Vol. 7
Reporting live from Basel the WYGAS European tour is underway, wrapping up a business trip that has been one of the more disorganized things I've been a part of since running a midnight college radio show. Being surrounded by Europeans who don't know how to take the train is one of the more enervating things of my life I can tell you that much. At the very least it's given me even more time than usual to listen to music, though a lot of it has been in a quite unfocused way; great way to catch up on recorded sets, less than ideal way to engage with new albums. Anyway October looks quite stacked on the release calendar, not just because of the new Gyrofield album but also hey please get excited for the new Gyrofield album, Gyrofield themed volume coming whenever I can get everyone to lock in, hopefully I will be able to lock back in myself next time.
Also putting the preamble before the images for now since that fixes the embed text being the image ID.
Boo: Maxime Denuc - Club Imperiale
thank you to the seven people who messaged me about this record all in the same week, I was first btw please see attached your great reward: i love this record, this record rocks, this is one of my albums of the year, from minute one this is the highest order of boocanan bait, and i have fallen for it hook line and sinker. get it because the cover is water but it might not have always been the case...
Club Imperiale is largely iterative off denuc's last effort Nachthorn, a record built around hooking up a gigantic church organ in dusseldorf to Max for Live, playing crazy midi arrangements, and then recording the resulting sounds. it was a huge hit but one i bounced off of super hard. this is mostly because i am a little gay fussy emo idiot who hates her synth veggies and often prefers theming and raw affect over construction, and guys who are so european their album artwork's margins accidentally matches up with their bandcamp profile pic are typically pretty tough listens for ol booboo. despite the suggestion of 'lines sketching the outline of an imaginary warehouse", Nachthorn was still so synth-like, so focused on its construction of endless oscillating organ notes all played the same on the different divisions, meant that for me i honestly kinda just got dizzy every time i listened to it. For me the speeds, both in bpm and in how songs transitioned between each other and their own sections were just too all over the place denuc's earlier work mixing baroque and club landed for me before, but again i'll acquiesce that i'm stupid and denuc doesn't have to take opinions of girls like me very seriously. fellow club academics Barker and Lorenzo (who seems to be teasing new shit on ig rn!!!) already think big about club and synths with no caveats, i don't have to wrestle these nutrients out of huge church scales if i don't need to!
fortunately for all parties, Club Imperiale represents a second go at denuc's midi church organ blitz (hell, even the cover is blue with white on top like last time) and with more room to play in the concept it not only totally surpasses Nachthorn but opens its own can of total trance whoop-ass. from minute one it's immediately clear denuc's approach to the organ is totally different - last album, an EXTREMELY overt opener quoting the topline from LSD's classic Hallucinogen might have merely been broadcast to every single division of the instrument at the same time, or with the lowest notes of the choir acting like a fake whoomph-y kick drum, but here the arp is played only through the organ's great, as the choir and swells are now reserved for sustained cymbal rushes of notes to create choirs of pads and bass. it's simpler than what Nachthorn throws at you, sure, but it's also more refined, and there's so much room now in this record for club music's unique resonance & affect to sit properly into denuc's work for it.
hallucinogen is the standout for me but it's all awesome plain and simple. pointier tracks like Everytime & Impreza might be plainer or more platonic shots in the mix but they sound damn good and you know what sometimes plain shots hit the damn mark. ambient selections like The Shore and Plaster Figures push the sustain & rush division technique to dizzying extremes, to the point where i was basically couchlocked while sober trying to figure out what was coming from the organ and what wasn't anymore. No love for La Paloma... ok.... i'm almost 30 so i'm starting to get a big head & act extremely picky about what Speculative Fiction/Elevated Clubdawg/Whatever The Fuck albums pass my smell test these days, especially when you start quoting trance music (throw as many coats-of-arms or whatever on your ig page as you want, nobody is toppling evian's throne) but if you can get me that sober-stoned while i'm trying to do something else, you pass the boo test with easy As, baby
Max: Dear reader, this week you find me ill, crafting a headache-inflected missive from within my crumpled bedsheets /: The WYGAS deadline has passed, and I've resigned myself to the fact that this simply isn't gonna be my week, yet something is calling out to me, a tiny sound sneaking in under the door, wending its way between discarded tissues and slinking its way up to my eardrums. I scrunch my face up for a minute trying to discern what it is before something finally clicks and everything makes sense. It's The Music, and it wants me to write. please note Max said this was going to be short this week
And I have a few ideas stored up, and it's been a good couple of weeks for new music, but I am in no state to do them justice, so instead I'm going to talk about one of life's most simple pleasures: pop music! There have been a couple of early noughties dance pop records that have been on constant rotation this summer and are tied to each other in my mind. I want to share a track from each of them, straight from my notes app to you!
