for much longer CD sales are massiv... There’s an inextricable link between CDs and compilations in my head as well; growing up in the age where CDs were the dominant way to listen to music, I remember my parent’s collection being full of greatest hits records (big hitters like ABBA Gold and The Beatles 1 alongside other career-spanning sets from artists they liked but not enough to own all the originals) and broad scene-spanning sets (Alternative Eighties, an easy listening CD I can’t remember the name of)- an entirely different world to that of the boutique reissue label but one with the same aim, albeit more influenced by the limitations of maintaining a music collection. A CD was something that stayed in the car or on the shelf by the stereo for months, you got to know it inside out such that it might as well have been an artist’s full discography, a scene’s complete output- something with outsized value in an age where music wasn’t all around us waiting to be grabbed.
I rarely think of compilations in that way any more, they more often fill the place of invitations or curios rather than lifelines. This record certainly fits the bill; a light, wide-ranging work that presents a range of connecting sounds from a rough time and place and promises that there is more where that came from if you’re willing to look. Which is not to say it’s bad, far from it, just a little diffuse. The bulk of the record is a mix of electronic ambient, muzak, and oddball pop songs, tied together by a hazy atmosphere and interest in sound play that makes for a lot of the standout moments. Eiki Nonaka’s “Phlanged Vortex” is one of the more striking tracks, a hypnotic odyssey that gilds its lush synths with half-speed steel pans and wailing sax. Love, Peace & Trance’s “Yeelen” is equally strange, almost a guided meditation with its spoken word segments about a “world of occultism” on top of classic new age staples, trilling panpipes and plucked harp building up into a frenzy. I guess Keisuke Sakurai’s “Harai” is the actual sound that Mallsoft Vaporwave is aping and playing with, but with its strange vocal loops and playful marimba solo it would comfortably slot into one of those more modern records and blow half the tracks out of the water. And not every song here feels as beholden to expectations, Ichiko Hashimoto’s “L’ete” is simply a really cool really quite cool synthpop song, dripping in drama, and POiSON GiRLFRiEND track “Nobody” is a really elegant example of her peculiar, francophile take on trip-hop. It’s an album that ended up doing exactly what I’d hoped- there are artists on here whose work I’ve gone on to explore and love, and others for whom the single track is still all I know. That lucky dip is half of the fun of a compilation, and revisiting this one after a few years away makes me feel energised to follow a few more threads, the journey’s never done.
Dream Dolphin - Gaia Selected Ambient & Downtempo Works (1996-2003)
Speaking of which, one artist featured on “Heisei no Oto” is Dream Dolphin, a prolific ambient music trio who put out at least 17 studio albums in their 8 year lifespan, frequently with wonderful names like “Visions / Rebirth / Underwater (Earth's Last Ephemeral and Beautiful Dream" or “Angel13: From The Hyper Speed Forest”. A couple of years after that comp dropped, Music From Memory followed it up by announcing “Gaia”, a career-spanning compilation dedicated to the group, and it feels apt to talk about it here in the same breath.
The group’s track on the original comp, “Take no Michi”, honestly isn’t a stand-out to me. It’s a noodly downtempo groove that rides out for 6 minutes without an awful lot beyond a bright, peppy tone- if this second release hadn't dropped, I might not have heard another song of theirs. But it did, and I did, and yeah wow some of the tracks on here are amazing. The Dream Dolphin sound is all atmosphere: feathery ambient with a healthy dose of acid trance. would you say it's dreamy? These are tracks to soak into, to let your mind wander in and you explore to their edges, and I think if that was all that was here it would be a great record. But as is fitting for a group with so much material, there are some significant detours too, and they are often where the record shines the most. “Voyage (Dive to the Future SIght)” opens as the PS1 Fantasy RPG soundtrack of my dreams, ah ok yeah you do call it dreamy fair play chunky pulsing synths and cycling choral chants.
