Vol. 4
Been a weird few weeks over here. Pretty sure my left shoulder is freezing up, thankfully it waited until my right one thawed out but was hoping to be able to get the torn labrum taken care of before dealing with any new pains! What this means for music is that I have gone out a little less than over the past few months, and been returning to a lot of DJ Sets and NTS streams over seeking out a lot of new albums, Don't worry I still have heard the L'Rain album, just don't really have anything interesting to say on it beyond it's pretty solid.
I mean part of it too is that it's just early August, the ultimate chill out and decompress time. I've been reading a lot on my roof recently, finally finished the Penguin 19th century European history book, and after whizzing through a Mumbo Jumbo reread (still the GOAT) in a day, I've cracked open Adam Zientek's A Thirst for Wine and War, about how critical it was to keep every Frenchman in his WW1 trench drunk out of his mind. It's been fun(?) so far but also this leads me to more Jazz live recordings and Lot/NTS catchup than album spins. This is sort of a meandering and meaningless intro to the newsletter I know but that's blogging baby! You already got the Andrew health update it would be a bit on the nose to get the Andrew love life update as well, and there isn't much going on in the grander music ecosystem I find worth remarking on. Hope everyone bought something sick for Bandcamp Friday at least, anyway let's get into it.
Boo:
Jay: Johari Salleh - Jazz Dari Angkasapuri
Jazz as a worldwide sound is such a beautiful thing. Always hewed and contoured differently but still undeniable. These two new Audible Beauty records from Habibi Funk, a label I had no familiarity with before I like that we've cultivated a place where people would assume Habibi Funk is old hat for our writers these two explorations of Malaysian Jazz, but I'm hooked. Volume 001 is fun as well but Salleh's turn on Mengapa alone makes 002 the much more arresting work. He plays the fuck out of that trumpet, very melodic and modal, sort of like once Chet Baker figured out how to play his instrument.
Without wanting to wax too heavily thank god someone takes the 300 word suggestion seriously it's just nice to have a very pleasant Jazz album fill out a room, and to learn a bit more about Malaysia, in a way that totally won't make me look like an ass to anyone who actually has spent 5 minutes in Kuala Lumpur. Case in point on a first listen I assumed the importance of keys (as in the piano) signaled the primacy of hotel bands à la Ethiopian 70's grooves, but nope Salleh had his fingers stretched over the entire media and commercial art landscape of his native country. The Trumpet swells on Anda just hit, really fun tune. As everyone reading this and generally been in my life knows, moving has made me more than a bit frazzled, but getting a peak in at a completely unknown scene from 50 years ago is just really exciting. Also check out this short interview on the label's YouTube page! Jazz really is the world's music!
Iris:
Max: The Femcels - I Have To Get Hotter
So it’s been a hectic couple of weeks and for the first time since the newsletter started I sat down to write something and uh, didn’t really feel very inspired. So what did I do, made like a snake eating its own tail and turned to WYGAS! well you had a second Listening to the textures of Confield was like meeting an old friend, and drowning in the wash of The Gerogerigegege was like making a new one. It made me want to similarly dig out an old record I love and remind myself of all the reasons why, but that just took me back to where I started, with nothing really scratching the itch. So I’ve pulled the emergency cord and decided it was finally time to write about the record I’ve listened to more than any other this year, The Femcels’ debut album “I Have To Get Hotter”.
Sure The Femcels are posh, a little obnoxious and gave us the evils whilst awkwardly grabbing an ashtray in a smoking area the other week, but when you scratch beneath the surface they’re also total music dorks and a couple of endearingly strange characters who are very very funny. Their recently-gained status as hip young upstarts in the London music scene honestly feels a bit uncanny, like a pair of nerds believing they're definitely truly actually sooooooo cool and watching the world warps around them and turns it to reality- which is not to say they aren't cool, it just feels like they should be a best-kept-secret rather than playing Charli xcx album launch parties is it not subversive to launch your subversive new album with new subversive artists who subversively are not on the album proper?. More than anything else they seem to proudly inhabit the scrappy, rule-breaking side of lots of music I love Charlie XCX deep cut reference??, unburdened by expectations of what pop music should sound like and forever driven by a sense of silly, boundless fun. It’s in Gabriella’s vocal palette of shrieked rap verses, spoken word skits and horror movie rasp; it’s in the bizarre references to Surf’s Up (2007), CS:GO and Fast Fourier Transforms; it’s in the lovely embrace of twee music, nursery rhymes and ramshackle seams-on-show synth pop.