Both of these records were the fourth put out by the singer, though they were at different points in their careers, one at the peak of her powers and one just coming into her own. Both of them were engaging with similar sounds of the era, even though they were on different sides of the planet. There’s a funny kind of symmetry to it, like a scratched up mirror- you can make out the reflection but know there's something different in there.
Reni Jusis - Wynurzam się
The first of these records is Reni Jusis' Trans Misja. Jusis is a Polish pop singer who was notable for taking on heavy composition and production responsibilities in her work, whose sound had already changed dramatically across the early years of her career. Her first couple of records were built on R&B and Neo Soul sounds, before third album Elektrenika saw a striking pivot towards bouncy house pop. Trans Misja (literally "Trance Mission") pushes this transformation further, presenting an assured, expansive journey through dance music past and present.
The album slipped back into my rotation this year following the lauded release of a very similar record, Madonna's Confessions II, likely thing for you and it feels like they share a very similar musical mission, equal parts excavation and celebration, flipping between levity, euphoria and singleminded head-down dancing. I like Madonna's record but prefer what Jusis is doing here (two years before the superb original "Confessions of a Dancefloor", it should be said), and I think a lot of that is in the way she plays with contemporary sounds rather than simply looking back at the past, slotting sleek synthpop ballads and modern trance in between kooky analog electro, acid house and "America: What Time is Love?"-style ragers.
Of course it helps that this is just an extremely confident dance record, and opening track "Wynurzam się" might be the perfect example of this. At 9 minutes in length, it really kicks this record off with a bang... except actually no, it kind of doesn't? It's a wonderful progressive trance track, opening with a rumbling gong typical of the time before slowly building itself up. Jusis seems intent to put her production first, her voice doesn’t enter until over 4 minutes in and when it does arrive it's not in the form of the soaring euphoric melodies I associate with the poppier side of Eurotrance at the time, but a calm, lilting tone entering the mix. Everything feels so controlled, so deliberate, and whilst I typically love this sound to be more maximalist (I'll write about Oklou one day...), here it feels so elegant and true to a sound I love that I just get swept away regardless, the scene set for the trove of dance pop riches awaiting me in the rest of the record.
Ayumi Hamasaki - Connected
A year and a half before this record dropped, "Empress of Pop" Ayumi Hamasaki ushered in 2002 with her own 4th record, wherein she similarly handled the bulk of the composition on top of her trademark lyrics, working alongside long time producer Max Matsuura and a huge cast of musicians and engineers. "I Am..." is a fascinating record, not least because it showed an artist on top of the world surveying her kingdom and deciding she wanted to do MORE. Now Ayu probably needs no introduction (if she does, you're missing out!), but it's worth hammering home that at this point in time she was releasing around 7 singles a year, with the bulk of them reaching the top of the charts. It would have been easy to just keep doing the same thing but, ever restless, her fourth album was her most ambitious yet.