Voyage is crazy, before transforming into a trip-hop vocal track, smashing the two together and then exiting to a beautiful midi saxophone hook, brilliant and bonkers and utterly entrancing. “Rain” is a less grandiose track, but something about the way its eerie washes and squealing sax tones give way to a spare, needling acid synth line feels genuinely surprising. Final track “Ao No Yume ~Dreaming Blue~” takes ideas from both of these tracks and pushes them further, creating a psychedelic 12 minute journey that veers between beautiful vistas and disquieting depths. The common theme in the tracks I love here is a sense of daring that “Take no Michi” never hinted at, a willingness to play with structure and sound in a genre that excels at riding a groove. It’s the sort of record that makes me want to deep dive on everything, gives me belief that there are so many artists out there with music that will make me specifically tick (and maybe some friends too) buried away in back catalogues. For me, that’s a lovely feeling to leave a compilation with (and maybe what they’re all about to me at their heart), a fire burning for more discovery, even if it’s something entirely different. Now I’ve just got to wait for when I get a second, and then it’s time to dig.
Liv: AANJEL 001 V/A
I really liked having a prompt for once, much less stressful than the usual situation for me really. lol I also found it made me a lot more comfortable to check out something totally new to me, though I am pretty sure I have heard Aanjelitos in the club before. aanjel's release had made some waves in year end lists, but for some reason or another I never got around to it beyond thinking the artwork is really fun. it's pretty fun yeah Glad I got around to it though, a release that is arresting in just how easily understood and in context with stuff I am already listening to most of these songs are. While I think it's important that releases highlighting parts of the Global South or underserved communities highlight their own methods and idiosyncrasies and not make it more palatable for the imagined consumer, it's really refreshing to just have "we have more in common than we think" mentality to a release highlighting Latin America. We are all out here deconstructing the club.
Well I should probably give a bit of context, especially since this is also a label debut release. aanjel's based in Mexico City, by two women Paurro and Valeriana. Valeriana is a resident at one of the cooler (in this one American girl's opinion) clubs in Mexico City in Funk and helps run the FLINTA party series, while Paurro is very much a part of the international delegation of the general Making Time/Good Room/Lot Radio universe and is(was?) I think still is? but no releases for a while hm one of the principle people involved with the Cómeme label, a really fun label with releases from people like Borusiade and Matias Aguayo. So these gals definitely have the bonafides to be putting out a very plugged in release and oh wow they deliver, and not just on the two songs they contribute, the aforementioned Aanjelitos for Paurro and compilation closer Xico for Valeriana.Boo you should check out Xico
I don't think there's any hard or fast rule for compilations, but only pop albums probably face a stricter "the first three tracks on this need to fucking bang" pressure than comps. Luckily Cobweb's kinetics withering away under Pitaya's twinkles is a great one-two punch, and the rest of the sequencing helps keep the album flowing, in that distinctly compilation feel. P1 LM might be my favorite thing on here, from the jarring racing commentary washing away for what at first seems like a little bit of trance, only for an incredibly towering low end roll to thump around for the remaining five or so minutes. the Denuc fake out is crazyyyy Music can be so fun sometimes. More theme weeks please! see you in 20 weeks
Iris: PC Music Volume 2
It’s 2015, im on tumblr, and someone I follow has just posted this:
My taste in music was irrevocably changed, someone had invented the girliest music ever and I had just absorbed it into my soft teenage mind. Everything new the label put out, I was on like fleas on a dog. It was magic to me, I was listening to something that really sounded like the future of music happening in real time. Over a decade later and it still sounds like the cutting edge, and nowhere is that more apparent than their compilation albums.
PC Music Volume 2 is about as clean of a slice well some of these songs decidedly do not sound clean s/o a new family of the label’s influence on music as you could ask for. It’s only 10 tracks but each stands on its own. Hannah Diamond’s Fade Away opens the album, and it’s this incredibly melancholy trance-pop track with vocals processed to sound borderline angelic. It feels like something you’d hear in a mediocre-to-okay 2000s OVA over the end credits and resonates in my heart with the same kind of nostalgia. It’s everything PC Music was doing at the time in your face up front. After showing off this crystallization of the label’s sound, we get Danny L Harle’s Carly Rae Jepsen (Post-Emotion!) track Supernatural. Departing from the PC music processed vocal sound into CRJ’s crooning over Danny’s eurodance backing track lets you hear a portent of pop to come. I would argue this is more signaling how much Volume 1 had already changed the space tbh
Next up is A.G. Cook’s Superstar. This song is so beautiful and funny, it’s A.G. singing a little song about how this girl makes him feel like a superstar over what will become every single one of his production signatures. His awkward but sweet vocals float over the supersaw synths and bit-crushed bassline in the same way he will do for every woman he works with in the future. It’s such a lovely little succinct picture of his career.
