Vol. 8
Sorry for being a day late this go round, I put the wrong deadline day in the group chat and that's just on me.
You would think this extra day would grant me the time to come up with a more compelling than usual introduction but I just got nothing in me on that front ha. Cool stuff down the road I promise? Anyway please check out this beat on Boo's "submission"
Boo:
For readability testing out editors notes being in red
Emi: Gucci Mane - So Icey Boy (Disc 1)
There's an advert produced for Sprite back in like 2009 that I'm sure you've seen. From my memory, the rapper Drake the gambling executive? takes a sip of the aforementioned lemon-lime drink and is engulfed by this striking visual image: his skin fragments into puzzle pieces, resembling the cracked flats of land browbeaten by the sun that you see in parts of the world affected by droughts. The pieces convulse, split, intertwine, extend and retract in rhythm; Drake is no longer man but a locus of power shedding his meagre skin suit in service of great cosmic rhythms. Of course, Drake can't do that in real life, nor does Sprite grant those properties. But when I sit and I think about the Gucci Mane that recorded So Icey Boy, I picture him being able to do that thing. He's kind of like a steel golem, I suppose? Like Karn from Magic: The Gathering. He brought us this disc from his strange homeworld, disc deftly pinched between his iron thumb and forefinger in a pose of oblation; perhaps he removed it earlier from a storage bay in his torso. is this why he got worse at rapping when he got skinny? Picture that image, picture his metal form gliding through space, arms by his side, starlight clinging to chrome, and close your eye and listen to track 8 (Get High). tell me I'm wrong.
The album cover is him in some kind of mystical emerald mine. There's stalactites of grey rock drooping down in the background while he poses in front of these large green crystals that he is presumably about to harvest. If I had to guess, he will then go on to use them to power his space armour, or trade them for some co-ordinates to an ancient temple. The whole tape is sci-fi themed in a sort of half-hearted, earnest style - the most famous song on the project is probably My Plug is an Alien; the title asserts that his plug is an alien but in the actual song he errs on the side of caution, stating that he just thinks his plug is one. And then the DJ (Supastar J. Kwik) starts naming a bunch of different sci-fi movies he's seen at the end of it and suggesting that if you mess with Gucci you will have a 'close encounter of the third kind'. the kind of shit you talk about when your Chevy is 100 degrees to be fair
It's really goofy and endearing, devoid of the seriousness and aggression all over his breakout project Chicken Talk, or the vitriol against his contemporaries on Bird Flu. Zaytoven is on almost every track, doing the classic piano/organ trap beats you already know him for. He cut his teeth on these kinds of Gucci projects. Gucci is mostly just fucking around, he's moving like Shrek. Shrek stole his flow lets be real He says he stunk up the booth like he farted in it and his car has a pork chop paint job and his weed reeks like funyuns. There are some misses, obviously, but it's just a great time. Man, things were so different. The DJ just reads out his whole fucking phone number like he's Mike Jones in the middle of a track and tells people to call him and say hi and then says "yes it's my real number". Something really did shift at one point. Gucci and J Kwik dropped a disc 2 to this tape later in the same year, but it's not as good. Although he is harvesting a different kind of crystal on the cover for that one. Something to keep in mind.
Liv: Fumio Miyashita - White Morning
Andrew I don't know if SSENSE jokes is going to end well for you yeah but editing protects me. but that the concept of SSENSE travel agency gagged me. Thankfully none of the places I go while out here were caught in the crossfire, but my music ecosystem has been in flux between the runways, where the music has been better than usual, and parties, where it's been so much worse, It's so nice this newsletter gives me an environment where I am not the biggest yuppie of the group tbh so my only real time in control has been between 5-10AM. I would like to say I have been catching up on that Denuc record! It's great! Perfect leaving a party I'm working music, really special, but most of what I have been listening to have been ambient compilations (@0 my beloved) and new age, and in honor of buying the vinyl at Yoyaku you LOVE whoever put you on Yoyaku I'll talk about White Morning this go round.