In the same way that "Trans Misja" presents a grab bag of sounds from the dance music canon, "I Am..." reads like a laundry list of the coolest rock and dance sounds of early 00s J-pop. Some recently established, some still in gestation, Ayu was feeling greedy and wanted to try her hand at everything, and if makes for a document that feels bigger than itself, intensely evocative of an era I was there for but can't really remember. For the most part we are treated to either synth-laden rock ballads that could soundtrack all the rolling credits sequences the year would have to offer, or cool rock-tinged dance tracks. All of it feels grand and loaded, as if the world is ending around this record- Ayu has stated the heavy influence of the September 11 attacks on this record, so maybe it was... First 9/11 reference on the newsletter and it isn't even from an American
"Connected" stands apart from a lot of the record. For one it is the most straightforward dance track on the album, but perhaps more significantly it is a collaboration with trance DJ Ferry Corsten, an artist who was similarly at the peak of his powers in a different scene on the other side of the world. It feels like a tribute to some of the tracks that Hamasaki made her name on ("Fly high", the Eurobeat remix albums, etc), but at a new fidelity, with a new urgency. As a counterpoint to the lightness of some of those tracks, here her voice sounds stronger than ever yet also more enveloped by the music, more desperate as she makes pleas to another person, tells stories of connections made and lost, perhaps forever. It is a track that ends too soon, crying out for an extended cut, but while it lasts it is a blast of energy and emotion, straining to the point of breaking in a way that feels totally opposite to "Wynurzam się", especially as we reach the electric chorus.
So there we have it, two great tracks from two great records from two great pop auteurs, and I'm feeling slightly better for having spent time with them rather than lying on the sofa failing to make chesnaught work. Now all that's left is to convince our lovely, gracious let's calm down editor to let me submit an hour before release, oh and get better for next time. See you then!
Iris: glob - glob deejay
Gonna be a short and sweet one from me this volume, just like the album I’m covering. I know very little about Stone Burletson (who puts out music as simply “Stone”) besides the fact that he pops up regularly in other stuff I like. Typically he makes loose, seemingly burial and Tycho inspired trip-hop type shit that shows up in mixes on lot, nts, etc. he spins on the lot as well But last night my friend sent me the album he dropped in march under a new name: Glob Deejay. naff is one of the more fun things going in Montreal imo, though I had missed this
I put it on and listened to it through, and then I ran it back two more times. It’s lovely! A bright pink cute cute cute dub the album that reminds me of a personal favorite of last year, namely Oli XL’s Lick The Lens. Something about fall puts me in the mood for bubbly melancholy tunes that you can just kind of unspool to while the sun starts to fade earlier and you try to make the most of what daylight you have left. But enough from me, just check out this track and if you like it enough check out the rest… when you get a second.
Liv:
Introducing SSENSE CITY GUIDES. First stop: Paris. We decided to solicit the most slept-on recommendations from a few of our favorite people with exquisite taste—including the designers who will be presenting at Salon des Refusés, a one-day showroom presented by SSENSE. pic.twitter.com/O4Yc6BcF0G
— SSENSE (@SSENSE) September 28, 2026
she did put the umru Popstar flip in a group chat in the middle of the night but deadlines are final
Graham: Chat Pile - Who Loves The Sun
I was prepared to completely reiterate what I said last time about my nigh obsessive compulsive listening habits and how the new Chat Pile makes me want to run over some with a car and/or lay down on the floor in my unfinished basement but I did manage to not just listen to one thing for a month. It's important to remind people not all chat pile fans are bald
I started to panic reading through the last few weeks as I began to remember how when I worked at the alternative comic book store, we would all take turns putting on music. We all had pretty diverse tastes-a vivid memory is synching up with my friend on the other floor to play Frankie Teardrop for half an hour during a 75% off sale-or my other friend getting confused looks when putting on the more, let’s say, “open ended” Sun Araw albums. When I started there, they all told me about how there used to be one employee who would just put on video game soundtracks, and how they all seemed ready to kill him with a hammer. I don’t want to be the “putting on soundtracks” guy of da blog. I mean I imagine the pitchfork Mario reviews do big numbers How awful. Have you guys heard the new Ace Combat soundtrack? Uh anyways 80 dollar vinyl release lmaooooooo
BATHROOM is the exciting new music project from some close personal computer (and real life) friends Tom and Gil. (We’re crossing several friendship barriers here as Tom has done the music for several projects that friend of the blog Degen has done art for. Wow!) Wow!! Both are experienced multi-hyphenates, and while I would hate to play favourites, this is certainly up there in their individual canons. There’s a little bit of everything in the 4 tracks on “Welcome to The Bathroom” (recorded live and IN the bathroom)-plunderphonics, loops, muzak, noise, lo-fi, samples-but it feels nearsighted of me to simply point to what the music may “remind” someone of. we fuck with Kosmische Musik heavy This isn’t music that “defies description” (another shorthanded way of glossing over something), it’s music that is uniquely theirs, their individual years of experience colliding into something that is both a culmination of respective projects, and an still to be explored new frontier.