In what’s becoming a running trend amongst newsletter contributors, I’ll admit to always swinging for a record that’s maximalist, loud and stuffed with detail, and this fits the bill to a T. Despite its rough-and-ready presentation there are creative sounds I love all over this thing. The bizarre chomping sound and white noise that open “Monster in You” make me grin every time, for a totally different reason to the sunny guitar solo that closes out “Indiest Girl in School”. The cartoonish nervous gulp soundbite that crops up on half the songs here is one of the funniest things I've heard all year, and hey if you’re into bleeping, whirring synths you’re going to have a field day as there are seemingly infinite permutations scattered all over this thing.
More than any of the music though, the most striking aspect of the group is their personality. The love-us-or-hate-us band name Oh and I do sets the expectation that this will likely not be a solemn affair, but probably belies just how charming the lyrics and performances are here, full of studio banter, self-deprecating witticisms and tight melodies.
It’s funny watching people write about the group and step on the same old rakes, hand-wringing over an imagined dichotomy between playfulness and sincerity. It’s like PC Music, or They Might Be Giants, or solo Jonathan Richman, and you’d think people would know better by now, but I keep reading people talk about memes and “brainrot” as if this means something about a generation or a culture I mean one of the tricks of the "generations" scam is that it enables you to just uncritically regurgitate what was said about you as a kid. Also as Ranka and I always say people just love having excuses to not engage with new stuff. I’d like to posit a counterargument, doesn't it feel great to goof off with your mates? Real Milk All Dairy When I listen to this record I hear a pair of silly friends splashing the things they find funny across a canvas, a show of who they are that means just as much as the backdrop being a whole-hearted expression of the music they love. I find it all genuinely touching, and that fact doesn't disallow me from being equally as moved by some heady, chin-stroking techno afterwards if it's good enough, thinking otherwise is craaaaazy!
Pulling back a little, there’s plenty of tonal variety on show anyway. Mid-2000s Myspace pop homage slash irreverent Popeye (1980) soundtrack interpolation “He Needs Me” is winking and stuffed with one-liners, but preceding electro-pop rager “I’m So Fat” is shot through with melancholy, the girls yelling into the void in a moment of shared anxiety. The emo-lite acoustic guitar pop of “Is Loser An Emotion You Feel Too?” hits a similar tone- rising refrain “I have to throw away these shoes 'cause everyone thinks I'm such a loser” sounds quaint at first listen but I’ve seen it sweep up a room, single flats and trainers being chucked up on stage.
“You’re Gay And You’re In Love With Me (Please Let Me Touch Your Boobs)” manages to be both, an earnest ode to each other’s friendship framed around a goofy joke, all reverbed synths and chintzy keyboard phrases. It feels impossible to hear this and worry about whether the characters they inhabit across this record are “just a joke”; the Gabriella and Rowan who wrote these songs are all over them, totally saturating them so that there’s nowhere to hide. It is this quality that makes “I Have to Get Hotter” a record to love rather than just absent-mindedly enjoy, at least for suckers like me. Even if you don’t fall into that camp, there’ll be a moment somewhere on this to make you grin- my favourite track might be “Please Don’t Stab Yourself (Like Elliott Smith)”, a madcap pop miniature where blown-out riot grrl twee is punctuated by deranged spoken word segments about javascript and guppies. No-one else is doing it like this right now, long may it continue!
Liv: Origins w/ Kevin Saunderson August 08th 2026
I have a lot to get off my chest unfortunately I do have to support her in this she does but hearing "Techo is white people music" has had a strong resurgence recently, to the point I see people comfortable calling it "Colonizer Rhythms", and I keep getting way too frustrated at that and not my real life shit. I know all the prestige write ups of Detroit like a decade ago were kind of corny but surely really reinforced you just look uninterested in music if you do this right? Have bad news on how people treat the art form of music Anyway the latest Saunderson NTS mix rules. As Saunderson says about X-Ray's untitled, it's very inspirational!
I really liked when Emi talked about techno as a way to provide structure yeah she's great we all love Emi, and I think in album form that's one of the keys to good techno albums, but flipping that structure for the verve of a fun DJ mix is key as well, and here the disco and house sliding around gives the mix it's, dare I say NO, storytelling she does this shit on purpose as the years and styles flip by, ending on the always exciting "unreleased current party only" jam.
Saunderson's voice and control of the mic as a DJ is also just really hot, the quiet charisma really does it for me. He never overpowers the music with chatter but the few stories and non sequiturs always welcome, feels like an ideal encouraging academic or librarian tone to it. This is.... Tronikhouse.... right into that Pinto song I've been partying to for almost half my life wow. I've repeated the mix a few times and I doubt it will live longterm in my memory as a distinct one, but god it's just really fun getting to hear one of the founders of 20th century music still get to spin stuff every week. Also it's just really fun listening to things and debating if that's my WYGAS choice or not.