With the record being two sidelong pieces a lot of the basics of how I talk about music go out the window, which is an easy way to say why instead of bringing up favorite tracks I just talked about SSENSE. It's really just a record to heal to, such a stated intent from the record that it's both a tag on Miyashita's Bandcamp page and the world "healing" is stamped on the vinyl sleeve. See The Light was already a highlight of the Kankyo Ongaku anthology for me, but this uncut version, more than tripling in size from 7 to 25 minutes, gave me such a beautiful sunrise. I hope I'll think about it whenever I hear the song now. I would hope anyone reading this loves when Ambient releases turn the genre name into one of music's biggest misnomers with all the dextrous tricks and ripples Sakura write up coming soon! but that new age shit that lefts your mind just drift really does do you some good to listen to every so often. There's a lot of tonal shifts in See the Light and I forget every one of them after it all ends, I tried taking notes the last time I listened and forgot to take any after the first few minutes, just makes me feel like I'm floating. Music to float in a hot spring to, or based on how fast I am writing my writeup this time, music to write to.
The second song on the album, morning prayer is even more gauzy and peaceful, though the inclusion of a synth chime works as a really nice call to attention in case you get a bit too unmoored, like a lot of the music that plays when I get acupuncture. It is only in editing this I've realized all my descriptions of the sounds are based on stuff I do to relax but again, healing is the goal and it works! Look, you know how a lot of New Age stuff sounds, slow synths that invent their own bass from a sub 70 BPM, very deep mixing with occasional spacial audio, and a respect for cheap headphones. White Morning's is not reinventing the wheel for the genre, nor is it trying to. It's old enough that it probably helped build the wheels for the genre! But this one's really nice, a hard thing to talk about but something I really want to have playing while talking to people over tea. Andrew we are going to Kettl when I get back right just bought some more genmaicha there today twin...
Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the way that “podcast” is a made up word. And yeah yeah I know all words are made up, but it struck me out of nowhere that it is a really bizarre, barefacedly product placement-ass word that we all just seem to take for granted these days. Looking into it, I was surprised to find that whilst it is obviously a portmanteau of “iPod” and “broadcast”, the Apple “braintrust” didn’t actually have anything to do with pushing it out into the world. No, it turns out the word was actually coined by a Guardian journalist and they simply latched on and helped it skyrocket- sometimes the money makes itself I guess.
This got me thinking about other oddities of this kind, and my eye was drawn to Jobs and his boys once more as I considered the word “shuffle”. My initial gut reaction was that this had to be an Apple-ism, a folksy word with a cute little icon that somehow sits alongside cold, imperative tenets of music playback like “play”, “stop” and “rewind”. It turns out it is a similar story, the concept of “shuffling” music has been around for a long time, with functionality implemented on many CD players from as early as the 80s, though I struggled to pin down when exactly it became the go-to term. Of course the iTunes era put all of this beyond doubt. Even a few years before the Ronseal-style device launched, I expected Alexis to have the first Ronseal drop on the newsletter omg digital music libraries had truly been thrust upon mainstream audiences, offering a new listening experience that was going to change everything. As I dug through this stuff, it occurred to me that this free association might not have been as “free” as I’d initially thought bro exists in a sociiety (though if I’m a prisoner it’s only of my own mind): these past couple of weeks it turns out I’ve actually been shuffling an awful lot.