Finally, here’s a song Tom turned me on to via an Instagram story. Trying to find anything about Khmer Rouge or the “Another Bouquet on the Grave of Free Enterprise” comp felt like what I imagine seeing the Nurse With Wound list back in the day must have been like. Fun!
I really wanted to write about Coltrane Mr. C.... but I just couldn't do it justice. There's already so much written about Coltrane that's written with such conviction that weight that I just felt overwhelmed by the task, though I did listen to Sun Ship about a dozen times for his birthday. Veering away from the sort of information paralysis I was dealing with Trane, I chose Ephemera mostly from not knowing who Fergus Jones was at all until Andrew put his NTS show in the chat since it opened with Ishmael Reed. Fun set and seems like a fun label he's got going on with FELT, been meaning to check out Vincent Yuen Ruiz next time I need a dose of Scandinavian Jazz.
To be up front I think this album would just be better if there were no vocals, no offense to James K and Laila Sakini whose credits speak for themselves, but Heima and Can't Touch feel so constricted by needing to synch up to their performances. I am willing to concede that might be a me thing though, I feel that constriction with a lot of trip hop tinged tracks one day I will have a trip hop opinion :) but when I hear It Should Be (Free) I just wish the whole thing had the atmosphere of that final three song run on the album, which coincidentally feels like a prologue to 2026's dubbed out ambibliss sonic palette. Seeing the aforementioned James K and Huerco S features (and being amused at it being Huerco and not Loidis alias) and ending the album with Koreless does make me feel like this is a pretty nice blindspot to be filling out, and I think the exercise itself in just going into an album with the only context being "ah I liked the NTS show" is gonna help keep me young it's also just so much fun, it can be exhausting trying to preload all the context around something before ever engaging with the work itself. but we all love me The flip side is that now all I can really say is Heap's very y2k spacey bouncey techno is a really fun change of space to set up the final three runs, and not go into the Fergus milieu and process as it were, but what's fun about regularly doing this is that I don't need to, and I like using this as an excuse to experiment with different ways to get into music. Still think my favorite Atobe is Heat by the way crazy thing to say but Heat is an amazing album all the same
Alexis: ODAE - MOIREMOIREMOIRE
ok so this one is entirely biased and personal. oh no i have a thank you on the bandcamp page and there are chord voicings and drum patterns across the record that i think of as 'mine'. i am so delighted i got to help comment on, refine, just celebrate the album as it was being made, as a doctor of editing and that doesn't remotely change the fact that it's one of the best things i've heard in so long and i love it with all my heart and i will be shilling it for all time.
when ruairi (ODAE) was running the promo copy past me, they were focussed on the idea that they had been writing songs and then wrecking them. that is transparently one of the modes that MOIREMOIREMOIRE works in, by presenting a set of impeccably tidy and cute pop songs that get exploded by no-input mixer noise and violent clipping distortion. it fits, it makes sense, and the pervasive air of tenuousness, of a liability to collapse, is so finely tuned. my suggestion was to consider alternatively how much of the record is made by starting from noise and then carving away until something recognisable appears. that's another way of spelling out the technical process that gives the album its sound: through some fancy slew clipping buss processing techniques about which i have read and reread a countless supply of messages about and have still barely internalised, the effect produced is a kind of aural pedestal. layers upon layers of noise get squished together into a surging, roiling ocean over which a few parts, usually the vocals, slide in shocking serenity. i basically have never heard a record that is simultaneously this dense and this clear, it is kinda terrifying to be honest. the best approximation i have for this kind of listening is when i go back onto a dancefloor late in the night from a break in the smoking area and the tinnitus has already kicked in, and my inner ear and the punch of the kick start having a fistfight for my attention. she's not rocking her custom earbuds omg the overall picture is a heavy dense groove but all the intensity is placed right up at what seems to be the eardrum rather than at the speaker stacks in the corner of the room. everything is in the foreground at once, everything is lit up, everything speaks loudly and at the same time and makes itself heard clearly.