Graham: In a save file that called the newsletter when you get a MINUTE
Poison Ruin - Hymns From the Hills
The way I listen to music is enough to give any other contributor or reader of this newsletter a stomachache. I can’t listen during a commute as I live five minutes from work. I’ve never been someone to just have it on in the background at home. I can’t have it on while writing. [Insert other insane behavior here.] I’ve had to devise not-that-elaborate ploys to have “serious” listening time. Two years ago, I decided to listen to every Guided By Voices and Robert Pollard solo album up to that point by just making myself play roguelikes while doing so. “Moses on a Snail” really hits when you’re shooting poop in Binding of Isaac. Hop on Caves of Qud Of course, my own neuroses have turned this into something else to feel insecure about. During “end of year wrapped” season, I marvel at friends in the six digits “total streamed” territory. I was never a Last FM guy. I don’t know how to make a topster (20 artists listened to in a week? Are you all Christgau?) We say JMK now It’s probably not a good that I’ve trained myself to have the same reaction to stuff like this that people have to seeing someone doing better than them on social media. Fun! When I do listen to music, I tend to hyper fixate. This time last year I convinced myself that I was very into Angel Dust (I’m not using the $, I mean come on) before revulsion at what their typical fan was like set in-an extreme “I wish I had more friends with the same interest as me around here…except this guy” situation. I have no control over this mania: before that I had a stretch where I listened to one Scott Walker song, and literally nothing else, for a good month. This is an unnecessary explainer to build up to saying that I have essentially listened to nothing but the latest Poison Ruin, “Hymns From the Hills” all summer. Even admitting that started to give me pause, as I was worried that writing about a “Band”, after three newsletter volumes of (mostly) jazz/electronic/noise, would make every other contributor think less of me. simply establish dominance by not missing weeks But I have my “music guy” bonafides despite all the complexes listed above: I was the world’s most irritating 20-year-old and had a WIRE subscription! I wrote a paper on No Wave/noise in undergrad! I saw Sunn O))) in an abandoned power plant! Did you stage dive I saw Michael Hurley on Geary Lane before it was slightly more gentrified! I saw The Urinals! A “noise rap” guy talked shit about me once! Aaron Dilloway liked something I tweeted! Can someone hit me with a car. I’ll try to talk about the album without any sword imagery: “Hymns From the Hills” sees Poison Ruin refine (uh oh) their previous work to its sharpest edge yet (shit). It’s still relatively easy to describe the band as sounding like “Wipers if every song was about peasants,” but why mess with what works? By Poison Ruin standards the clarity of the production here is almost shocking, but it’s to their benefit, they’ve never sounded quite so “big” or (groan) “epic.” Don’t get me wrong, something like “Fog of War” from their first album sounding like it was recorded on a four-track in a mud hut has its appeal, but “Pilgrimage” on this has a big ole gong. “Harvest” doesn’t have a song as good as “Lily of the Valley” on it. Sorry! I’m sure some maniac out there is dying on the hill that the 30 seconds of black metal more on that in a second guitar on the closer would sound better if the tape had been thrown down the stairs, but too bad! And don’t worry, while I’ve never been the biggest dungeon synth guy, rest assured, all those interludes are still here. Look, if I have one knock against this album, it’s that I ordered a pair of the shorts in their merch shop, and they’re a little big. But hey, look at that, I just came up with a new elaborate ploy/excuse to listen to music-slim down to wear that with the exchange rate, was wildly expensive. Every Psychic TV album, here I come!
Emi: Bekëth Nexëhmü - De Fördolda Klangorna
I'm going to assume embedding the full album audio instead of wanting me to post the art is a sign of respect in guitar music culture
In a 2021 interview with nobells, RXK Nephew (65 albums, 43 EPs, 29 mixtapes since 2020) and RX Papi the lack of stats for Papi... claim that they can do "four features an hour". There are a few artists that immediately come to mind when thinking of this kind of crazy output. Lil B is the obvious one.. Merzbow, John Zorn. In the metal space, Damian Ojeda (of Sadness/Trhä and 35 other bands) is probably the most notable one. I want to put forward Swartadauþuz into this canon of 'firehose musicians' and talk a little bit about his band Bekëth Nexëhmü, which he formed in 2010 with Likaska. If Neph does this because he prefers Distrokid to selling crack, then what about Swartadauþuz? Why does this guy have like 40 different bands hiding in the shadows on obscure blogs? Quantity is obviously not any indication of quality - off the court issues aside, artists like Viper exemplify the other side of the coin, a joke, a gimmick, and while Swartadauþuz is fairly far away from that line, all the same the line is finer than we might think. The thing that draws me to these kinds of musicians is their apparent rabid, manic need to release music, like a hypothermic patient in the thralls of paradoxical undressing.