The London Film Festival is currently in full flow, a festival-circuit mop-up event which is nonetheless the first chance to see lots of good new films in the UK and typically has a pretty deep lineup of films that you won’t easily get the chance to see theatrically again. The festival has been a part of my calendar for as long as I’ve lived in this city (this is the 12th edition I’ve attended, yikes!), and life becomes busy and exciting and exhausting for the couple of weeks that it’s on. One of the #coldhardtruths about this is that music tends to fall to the wayside a little bit as the event takes over my life, along with a lot of other things for that matter. Well that’s not strictly true, there are lots of moments to listen to music during the fest but very few opportunities to give it the undivided attention it yearns for (and for the record if that makes music sounds needy I am happy to retract it; cinema is clearly the demanding one in this relationship, but what can I say you do what you can for love and sometimes you need to rationalise it!). Racing through Leicester Square traffic from one screen to another; eating a burger (this one’s for our American audience <3) tell us more about the burger as you see the minutes til your next film counting down wayyy too fast; waiting for a mate to arrive from across town and catch up on what you’ve been up to- yes these are all chances to stick a headphone in but they are fleeting and oft-disrupted.
I hope I’m not speaking out of turn when I say that I think the majority of WYGAS contributors are the type of old-school music lovers who still like listening to their music the old-fashioned way, as records front-to-back, or at least find themselves doing it roughly as much as not. well you see in the grand history of music the album itself is pretty new, but yes it's the ideal format. Earlier on when discussing shuffling, I suppose I talked around the fact that what people shuffle the most these days are “playlists”, another amusing compound word that has come a long way from its radio station origins, also given new life by the digital music revolution. In my experience at least, playlists originally served the role of digital mixtapes (sans the CD), but over time have had their clarity of purpose somewhat eroded, more often taking the shape of shaggy music landfill- a truckload of songs you like chucked into a big heap that can be pulled from at your leisure. such a nice way to say another way Spotify and the industry has worked to remove music from being viewed as an art form As the owner of some huge, unkempt playlists of my own, I don’t mean to paint this as some objective bad, it can be great when you don’t have much time to dedicate or are after more of a vibe my songs to be high too playlist is back up over 1200 than a specific artist, but the ubiquity of the playlist does lend a certain romance to engaging with music in its originally presented form, and albums still frequently take that role. I would go as far to say that my personal listening is almost exclusively made up of front-to-back albums and large shuffled playlists with the odd inclusion of carefully picked out singles and curated mixes, but this year during LFF I’ve been relying on none of these..
I had wanted to check out this new compilation from mappa (not those guys). “Synthetic Water Music” is a hell of a title but I found myself sitting on my hands. The album is a 51-track behemoth of mostly ambient work inspired by our buddies H, 2 and O, but it’s not on streaming services. This isn’t so much of an issue at my laptop, but despite being enough of an iPod classic kid that I still have my 10-years busted old one knocking around as a memento, I’ve never really worked out a good portable local music set-up since (yeah Andrew, I know this is embarrassing to admit). genuinely the best part of apple music is how easy to is to add offline files tbh Buying and downloading this record confronted me with this problem, and part of me had already half-resigned it to being a reminder note that was eventually going to be filed away unresolved. On some days this would have been exactly the way it played out, but with the festival on I wanted to find time for music somewhere, and this time rather than simply settling for a playlist I decided to try living with the problem, sticking it on my phone’s media player to see what happened. The outcome was that I had the music on me, but totally unsorted and kind of hard to parse. It’s a compilation though right, maybe that’s fine? I decided that each time I had a moment for music I would simply click a random song and shuffle from that point onwards, and it turned out to be a perfect match to the choppy nature of film festival listening habits. Bro went Chris Marker mode?
I have no idea how much of this record I’ve listened to, maybe 80%? I have no idea which specific songs I’ve listened to or which musicians made them. I don’t even know which ones are my favourites, hell I don’t even know if I’d remember them if I listened through it front to back. You'd know if you had heard Legume Hydrosonics It’s a form of engagement that feels counter to a lot of the contextual scaffolding I love with my music, yet despite all of this I’ve loved it. Listening in this way has meant that no amount of time is too short to enjoy some music, Bro had a second and every time a track ticks over there’s a sense of anticipation, whilst it has never felt like an empty calories playlist. And well, more importantly than any of that, the music itself has been fantastic.