the mixing and soundstage alone is enough to make the record special, but i want to celebrate it as a deeply flippant, silly and goofy piece of work too. much of the sound design is affectionately square and retrograde, much of the percussion is uncomfortably squelchy and springy, it splits the difference between SOPHIE/autechre physical modelling flanger effects and bbc radiophonic workshop sonic inventory for a kid's show. all the serious moments arrive obliquely, cut across by these watercolour washes of tailored noise and delay tails, and all have a kind of revelatory quality, where they bloom for a moment and then get swallowed again, as if they're too blindingly exposing or embarrassing to be allowed to stick around. 'caulk' is my track of the year right now, and i doggedly want to call it austere even as it is completely filled with those chunky, crunchy splashes of percussion and distressed, flailing synths crowding into the space. church hymnal in an earthquake. it takes a long time for all of its pieces to resolve into something beautiful, and then it is briefly achingly beautiful, in the vain of the best imogen heap songs, and then it decoheres, and then i am stuck in the wreckage with the flavour of something beautiful licking at the back of my throat and an incessant need to recapture it. the next track is a piece of bullshit (said with deep affection) and its the best, most affronting and audacious track ordering decision possible.
the state of in-process collapse that pretty much all of the tracks evidence is not one i want to readily psychologise, even if it is pretty plain to me that i can hear how gay, or furry, or maybe just mad and strange a project it is in this decayed state. i think of the artists it most forcefully brings to mind - baths, frou frou, bibio, matmos - and they run the full gamut of no-vocal opaque sonic barrage, to pop abstraction, to desperate confessional. i think there could be confessions on this record, but im not sure. they're too private, they're too turned inward, maybe disinterested in the listener but i think more just delighted in the half-space of subterfuge and sneak peaks. the one i am resisting is animal collective, cuz i have a deeply personal vendetta against animal collective and i dont wanna make ruairi mad lol. it is important to me that the confidence and stridence of this record not be mistaken for clarity or legibility. it is confounding, it misdirects, there is always somewhere else to go. notably, it often wants to return to the DAW. 'nine pretty lives' samples the process of comping and tuning vocals, up until the scrubbing slips into the kind of skipping cadence that launches back into the opener. it hardly comes across as clever clever, more as just a very direct attempt to dispel the idea that whatever reached the final product is a unified or directive statement. so this brave little record is also so very worried about its own understanding, it has to demonstrate the happy accidents that compose it. hearing those distended vowels does the demystifying job it needs to.
i have had a moiré pattern as the header image for my private account for as long as its existed. it is, on every digital platform, annoying and slightly exhausting and hard to keep in focus. painting a whole artistic project in moirés, owning that silly petulant impulse so fully, is a thing i find so alluring, almost scandalous. how dare you be so silly and loud and brash and self-absorbed. how dare you not justify why you deserve to act out like this. how dare you sit in your own emotional epicycles convinced that, just because they are beautiful and yours, someone might want to spend time living inside them too. what joy that in those orbits something can grow and die and grow again without rhyme or reason at all.