Then we get the quintessential Easyfun (Finn Keane) track with Monopoly, all bubblegum and glitch. Then whiplash into Poison, a GFOTY track that sounds like a rave got put in a blender. Important (and underrated) PC Music staple Felicita contributes a track that sounds like an audio haunted house with a new family, which is extremely fun despite being the most gimmicky song in the comp. Nothing gimmicky about wanting to make a nice tune But all of this pales in importance to the next track.
Hannah Diamond’s Hi was the second PC Music track to hit me like QT did when I first heard it. A beautiful little pop ballad about being a lonely girl on the computer made me suddenly feel like I wasn’t alone in being that. I’ve spoken to so many friends about the impact this song had on me and many of them share the sentiment. It meets the rest of the compilations big dance-pop sounds with restraint and lets you know who the album is really for: weird girls and gays who like electronic music posting about it online to their friends. I think Danny and AG have, a different idea, of who they make music for, I have to be honest here It’s a song that fills me with the kind of hope and positivity that music rarely elicits. I adore it and it’s a big part of the reason why this specific compilation has stuck with me for so long. Following Hi we get the timeless Danny banger Broken Flowers which I remember hearing at some of the first clubs I ever went to. It’s got everything he’s great at: bouncy pitchbent synths, catchy vocal samples, and a totally unique spatial texture. I want to bounce around whenever I hear it. Then we get Chris Lee’s Only You. I always forget about this song in the larger context of PC music but it’s singular. AG’s Production on a Chinese pop track rules. This song really feels like the most futuristic part to me and I am crossing my fingers that we will hear more PC Music influence in Chinese pop as time goes on. Bloodz Boi NTS show a pretty good place to start, some of the people who works with Ma Haiping as well What closes out the album is maybe the single most important PC Music track. Released by the artist known as “Life Sim” who, as far as I have been able to figure out over a decade of following this label, is basically all the big members working collaboratively. It is maybe the single most iconic sound in the PC Music archive to the point where it has been sampled in innumerable projects from the label since its inception. It’s iconic, to say the least. If you have any familiarity with the label then you have heard IDL in some form or another. It is the sonic backbone holding up the project and carrying it to where we are now. It is beautiful.
Claire: The Worst Label - The Worst Compilation: A New Low
what better way to handle a compilation special issue than a compilation of compilations? I knew I could count on you for this now you might say that all i would have to do is write about more than 1 compilation and thats not very clever, to which i say: i am so far ahead of you. dont even sweat it shawty. heres my basic rundown: i am covering several compilations i like from over the years, from different times and contexts (all relatively recent though, mind you) and made for seemingly different reasons. whoa! what a cerebral writing and reading experience. please hold your adulation until the end. Well no I write my stuff inline
which means we start at the beginning! ive already spent a lil time writing about this era of online netlabel shenanigans, and have namedropped The Worst Label before but have yet to have a good reason to go really in-depth, or feature the music directly. that changes now! im not sure if you all remember this frankly kinda lame ass time about a decade ago does not narrow it down of the "soundcloud breakcore producer", again, which was just a guy who would use dblueglitch on default settings for the drum track on every single song. Ok wait no this seems specific this was interesting if you did not care about the genre at all because these guys were very much outsiders. but it was exceedingly lame if you knew basically anything about breakcore. The Worst Label were positioning themselves as at least above this kind of guy. they wanted to be a home for people who liked breaks, anime samples, things like that. i would say they were extremely successful at this goal! for nearly a decade they were a home to a kind of music that was always going to be fairly niche. and especially once the soundcore breakcore guy went extinct there were not a lot of places to hear this particular sound, given the large breakcore guys like Shitmat and DJ Donna Summer (wasnt he supposed to not call himself that anymore btw?)genuinely this came up like 3 times at the show idk, can't be letting blessed madonna outcompete here were acting more "professional" and i guess mostly dont like anime. fair enough!