This record is technically the second in a 3-part series the label is putting out, the first being Synthetic Bird Music. That record had a range of ambient tracks with a lot of synths approximating birdsong (not to mention some that sounded like bugs and monkeys too!); it was a good record but the new one feels so much more ambitious and unconstrained. The fundamental truth is that as much as I love em, birds aren’t as integral or ever-present in our lives as water, and that makes for lots of opportunities to do inventive work around the theme.
Sometimes it sounds the way you might expect, idyllic synths imitating water droplets splashing into pools, but over 50 tracks there is a LOT of room for surprises. There are tracks that sound like when the dentist has the suction tube in your mouth, like ice being stirred furiously around a glass, like being sat and the controls of a submarine. There are tracks that evoke walking through a cave system, having an MRI scan, tumbling down someone's throat after having been sipped from a glass. And I want to make clear that whilst that all sounds very reconstructive, the failing here is more in my ability to interpret. The material here is often allusory, yes, and sometimes very specific in what it is trying to create, but a lot of the time the interpretations feel more like they come from within, more driven by emotive response to the music than by it being some kind of perfect facsimile.
It isn't all synths either, on one walk over the bridge from Embankment to Waterloo a striking tune with densely layered acapella vocals appeared out of the mist, like sirens luring me from a rock. Sometimes I have no idea what the sounds are and how they’ve been produced, unsure whether it is foley-style sampling, wrung from a laptop or something else entirely. Other times, the sounds are familiar and then transmogrify into something abstract or alien. I just loved the experience of taking each one as it came, just as likely to encounter something disconcerting and strange as I was a gorgeous piece to slip into.
One thing I admire about some friends is their ability to listen to a record and really dig into the minutiae, unpicking lyrics, production choices, using every little detail to inform their understanding and enjoyment of a work and relate it to the world around them. When I see Alexis I could listen to her talk about music endlessly for this sort of insight that feels both personal and precise. It makes me think about not only the different ways we sequence and organise our listening, but also the different ways we can actually listen. Allowing myself access to small slices of this album at a time left me wanting to make the most of that time, somehow be deliberate about it even though I was doing it without context. I feel like I have experienced a lot, felt a lot, even if I have little material evidence of it. I’ve come away feeling a little less scared of some daunting works and a little less reverent of any self-imposed music listening rules. It was a perfect album for it sure, but it won’t be the only one. So yeah, give the record a chance, you won’t regret it, but alternatively pick up something else you’ve been putting off, and see if there’s a way you can give it some time, it might be more worth it than you think. Now time for a glass of water… not milk?
Yeah I was absolutely not going to listen to Cooked until I saw the collaborator's list. And then I made the mistake of who made that cover art and it's just got me fucked up man. That's just not ok. I was so ready to write about the Vincent Yuen Ruiz album but I just can't talk about Jazz right now. What sucks is that Cooked is really incredible yuuuuup so I am gonna have to keep seeing that shit. Footwork it is then, with one of my favorite albums this year and definite favorite opening three tracks.
First of all I think you should watch the visualizer, I know 40 year old geeking over a YouTube video made by someone under 25 reeks of digital humanities it's the reverse, referencing digital humanities reeks of 40 year olds but what a cool way to jump into the world of username. I'd heard this and Overtime, but video is new to me and yeah I bet your Chris Marker ass loves it It helps that the first seconds of didn't notice is so arresting, all good footwork songs snap you in early but it never gets old.
I hear a lot of DJ Nate in username's stuff, the off kilter nature, humor to mask the technical skill, the front loaded album, the thwomps of bass. The piano on did is so good, the haunting space by the keys being mashed to bits by the drums, becoming weirdly harmonious until the distortion becomes too suffocating. 4 angel is so discordant, a really evil little beat that gets ridden so well in the vox. mg is just classic drug tunes, we all love DJ Clent's I get high might be my fav footwork song and the outro section is just a great comedown.