Claire: magic red kids - new melancholy etiquette
so i would like to preface that my writing for this volume of our beloved newsblogletterwebring well newsletter is motivated by spite. i was originally gonna listen to some miscellaneous hardcore comps linked by a friend of mine. but i felt myself being pulled to shoegaze instead lol. and then this was crystallized by seeing an absolutely asinine opinion about shoegaze on the internet: "shoegaze is a solved genre and no one shouldve released any of it after loveless". it's pretty funny we still get this after the third round of shoe gaze revivalism tbh this idea is so fucking stupid that if you genuinely believe it i hope you die. loveless is a good album! really good! if its your top shoegaze album i believe you! but if you wanna live in a world without Yukari Telepath, or Velocity : Design : Comfort, or hell even like the most median Sadness track of all time then i will grant you this wish when i bisect you with my cursed demon blade and send you to hell forever. Ladies and Gentlemen, we are Floating in Space is my answer fwiw
which brings us to this album (because its shoegaze if you didnt catch on), oh ok which also could not exist in the time of loveless. not only because the sound has obviously evolved and matured in the decades since, though obviously it has. but also because its touhou music baby!!!!!!!!! and vocal synth baby!!!!!!!!! i cant just say vocaloid because even though its mostly gumi and teto because there are several tracks by a dreamtronics vocal synth called mai. dreamtronics are really interesting in this space from my very cursory research, in that they refuse to market their vocal synths with anime girls and instead opt to visually represent them as their names or parts of their names as stylized logos. this is really artsy-fartsy in a way i respect even if i also want to say "just put the anime girl in the bag man". unfortunately the 2020's has shown us that if you are real head now you kinda have to obfuscate the anime lady tbh but anyways! this is an experience that could only exist long long after loveless.
but is it as good as loveless? well, no. this is a solo musician (who goes by Little Tanioka on a personal level since they have multiple projects) working mostly digitally. its constrained in some ways! but we shouldnt expect everything to be in contention with a literal top 5 album of all time in a movement lol. and this is good! i say this as a vocal synth enjoyer but i do always have the nagging thought that products that are especially designed and envisioned for their use in popular music are really up to the task of a genre that's even a little out of that sphere. and like every time i have this thought i am proven wrong, as here, so maybe i should stop having it. and also maybe ill link some watashi no koko in a future newsblogletterwebring newsletter release hehehe...
but yeah, its a fun album. the vocal synths are used really well (and i may have to keep an eye out for anyone else using mai in the future...) and the touhou stuff is at a really good background level so it's present for the fans but not intrusive for the non-fans. you can listen to 白いナイフ for example and not even realize its a touhou song unless you know what to listen for. and in an act of radical kindness, i will not tell you which touhou song it is. owned. get owned. the actual shoegaze is also quite nice. it is not blow my socks off Sadness level or anything to be clear. but it hits right man! i get the sense Little Tanioka is trying to find their place in the world, in the scene. and im really interested in seeing where they take this from here...
Magnolia Cacophony - traceback (most recent call last)
...so of course i went and listened to a second album lol. this one is just vocaloid! (no mai here) and just shoegaze! ( no touhou here) and also not a solo project, with Little Tanioka mostly handling lyrics and composition. and i like this one too! there's a sense i get from some producers and other people who actually make music that they feel like touhou music is a way to have a crutch. after all, now you dont have to write a melody. i think those of us with real ball knowledge know that's not the case, but even if you dont have real ball knowledge this should make that clear! i think these two albums stand alongside each other extremely well. they are clearly interrelated and demonstrate a high level of appreciation for the space being worked in. thats awesome! btw im trying a new thing where if its not a comp album i highlight some standout tracks. Columbia Records in the 1960's i always truly hope that you listen to every second of what ends up on this blog but even i dont actually manage that so i will cut you some slack. for this one, the middle section of 最終処分場 into Forgetful Angel whips. thats what im talking about baby. it's exactly what you want. someone should tell these teto and gumi ladies they can sing! and tell me where to hear more shoegaze, thanks in advance #smiling
Emi:
Andrew: Oren Ambarchi - Cooked
Ok. So. This is one of the worst album covers I have ever seen for music explicitly targeted at adults. Jeff Koons comparisons almost make me feel sympathic to Koons. Even beyond the atrocious little doll, the typeface sucks. Serpentine, Ambarchi's August album, had normal art! His next album, out on Gyrofield day (October 23rd), just uses a picture of Kazuko Miyamoto's Untitled as its art. This seemingly is a one time affair with true dogshit art and I would love to know why it was chosen and how the collaborating musicians feel about it, because I can tell you already from some early recs it makes people not want to listen.