like most groups of people over a long period of time (but unlike most netlabels gottem lmfao), the end was nothing dramatic. people just moved on. they got busy. they wanted to make different kinds of music. they didnt want to make music at all. etc etc. i really miss these guys. not just because they were my friends (but they were!), but because it felt really fun and natural. no one here was under the illusion that they were gonna Make It Big. we just liked the music. and its so interesting for me to go back today and listen to this again. they were surprisingly forward thinking for being a bunch of internet nerds! (said with love)! while the chiller styles of breakcore were already well represented by this time and continue to be so i think it is fair to say that for the other kind, the louder and more obnoxious kind, that in their own way The Worst were helping push that forward. i look at the modern proliferation of hyperflip (not hyperpop) more important than ever to make this distinction and see the exact same dna. in a way i dont think you get to hyperflip without it percolating in the exact same online space that The Worst existed and thrived in (not to mention its contemporaries like Dance Corps/Bubblegum Luv/a lot of smaller labels or people who only briefly dabbled in these kinds of releases). in that sense were still kicking i suppose! which i guess is much much better than if none of this ended up mattering. to not get too caught up in it: please listen to this. it matters a lot to me and i think it will matter a lot to you if you feel similarly as me about some of this stuff. the exhale on waiting for an empty world speaks to that chill out vibe flow
Psycho Filth Records - THE PSYCHO BLAST Vol. 4
this ones just pure crowdpleaser baby. Psycho Filth Records is the personal label of perennial menace DJ Myosuke, currently mostly known as the loudest guy theyll currently put in japanese rhythm games, given he is also a member of HARDCORE TANO-C. Psycho Filth seems to mostly exist as a space for him to feature his scene friends more one-off works, as well as his own. THE PSYCHO BLAST Vol. 4 is a primo example of this. weve got a lot of huge names in japanese hardcore featured here! from mainstays like Kobaryo and RedOgre to (in a big shock to me) a moro feature from his hiatus period. whoa! theres just very little to expand on here since were talking about some very notable people. like i assume if you are reading this blog you know who HARDCORE TANO-C is. right? please dont say you dont. I'm not saying anything Myosuke may not be their most public facing member but he is a legit superstar in this world. with the pedigree on display here, even a few years out from this release (or any psycho filth release... :<), this is very easy to claim as a mainstream speedcore et al release. good intro to the genre if youve somehow not clicked all the dumber bullshit i post on this newsblogletterwebring! when you gert a second!
Silent Xords - 沪闽粤大型脑死亡事件~THE BRAINDEADZ EP~
and sometimes you just need some actual ass poop from a butt in your life. Silent Xords (the x makes a k sound, you know) are a very new blip on my radar. they were recommended to me by a friend (hi rin! again!) who wanted to help me in my quest to understand the more mainstream kinds of hardcore and club music. and like, i did try to listen to one of their more serious offerings! really! my first choice was The Silent Xosmos -United & Unbounded- , which looks very fine and very well made. but like, i wasnt feeling it. and i didnt want to not give the album a fair shake just because im in one of my flighty ass moods. it may be featured later! but, when that fell through and i saw another comp (EPs count if there arent any artist repeats!) that was an april fool's release that rin insists is "still very good". well that made the decision easier.
and like, yeah its dumb. its dumb as hell. normally I wait until I am fully done editing to delete the album art I save for WYGAS, but, you understand but if youre a talented, dedicated, and intelligent person you can make something really dumb that still goes. i was really pleasantly surprised by how well they hit the target on this! im naturally a skeptic for the specific lowbrow internet humor of using the "huh???" sample everyone likes and going "thats the joke haha, get it?". and even worse, i am extremely harsh on april fool's jokes. its my birthday if you can believe it. its maybe the worst day of the year to have a birthday on. you quickly learn that the vast majority of people on earth are not very funny. even worse, sometimes they will come up to me, their lovely friend claire who has never done a single wrong thing ever, and go "this bad joke i made is your gift. do you like it? :)" and i never do!!!! dont do this!!!!!! die actually!!!!!!!!!
but in this case i will allow Silent Xords this joke. its pretty good! theres a bunch of dumb samples, some of which arent used very artfully, but the majority are well placed and even funny. im allowed to say it. by the vagaries of my birth i am the april fool's master. i alone get to decide which ones are good. this one is! for a comp of 4 entire tracks, i found 3 of them quite good and 1 of them fine enough. given what were working with here, crazy well done lol. makes me more interested in seeing the fine folks at Silent Xords stretch those muscles in service of like, something that is a lil more serious and matters more. ill just have to get over myself a lil. i can do that! i hope you can see what im getting at here, and i hope you listen to the advice of my good friend rin and also check these guys out. you know, when youre free for a moment. thats how it goes right? smiles are down
Emi:
Alexis: v/a - Think & Change (2013, Nonplus Records)
think & change is a collection of tracks released at a moment of genre and movement in flux. nonplus, the personal label of one alex green, aka boddika and half of instra:mental, was brought into being in 2009 for the collaborative work of a bunch of UK artists clearly in the process of digesting music from outside of their narrowly construed lane of DnB: the signature club sounds of the midwest, and the dub and deathly atmospheric stylings of german techno. on the compilation, the worlds finally intersected. some would say collide, even the gaggle of producers fleeing the sinking ship of the DnB scene and the ever shrinking lane of dubstep that didn't soundtrack frat parties collided with the worlds of house and techno from the US and European continent, and a series of connections, of tempo and timbre and omnivorous attitudes to beat patterns, slotted into place. from this point forward the hardcore continuum extended across the channel, and the sonic possibilities for bass music were reestablished on a more radical and interlinked foundation.