Wish the album had ended there though, there's some good raw material in the back half of the album but it's just flat out weaker for me. 10 on 10 feels like a draft of a sample it's a cool sample though while grown now is twice as long as it should be, if that's the joke from the song title it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Sorry for the sort of track by track check masquerading as talking about the album proper, but again I blame Cooked.
Iris:
Alexis: Tinashe - Popstar
there's no question it's great, it's just about whether it's an instant classic or not. i'm gonna say yes. i want it to be true.
there is a dichotomy in the heart of the project which lives between 'too easy', which was a nuclear 2 minutes to lead this cycle off with, and the title track. 'too easy' is immaculate, razor sharp, airtight. it's clearly part of the style of the moment to nip and tuck really hard, but the heritage here is just digesting midwest (electro, ghettotech) club sounds and refining them to the limit of recognisability. the album has a habit of this: there are bedspring squeaks in 'i'd rather be alone' and classic house and electro bass synths all through the album that are squished and compressed to within an inch of their lives. the album owns its genre heritage in both RnB and dance music proudly, but is working exceptionally hard to make it work as pop music by aggressively focusing and tightening it up. so when she sings that she can't help that she makes it look too easy, it's the product of decades of condensed work and hours of craft. by the time we get to the second half of the record, she owns the work: "work late night on a weekday" is a bare statement of reality, she'd be doing it anyway, but the album shifts to dramatising the 25-8 grinding struggle against obligatory glamour and fakeness through which she's fighting to make a genuine and sincere mark. someone got their PhD recently wow all of it seems beautiful and exhausting, and the only things that can overcome it are commitment and trust, from audience-as-friend; an abiding faith that the work will pay off and the stardom will shine through for which you, the fan, will be both witness and vehicle. if you work hard enough and put the hours and weeks and years in, it will all click and one day it will seem like it was natural all along. too easy!
when it dropped in the summer, i called 'too easy' the k-pop track of the year, because it is, at its heart, a perfect refinement of a model of pop song that k-pop has been attempting for a few years (patron saint of music newsletters JMK dates it to le sserafim's 'eve, psyche & bluebeard's wife', i think there are traces in chungha and the early itzy singles, the crowning moment so far is aespa's 'whiplash'). it's gotta be an east coast club or house track, segments out moments in the verses and bridge for vocal flair, and ratchets the contrast way down, it's just all hook all the time, and there are no real concessions to radio play. loads of pop tracks work in the club,well no just because loads are played in the club does NOT mean they work but very few feel club native. i've already seen too many techno and electro djs throw melatonin into their sets already to call this incidental, it's what makes this record so bullseye-targeted cool to me. it's so cool looking up how many different NTS/Lot shows have been using the album i'd hardly call this lane subtle but it's a scornful reaction to the high gloss maximalism of peak EDM and a much cooler and more elegant advancement from trap-pop. the point of the comparison isn't really that she's somehow responsive to k-pop trends, but that the format that she has landed on as a big solo US pop artist to show herself off is literally identical to the model that big k-pop girl groups have been refining for decades. it's crafted, effortful and kinda old-fashioned.
and she wears that old-fashioned style so openly. her sound is completely contemporary but the form - choreo, stage presentation, album rollout, obligatory sad slow jam and lighter/phone flash-wave album closer in the sequencing, social media presence you can just say oomf and self-conscious involvement in her own fandom-making - is completely recognisable from like 2016 at the latest, that's probably when Beyonce gives this style its last gasps in the chart's upper echelons. it's refreshing to get a pop star like this, being needy and grateful in public, open but not too open (cf troye sivan opening his finsta lol), kinda mean, but mostly on your side, deeply online and cringe about it, her own fan along with you, workaholic but very much inside the system. it's how pop music was 'supposed' to work in the era of public vulnerability, and only very very occasionally still does. if anything it might just indict me as a listener to be so enamoured with a pop artist delivering their sales pitch as if the last decade of transformations in cultural mediation didn't fucking happen. the subversions... i don't think it is remotely accidental that the reference points for this record are from the era where this machine pop music was fairly universally thought to be at the peak of its inventive powers, backed up by a generation of producers right at the cutting edge of what is permissible in pop: aaliyah's s/t, britney's in the zone, madonna's ray of light. it turns out that the era of personality driven pop in which she seems to be at home as an artist didn't produce the same kind of beacons of experimentation or self-development very often, at least outside of the underground or particular iconoclasts. so many of the cult albums arrived from leftfield, many of the iconic examples of the actual Studio System ass process at work were deeply regressive. finally, maybe, enough time has passed for the fruits of a new era of development to be incorporated more earnestly and capably.