Once you hear Eiko Ishibashi's piano play off Jim O'Rourke's synths once more though (check out Pareidolia when you get a second) the ugly ass demon doll leaves your mind, letting you focus on the real star of Hidden Tableau, Konrad Sprenger's haunted synthesized voice. Recreating vocaloid's from first principles works almost like gauze on this very psychy jazz piece, everything still flows but feels very sectioned apart by the... howls? exhales? However you want to describe the voice. It's really quite affecting, giving the song a sense of place I normally don't associate with Jazz but it works so effortlessly. the section from roughly the 10th to 12th minute you hear a really mesmerizing suite that's compellingly fresh, there's still so much stuff we can do to make music. Sleight Of Hand is more of a proper showcase of Ambarchi and his guitar+stuff prowess, and features of section of playing sheets that feels as if the release was intentionally timed to be a tribute to Coltrane, but it does take me a few minutes to stop thinking about Tableau whenever it starts up, which thankfully you get that space on a 20 minute track.
Cooked aside, Ambarchi has been one of the big personal revelations of the year. Before this year I knew about the Ghosted releases and had probably spun Shebang (hm ok maybe he does just love terrible album art) a few times but until I made contact with Ricky V's Hubris variation I was mostly familiar with him as a bit of trivia, the Australian guy who had dropped the drums for the guitar after getting really into Keiji Haino. I still need to really do a deep dive in general but that might need to be a 2027 Journey for reasons that are about to become obvious.
Batu - Lot Radio Set
Exhale was pretty fun, wish I had spun it more this summer, and on a very sleep deprived morning in Venice I peeped the set since a friend (Hi Yukari) dropped it in the group chat while I was waiting for the humble Venetian boat bus..... fuck me Kodomotachi really might be the best song of all time. In general a really nice post festival set (WYGAS Making Time meetup 2029 will be great) but hearing Kodomotachi on a boat as the sun is sparkling off the water on maybe 2 hours of sleep was such a profound moment, makes it worth how much I really did not like most of the main pavilions for the biennale.
Susumu Yokota - The General Concept
I think one of the first times I talked to Max and Alexis about music in our group DM was complaining Fallen Angel had been taken off Apple Music. Obviously I imagine anyone who is reading this has a particular way they like accessing Soulseek, but we all know I love complaining. Anyway Prism might be my favorite Yokota alias with how fun his even more nocturnal spin on deep house could have been. I can only imagine how much fun Yokota's take on our current wave of dub techno would be.
Anyway for fans of my Miles Davis/Hosono deep dives, we are back baby, I wanted to put this off until my Skintone collection vinyls showed up in the mail but between underestimating how evil customs is (allegedly it's finally available for me to pick up when I get home after ordering it in July) and how much that Batu flip blew me away... we are back. I really am running out of time to get the newsletter out on time, a prison of my own making I know, so I guess this will really be the announcement of what one of the albums for the next few volumes will be, an obvious focus on the stuff covered in Skintone but we WILL be discussing the Frankfurt Tokyo Connection.
Yokota in general feels like his renown has faded a bit in the 2020's, which is fair in a lot of respects, he has been dead over a decade and again not everything is on streaming, even with a remaster Acid Mt. Fuji remains in 16 Euro Bandcamp only zone, but he really is one of my guys, and after a few years of mostly replaying the hits while high it's been an exciting revisit already. Sakura remains the titan of course, but goddamn the Latin House of Will fits so perfectly into 2026, Symbol's classical samples pair so well with one of my favorite albums of the year in Seeing is Forgetting, he really just unlocks music for me. I realize I can get very grandiose and sentimental in these write ups, because it's fun to be that way about music and we all agree I need some way to express positivity, but Yokota, Hosono, Dilla, and [ignoring Kanye sized hole here] Ghostface in terms of learning what music is for me as a dipshit teenager intimidated by Jazz.
Anyway getting late here, see you all next time, will finally return to the wall of text style releases.