The titles for Beketh Nexehmu tracks blend together endlessly (especially if you don't speak Swedish) I would never accuse someone I care about of that and much the same is true for their album covers. Moonlight forests draped in snow, swirling mist, occasionally some creepy looking guy (probably Swartadauþuz) looming in the background. The band's whole discography feels like an impenetrable monolith at first glance, and it's a little hard to parse initially. The music, though, is far from repetitive. Atmospheric, frosty, all of the things you me? want in 'ambient black metal', but meandering and adventurous and exciting, and allegedly largely improvisational. I don't know if I've ever sat down and listened to a Bekëth Nexëhmü track on its own? I just always put on the whole album. Feels wrong. Anyway... according to the bandcamp page for the 2019 reissue of this album, it was released on May 21 1903. Given what genre we're dealing with, I was kinda expecting to google this date and find that it was the anniversary of some kind of racially charged Swedish event, but nothing really seems to have happened. I looked at the Library of Congress newspaper records to see if anything interesting happened on that date.
In the now defunct Sun newspaper (not that one), there was a story about the NYC health commissioner getting up and stopping a bell from ringing in the night. Possibly related? The World does revolve around us I get it I was going to make a remark about how quaint the news was back then, but the rest of the page this story was on was about different incidences of suicide. Anyway.
There's very little to know about the band themselves - the Metallum page lists one line of information: "The release of [their debut album] was delayed for over a year because Lik tried to strangle Svartedöden/Swartadauþuz causing the band to be put on halt." Only this kind of jolly cooperation could birth such an album. The 2019 reissue is definitely more polished, but I really like the way the original release flows together and also how dogshit it sounds. Check em both out. When should they check them out Emi????
Claire: Kazumoto Endo - Keiyo
you know, given my track record thus far and continuing, probably fair to just assume anything i link has a volume warning lmao
it is strange to think about it, or say it like this, but it is assuredly correct that Kazumoto Endo is a pretty famous guy. weird in one sense because his fame exists entirely within the extreme niche of japanese harsh noise music. and in the second sense, because he is a guy in that scene who isnt named Merzbow. that said, i like Kazumoto Endo. he is certainly much better than Merzbow (except for Worms Plastic Earthbound which is pretty hype) in that he is much less one note and dreary and self serious. this is perfectly exemplified by alltimer tracks like the effervescent Itabashi Girl and for many years i was pretty content to leave it at that. but given my recent rediscovery of how much fun it is to listen to music, i wanted to learn more about a guy i already respect. so i went on discogs and picked a release with a cover that interested me (and managed to avoid Endo's current era of tracks that are Exactly 15 minutes long in the process lol) which brought me to 2019's Keiyo.
compositionally this is a pretty conservative harsh noise record with few dramatic Endo-style twists but i dig it still. there manages to be things like vague writhings of instruments (a piano is one pretty obvious one) that add some much needed texture and flavor. there is something metallic and stringy in some parts that i struggle to pin as perhaps a guitar? the remains of the piano from before? a section of chain link fence? its fun! this is all bolstered by Endo's impeccable ability to construct scenes and images, you really do feel like youre stuck in the middle of the ocean being tossed around mercilessly and waiting for the day to break.
of course its easy to talk about noise compositionally and fairly hard to talk about it emotionally, which is i think a small part of what gives the genre its reputation as inscrutable and for nerds. not that im not an inscrutable nerd, but id like to at least try to buck the trend! so an anecdote for you: while doing my initial listenthrough, during the final track Shiosai, i started getting fairly nauseous. this is not actually unusual for me ftr. i am a pretty nauseous person overall between a major case of motion sickness and some issues with food. but i have also experienced this with noise music before, generally as some kind of sensory overload response when stuff starts getting really dense. its unpleasant, but not as unpleasant as it sounds! and importantly, the tracks that tend to do this to me are the ones i end up really resonating with. for example: Worms Plastic Earthbound and Itabashi Girl! so the fact that Shiosai also did it serves as i hope a gross yet effective advertisement lol.
moro_108 - Flashout
moro's back! its kinda bittersweet though? this guy was one of the monsters of the touhou hardcore scene circa the early aughts. its a pretty small scene to begin with and when one person shows up and just starts farming clips on people with insane gabber hits like The Nightbug or [Holy Bitch}(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6labQvd4z9c), its pretty easy to become a big name! it was an incredible time but like all things it didnt last. after a few years of dedicated releases moro had stopped making touhou works (this is pretty common in the scene and frankly rarely a big deal. look at t+pazolite!), and then a few years later stopped releasing entirely. they didnt vanish or anything dramatic like that, just seemed to shift towards visual arts and spending less time online. so imagine my surprise a few months ago when i found out moro had a new release from the last day of 2025 (!!!), but its not gabber (???), its modern dubstep (?!), but it also has a warning of "this is really loud so be careful" (?????????)