this is the narration i have held in my head for the full more-than-a-decade in which i have listened to this record, owned one of those samplers, placed in folklore and flaunted my knowledge of it. i was there when the planets collided,ah ref i saw the path be laid. but fuck me it's just a bit of a rough listen now.
let's tackle it in sections. there are representatives of the euro techno sound from its more dismanted wing. kassem mosse has two tracks here with 'broken patterns', the more typically windy and raucous cut which has stood the test of time. 'ip mirrors' goes the route of lowtec's track 'the rhythm' and slinks towards electro territory, but also in that both are very happy to wander around pretty ploddingly. they're skips for me, even if 'ip mirrors' makes me think of andy stott tracks i prefer much more. there's a four tet track,wow can hear your enthusiasm from here fresh out of the pink era refocus on club music, which is inoffensive and uncommonly interested in seeming warm and jazzy. more than being boring it's just out of place, but it does rubberstamp the release for the skeptical. this is the meanest thing Alexis can say in public omg there are representatives of those departing DnB for new fields. endian is an alias of one of the members of legendary duo commix, who takes a shambling corpse of a techno track, throws too much reverb on it and calls it a day. it's sad given his previous release on nonplus is far more focused and vicious, 'birdhouse' still makes its way into my rekordbox playlists.
and i can't even really celebrate the highlights. the rest of the compilation recovers some of what i remember: a confluence of electro and midwest techno's sonic palette with the tempos and sensibilities of DnB and dubstep in the sound of dbridge, a lightness of touch and grooviness from 2step rhythms working into house and techno in martyn, the flex and strangeness that makes the two boddika and joy orbison collabs heavy and dancefloor ready but just askew enough to make it sound radically new. about two years later, boddika starts sounding off about immigrants in the uk, doubles down on it, and in the process torches the label, his domestic dj career, and much of my loving attachments to his work. it's kinda sad, as both in curation and collaboration he was one of the artists who carved out the lane my listening and production followed. i wouldn't mind him never getting a gig again.
in the end of 2025 writeup i put a long essay together that i think i could boil down to a fetish for the new in form. i was tired of needing familiar #content in the shitty online vernacular, and was desperate for new modes of experiencing, to be shown that there were ways to be shocked out of a stupor by what i was listening to. i have just come back from a conference that spent a lot of time talking about the content-form dialectic and, like any good value-form disliker, i think form has a supremacy: no matter what we ram through the circuits of exchange it is their form as a commodity that defines how they organise and condemn our lives to alienated existence. whatever we experience must pass through form, so form is the site where the possibilities and constraints over what is thinkable and doable are contested. a marxist ought to be, in good modernist fashion, dubious about genre and the stabilisation of form, hi derivative as it is likely to be of the modes of production and circulation that will slide in unnoticed but unavoidable between us and our beloved art objects.