honestly, i was pretty conflicted. especially given the few friends i saw talking about it were people who i KNOW do not fuck with crazy loud nu-gabber nonsense as much as i do (hi brent!), i kinda assumed it would be a release with very little appeal to me. so for months i sat on it, until i decided what the heck? one more for old times sake. and honestly, im glad i got over myself lol. it is pretty modern dub massiv...., but it is also exactly what i expect from the moro of old. its loud, its melodic, its dynamic. the lead+title track Flashout is def the standout (always appreciate artists making it easy for me lol) but the whole thing is good. its clear that moro was not sitting around doing nothing in the 7(!) years since GOTT IS TOTT. i feel kinda dumb now making such a big deal of it lol. i will admit its never gonna hit quiiiiite the same notes as early aughts touhou gabber would, but its instead the first step into something new and perhaps just as cool? even cooler? personally i cant wait.
Saidan - FANGDRILLER: Scars Beneath Memory's Wrist
so originally this one wasnt gonna be here! i figured id have too much to say about the previous two entries and that for the sake of brevity it would be best to just do that. but then it felt like i was writing a Blogpost of Perdition and i frankly like music too much and have too much fun to even hint at the idea that it being that dreary lol. so then the second idea was a lil one-off track that i like (WHICH DIDNT MAKE THE CUT BUT IF YOU WANNA HEAR IT IT MAY BE IN THE EMAIL NEWSLETTER WINK WINK) before remembering i hadnt listened to this album yet! and my boys from nashville could never do me wrong, General Hood moments before one of the most embarrassing losses in the civil war so it felt like it was the perfect counter to the rest of what ive been doing lately.
Saidan wear their visual kei influence on their sleeve (it is even something they outright say constantly) and it would be easy to imagine this as solely dressing. but these guys mean it. you could maybe get away with calling an album Visual Kill (haha) and then NOT actually sound like the music. youd be a dick but its possible. thankfully, Saidan dont even pretend to attempt this. Visual Kill includes tracks like Sick Abducted Purity where they are just doing awesome ass J-rock anime OP chords. its magical. and its backed up by the talent to actually make these things happen and work and flow naturally.
FANGDRILLER amps this up to the next level. with this album, Saidan have finally managed to tap into the collective GACKT-conscious (its like the collective unconscious but you can only access the mind of GACKT). this album is so vkei as hell it kinda hurts lol. there is so much harpsichord action going on. like half the tracks have harpsichord things happening. is it the black metal album with the most harpsichord ever? i dont know. i dont know enough to say for sure. but its gotta be on the leaderboard. theres also a lot of filtered drum break stingers happening and each one of them makes me both laugh and go "wait that rules though". its an album thats so fun to listen to because you can tell it was made for the joy of it. we all fucking love vkei, and harpsichord, and drum breaks, and black metal. its that simple!
Alexis: feeble little horse - * bitknot *
i'm going to try and nail down a type.
when i wrote up my favourite music of 2025 good list btw, an inspiration for this, i was plagued by the sensation that i was gravitating towards pleasant and unchallenging yet we are friends?, 'cool' stuff for emotional reasons i wasn't particularly fond of. choke enough is indeed a really good album but i wish the stuff i call my favourites pushed me a little harder. and so i also listened to a lot of loud angular guitar music in the hope that it would tap into the spaces that weren't 'melancholy' or 'exhausted' or 'pleasantly floaty'. my favourite pick of the bunch was julie's my anti-aircraft friend, which is a record full of stringy guitars that ripple and snarl when they get let off the leash. it is gleefully monochromatic, with two vocalists who have identical, backed-off deliveries, and a sweet and affectionate approach to treble that keeps those vocals whisper-close to your ears. it's great! i like it a lot, it's worth a listen. on the same token it's basically never a bad time to listen to blue rev even if there are jokes on my tl about how white people be like 'listen to blue rev' once a month now. I'll listen to Alvvways eventually? Probably? i watched heated rivalry and got feelings for the following six months about Atlantic Canada as a setting for tragic love stories and the familiar horror of the suburbs. i would have found a different reason to listen to 'blue rev' anyway, but i think mine is a good one. letterkenny is great too btw.
then at the start of the summer, the record bitknot by feeble little horse drops and i almost started feeling bad for liking this shit. it is half of the way to julie's combo of angry guitars and smoothed over vocals, it just decides to pull the aggression back a bunch. which is disappointing, cuz the most thrilling moment in the record is the opening salvo of 'doorway', dissolving into the chimes and papery hiss of a perfect drum-and-synth-texture loop ripped from your fave alt 90s heroes, with just a bit more piercing resonance. i really mean it, it's perfect, with just enough songwriting to make the cathartic explosions of guitar in the chorus worth it, and a sickly, tightly wound quality in the verse that makes me vibrate right up until the track lurches out of the locked groove in a big heady sigh. it will be one of my songs of the year, and i will probably think about it forever.