sometimes art that challenges the bounds of form is also a bit shit. sometimes? i don't really like this record much any more, but i am grateful for it in a sense, it was a juvenile skin that needed to be grown and shed. the point isn't so much for it to have nailed a style, but to have revealed that the style was unfinished, that it needed to go elsewhere. pearson sound should come in for absolutely no criticism on those grounds, because 'quivver' is both an absolute nuke and also a cut between the programming patterns of dubstep and the rhythmic experimentation happening in electro and idm, and his whole career has navigated the intermediate spaces of genres, tempos and recognisable patterns with genuinely shocking adeptness. but otherwise, to find the version i actually enjoy, i have to look elsewhere: to the adoption of techno into the arsenal of british arch-miserablists like andy stott and lee gamble, to the intrusion of breaks into german techno in the guise of skee mask and a whole sea of imitators, to dbridge nailing his distinctive kind of analogue, soft-edged dance music on his own label exit, and the collision of the new rhythmic forms of footwork and juke into this dense hellish soundworld from jlin, jana rush or sinistarr. they actually sound fucking good, and all i needed in those early moments was a heads up on how to be a new kind of listener. out of genre, out of familiar patterns, into new ways of working. so long racist shitheads and your overly wet first attempts. i am glad this all feels very familiar now. nahhh she fuckin danced that dialectic
Andrew: Denshi Ongaku No Bigaku / 電子音楽の美学 (The Aesthetics of Japanese Electronic Music)'' Vol.1-4
Yeah the secret on how to get me to only write about one project is to make it something that has four volumes currently. Despite Liv's jokes I actually didn't even consider writing bout the Skintone collection in general for this, since it's a lot more fun to just have a Yokota section to plunk away at over the next few months. I was debating covering Virtual Dreams, as their two releases are really something special, but the last time I saw Jay we played both those records to death and also Volume 3 of Denshi Ongaku No Bigaku opens with Yosi Horikawa's Bubbles, which is in the handful of songs I flip between calling my favorites, so yeah lets get to these digital bonsai art inflected compilations.
Sadly I don't have much in the way of context or gossip on the label putting these out, a French outfit called CosmoCities, a passion project led by Matt Soulie with less instagram followers than I have. But they are followed by my fav ambient record store in Tokyo and I'm not, and the approval of Harunoame means quite a bit more than my friends.
It's refreshing we are far enough away from Kankyo Ongaku that Japanese, and to a lesser extent Asian music in general, compilations no longer feel like they have to be positioned around it. No disrespect to Kankyo it remains fascinating and generative, but it too was made less interesting by so many releases feeling the need to be Kankyo but for X or a sort of anti-Kankyo. Denshi casts an incredibly wide net, especially on the first two volumes, but it works in just how loose it all feels. When so many playlists and compilations try to feel "authoritative" or present themselves as a shortcut to genre expertise, whereas opening with the Kaoru Inoue's remix of GABBY & LOPEZ Drive From The Miracle's, best known from a 2006 compilation of it's own, feels a bit tongue in cheek, a release for people who have too many opinions Larry Heard and Ken Ishii's collaborations and would be excited to hear one of them be the close out track of volume one. That might just be a population of me, but, it is just nice how getting older means the music nerd cues you see are very much cognizant of your own timeframe.
To get the rough part out of the way: I really do not like Yuu Udagawa's 'We Float' on volume two. The production just feels formless, half masticated ideas ambling down, without any of the interesting drum programming she has at her best. It unfortunately does maintain the hallmark of her work I dislike the most, that's right, really grating feel good vocal samples baby lets goooo. it's a shame because volume one's "Infinite Possibilities" and volume three's "Little Secrets" are maybe my favorite tracks from her in general, downtempo cooldown gems that also glides right into the Keita Sano & Slow Didi tracks right after. Sano's another guy I keep meaning to do a deeper dive on, my introduction to him was him doing a sort of Mark Fell/Brighton Bass impression on his Legacy of Leyton EP but he seems to predominantly have a much softer hue?
I'm sure some is recency bias/being in a general deep house mood but newly released Volume 4 might be my favorite, Tokyo Black Star's Fantastique Voyage is so thoroughly obsessed with Larry Heard, XTAL's trance bops are still soooooo looooong aaaand hypppnooooottttiiiiccc, and ending with Bitowa & YAMADAtheGIANT's Forest mix is a great highlight of that contemporary texture obsessed underground club groove that is why I keep going out on Thursdays.
The highest compliment I can give to Denshi is it really has made me dig into a lot of the artists it highlights. After being mildly confused at why the shimmering beauty at the end of volume 3 is called Fatality 4, I discovered the antiseptic and brutal hardcore techno of Acidgelge's Fatality 1 and 2. Chari Chari's Luna De Lobos opening fully like Yokota's Hisen led me to discovering this fun jazzy gem on Kaoru Inoue's own label... which is also a bit of a reminder of the label games and relationships that are played for compilations, sure, but I can't feign much umbrage when the stuff being served up is this fun!
Thanks for supporting us through these first ten volumes of our own, we will see you all when we resume our regularly scheduled programing in two weeks!