and the rest of the record is a kind of telephone-game facsimile of the opener. the guitars are mostly blunted, and the uncanny smoothness of those loops starts to turn into a blocky, plodding mess. the tool at their disposal to break up the monotony is, usually, synth lines. that's maybe a bit unusual, it's not like shoegaze is a genre alien to synth parts, but it's not often that they are straight up leads, playing melodies, that are meant to be the permission slip for the guitar rhythm parts to hit the same four chords over and over. 'dior' is a kind of unwanted doppelganger to 'doorway', with a verse rocked by the gentle version of the loop and a noodly synth line, and a big ol' chorus. each of those parts needs a minute.
the instances of these obviously digital, obnoxiously honky leads in this particular corner of shoegaze and guitar music have come in varying degrees of sincerity. full body 2 are a band that full want to sound like the live orchestra to a final fantasy game and they are not subtle about this. Pretty fun NTS hosts as well a track like 'wonder limit' rises and falls and maybe soars on the back of whether the crystalline pianos and big screaming lead read as EPIC and WHOOOOOAAA or just a bit garish and dumb. alternatively, Alex G has basically been using synths to take songs that are formally poised and elegant and turning them into awkward, shoulder-hiking struggles, at least for moments. i feel pretty similarly about the pitch shifts on 'walk away' and 'gretel' as the obnoxious honk of organ on the classic yo la tengo albums of the late 90s: if there weren't something truly sour in the mix these songs would just sound too proper, but choosing to make it so piercingly clear keeps the choice, and the confrontation with what these tracks might be without their spikes, front of mind. it takes a bit longer to appreciate the kernel underneath them. and finally, in a similar lane to feeble little horse is they are gutting a body of water, who feel just a lot more grown up. they're a louder, messier band, and their actual mood is so much more morose and nasty, that the synths follow the lead of the songwriting and come across as either aggressive and confrontational or just kinda pathetic. there is no space for a compromise in sensibility. the fact that all of these bands are from the great (?) state of Pennsylvania has not gone unnoticed. maybe the critiques of capitalist social domination make it over the Appalachians but the drugs and misery don't. idk i have friends in Pittsburgh so me slagging off a Pittsburgh band cuz they're just a bit too pretty with it feels mean and i shouldn't make characterological judgements like that. We use words like Should so often similarly i shouldn't slag off philly just cuz everyone from there seems to make music for crashing out to. Was actually just talking to my friend Trevor about how Philly just attracts that sort of Noise/Crashout scene organically and well iron sharpens iron
synths as estrangement device in rock music is like, a well-worn trope. the thing that i find confusing or at least interesting about this little wave is how the tools and effects have drifted. it used to be pretty standard to have a microkorg on stage so the least invested member of the band could play some extra sounds, but the palette really hadn't changed since the instruments - cheap virtual analogue synths - had gotten introduced in the late 80s. by contrast, the sound of shoegaze right now is the same rock production with obnoxiously digital additions riffing on, once again, the heyday of digital synthesis' commercial explosion and democratisation in the late 00s: multi-oscillator stacks, bitcrush, digital editing, clean digital effects chains. i feel weird that the nostalgia bait is moving but even more uncomfortable that rock music's vernacular is following it, because it still fundamentally sounds out of time and place. sometimes, in special moments, that works. 'doorway' is perfect. the alex g and tagabow tracks i love feel like getting stabbed by my teenage anxieties. sometimes it feels far, far worse - just more offensive - than the straight deftones or mbv pastiche that i would still welcome but generally get bored of.
the other side of the equation that bitknot presents is worth talking about, and it is the songwriting approach of these loud guitar choruses. parallelism has made a comeback in a big way: it really is fun and cathartic to slide a single chord shape up and down the neck of a guitar in open tuning. 'dior' is the obvious case here, and it is kinda what makes me hate the track so much. stacked 5ths slid into four positions, over and over. the harmonic sensibility does lean a bit on the same, updated nostalgia content, it's riffing in the same zone as a lot of sampler based music, which uses parallelism as its central means of producing interesting dissonance. that clearly isn't the aim of this stuff though, it is all about maintaining clean enough lines of sight for the distortion to get safely turned up without losing sight of the shape of the song underneath. in the extreme cases, like full body 2, it can approach what patricia taxxon has called, in a podcast we did together and a subsequent video, 'puppyboy music', via the alexander panos record nascent. open, stacked intervals that orbit and cycle and stumble toward the subdominant and yearn, yearn with all their might for a resolution. it's not quite the same thing, puppyboy music requires a songwriter's dogged (lol) FOLKS commitment to consonance above all, whereas guitar parallelism often sacrifices the consonance for the crunch of an unanticipated modulation. what they absolutely share, though, is that raging love for stacked 5ths. i love them too. i adore them in fact. but i feel like they are often a crutch, because you basically cannot fuck them up, and they will sound good no matter how aggressively you distort them.
most scarily of all though, i am fairly convinced that this is the most decisive contribution of 00s electronic music to the new wage of shoegaze. it's a style and sensibility born from a harmonic vocabulary of cool, open consonance that makes for lightweight emotional drama when taken at face value, and tends towards the contemplative and self-absorbed when pushed to its limits. in its most advance form this is 703863435, interrogating those consonant intervals until they shatter by way of their tuning system. in its most fundamental and influential, it is deadmau5.
this isn't to laugh at it or to mock it, faxing berlin is great even if the dude is a shithead and that style is really unfashionable. it's pretty obvious that everyone in edm grew up on this sound. but i think it is important to mark what it has done to songwriting writ large for those who aren't its direct heirs but are clearly influenced by it: it's a move away from functional harmony and towards repetitive tableaus of consistency and relative stability. i love it for its ability to focus attention, whether that be on thunderously wide dynamics, or gripping textures, or the vibrational intensity of intervals themselves. it lends itself very handily both to these kinds of bold and deeply unsubtle stylistic moves, and to formalism as a mode of making them.
what i at least hope to make clear is why the groove is getting worked in this particular way, and why it sets up the drama playing out for me over the past year or so. from oklou to the guitar bands i fled to, everyone is trapped in this little morass together. i'd consider myself grateful for it, cuz it will give me sparkling, focussed moments of brilliance. for what its worth, it kinda failed in its basic objective. some of this music is angry and snarling but pretty much all of it is turned in on itself. a different way to daydream and mope and digest adolescent anxieties. if that is where we always get stuck, so be it.
Andrew: 8110118 - Jiwa Krungu
Probably the sickest thing I got off the most recent Bandcamp Friday? I still need to check out the Jazz stuff I got and the new Alex Zhang Hungtai, But Indonesian tekkers with heavy industrial hues and the kind of moody guitar hewing even I can dig? Sick as hell. The artistic statement 8110118 (Hajar Asyura) puts forth for the album, of information overload in urban Jakarta, feels quite apt, the way these songs fracture and wrap around themselves over their runtimes captures a very rapid urban feeling. The Bandcamp review capsule talks about this album making it's own internal sense after you give yourself over to it, and that just is how you adjust to ones own grid system routines.
To highlight a specific song on the Album, and to shill it to Boo, Jalur Merah really runs a gamut of styles, from an opening industrial pulse to flighty anxious computer ass computer techno in the middle third before collapsing on itself into the sort of dystopic trance we all love Evian Christ for. It is hard to mix this album into playlists or DJ streams because it's so woundly mixed to itself! I don't want to hype this up too much, this probably isn't going to get dozens of spins from me or be some lodestone, but it's just so cool and creative.
Alwin Nikolais - Electronic Dance Music, 1966-1989
Dance is the universal art, the common joy of expression. Those who cannot dance are imprisoned in their own ego and cannot live well with other people and the world. They have lost the tune of life. They only live in cold thinking. Their feelings are deeply repressed while they attach themselves forlornly to the earth.
- Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
Boomkat Runoff? Really? For how much everyone writes for this WYGAS is Boomkat run-on first of all. I've been sitting on that one for two weeks hope it worked out. Anyway clicked on this album because of course the album art spoke to the Miyake enthusiast, and learning Alwin Nikolais bought one of the first Moogs had me fully locked in. When my Mom first tried retiring she moved down to Asheville, North Carolina, and while I learned how truly allergic I am to being outside of cities in my time there, I fucking adored the Moogseum. If I was slightly less self conscious I probably would have bought a synth or five and while the newsletter would lack those classic Ableton updates (don't worry about it), man Moogs are so cool.
As for the album itself, it really does feel incomplete, which is a weird thing to say in a complimentary sense. But I mean that both in the "man I really want to know what the choreography/storytelling around Chimera: Dance I or Aviary: Dance II are" sense but also in how so much of what we could come to recognize as how electronic songs are composed are just not present here, even if the obvious Miles Davis influence is on a lot of the 70's material. I imagine that's part of the joke of the title, nobody would call this EDM if this was not actual music for dance recitals ha.
It's really beautiful at times though, while parts of the album are evolutionary dead ends, a lot of it just touches on what we now recognize as various flavors of ambient, downtempo, and house, with some of the 80's stuff even getting into noise and funk. The sequencing is also fun, it's not purely chronological or grouped by recital, some of the hooks within the album come from a 60's groove sliding into an 80's meltdown, thus is the power of the Moog.
LOUNA w/ Foodman - Room 303 Set
You'll forgive me if I just say YUUUUUUUUUUP to this right? YUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP.
Love Letters & Kasra V at Nowadays
Nowies is selling merch again.... If the blanket was not One Hundred Dollars ($100) I would love to buy it to torture my friends with tbh. I know it's causing some people to have the quarterly existential crisis about The New York Scene, but ehhhh. That's not why there are more finance dickheads there than most months. One of that's just a consequence of how being a popular nightclub works after a while, and two... it's August... just stay up until 3 or wait until it's the fall and all those guys will be gone, have you not experienced this all before? I'm more focused on Love Letters spinning a frankly awesome acid house set, which was a great way to introduce two of my friends to Nowies for the first time in years.
If there's still any doubt that so much of my preambles to my live gigs is because I was on mushrooms again and don't really know how to convey it without feeling stupid, well, yes, obviously, but also I do love providing context, you've met me right? It really was a beautiful Love Letters set though, the 303 squelches just really have been speaking to me these last few months. It would be fun narratively for the newsletter to credit A Guy Called Gerald for that, but it was because this has been an ongoing development for me that I was even at his set and now this one. I think the 303 plays up in space really well, you feel it pierce your body in ways headphones don't really allow, and it was caked in so many other elements of sound my friend Ez could only describe it as finally feeling like he was in an episode of Samurai Jack. (a show I of course have not seen, but I know is well liked? Right?) More euphoric than hypnotic, one of those beautiful opening sets that really makes you feel like the night is only starting at 1 AM. The first part of Kasra's set was fun as well, playing off the acid house with some of the weirder stuff he puts on his NTS show's... but then the curse of Berlin came in.
Part of the reason I don't really see European DJ's at Basement is because when people come here and have to sell Berlin, aka what American's who couldn't find the city on a map think Berghain sounds like from reels and memes, it just becomes so staid and safe. They aren't even playing Maurizio! It just gets really anonymous in a way that isn't even like the bad Berlin techno I like making fun of. It kills me every time, and the emotionality of the mushrooms made me just go sit down for like 20 minutes until I went home ha.
CYBERIA - Breakcore Rave
Yay another venue review.... You all fw me heavy right? Anyway Signal has my favorite sound system in the city, even if it does also just have the bar on the dance floor. Look, it just works, and the lighting and fog make it the perfect place to just be anonymous for hours at a time, and sometimes I need that. Like I said, August decompression. For a place as physically small as it is they get really high profile artists as well, hoping the Actress show ends up there. Anyway, if I can keep it real with all of you I don't actually know all that much about breakcore, but a very internet genre meeting my favorite sound system seems very funny (the mp3's breaking down over the system would make Benjamin and Steyerl proud). I get the gist and I do think anything that works off the Amen break has to be treated seriously, but it is a more casual dalliance. Again makes it perfect for a solo Thursday gig, a sober one at that, and DJ Donna Summer is the wikipedia picture for the genre so off we go.
First DJ was honestly electric, flicking seamlessly between 180BPM remixes of Swizz Beats, Miku, Soulja Boi, Durara, and Dancehall. Everyone is multigenre now sure but not everyone is good at it, and god I hope the DJ was the Cyberia founder and not one of the international guests, it will make me not make any jokes about how Lain is the entire marketing in the future. It was decidedly not hypnotic and my mind never wandered, but the kinetic forced have their own time dilation and dissociative effects.... which made Donna Summer's nearly endless talking a bit, frustrating.
Look again he's the wikipedia picture for the genre so he can do whatever he wants, and learning he brought out his 18 year old son and played one of his songs was sweet (it helped the song was a nice change of pace and not talked over), but man I really don't need to hear about how impressive it is we are all out on a Thursday ever, especially not five times in 20 minutes. Maybe it's me, maybe I am too cynical for the genre's culture, I admittedly do not have a plur bone in my body. Maybe I don't appreciate how lucky it is I can constantly go out on Thursday, I thought I had seeing a friends instagram story about how crazy it was to go to the club 4 days in a row on vacation in Brazil. But to quote Miles Davis "Try taking the fucking horn out of your mouth." Especially because the music being played was still fun! I stayed out an extra half an hour for it! Does anyone have more recs for the genre? It has a lot more of these softer moments than I previously thought, especially for its speed. For as complex as the drum patterns really get I really appreciate how fluidly they can take a backseat for large sections of time, just a very dynamic sound. I think it's cool this kind of stuff just gets nights at pretty established venues like Signal and Paragon to the point it doesn't have to do that awful "omg the internet in real life???" stuff I choose to blame Vice media for from the 2010's.
The day this goes live I will be going to a Footwork night at Public records, which I am hoping also kicks me out of the August malaise and back into normal Andrew mode. I hope to get better at talking about the music on its own terms too but people seem to like the context method so hey, see you all in two weeks no matter what.