earnest as it is, there is a lot of effort going into making the record seem low-effort, but jesus it fucking works. the mixtape sequencing is impeccable, it's so upsetting how good every transition is, techno levels of clarity with basically all of the highlights flowing together: from 'too easy' into 'melatonin', from 'i'd rather be alone' to 'crash out', from 'pillow fight' into 'nobody wanna dance anymore'. that last one is an absolute gem speaking of club native pop tunes, pillow fight has kinda launched itself into track of the year consideration for me, with an opening piano chop sequence that did briefly make me wonder if ulla got a sneaky credit here (it's too on beat for that but the mere fact i thought it put an immediate silly smile on my face), and a kind of featherweight feeling right through one of those greasy, uncommonly restrained house basses slides in on the off beats to keep the whole track spinning in motion. 'nobody wanna dance anymore' is a kinda monumental counterpart, all sneering percussion and club stabs, right up until the post-chorus where a chromatic descent straight out of 'womanizer' reveals that this was aiming for blackout- and circus-era britney all along. kingdom, one of the fade to mind / night slugs stalwarts who has defined the entry of club music into pop and RnB through his work with kelela, has the production credit here and through the back half of the record as it transitions from fizzy, direct cuts to something hazier and more self-conscious as on the title track, which announces itself with a vocoder blast then deftly avoids harmonising it with the 808 on the root note just to keep it so weightless and searching.
the best moment on the record is a shockingly brief one, on 'melatonin', when the extended intro gets folded up and sucked into a vacuum at the 1:10 mark for just 2 bars, exposing the stomach-battering helicopter shudder that runs through the bottom end of the track for just a moment before the hook slams in for the first time. this trick genuinely separates this record from so many of the pale imitators of this kind of coolness, it isn't so enamoured with its discoveries that it dares to rush its payoffs. so many of the crucial moments are delayed (the hook on 'melatonin', the chromatic descent on 'nobody wanna dance', 'cloud 9' reharmonising itself in the last chorus), or suspended and hollowed-out ('crash out' with its incessantly flat and buzzy bassline, the fragile, empty midranges of 'pillow fight' and 'sunglasses', the headrush and collapse into strings at the emotional apex of 'empty stadium'). there are some genuinely cathartic pops, but all of the most special and individually specific moments are subject to this restraint. when it's a dancefloor rager it stays postured and uncluttered, when it's a nasty, horny jam it stays contained and beckoning rather than florid and explosive.
the last real open question is really about popstar's timeless ambitions: i think it's going to age way better than the contemporaneous stuff that is flirting with this avant-pop edge. It also lacks that very self consciously Cool by name checking the moment posturing that ages like milk. This is not just about how boring Charli and Shai are I promise. the things it most forcefully recalls are records that sat at the opening of new modes of doing pop music, but they are fundamentally still pop records with refined, targeted sensibility brought to sounds that were ripe for the picking. timbaland had spent years as a workaday staff guy for missy elliot and swing mob before he put his stamp first on aaliyah's discography. william orbit had a whole career of 90s electronica and downtempo before he ended up writing for madonna. it would so beautiful if of all the fucking stupid moments, now was the time for so many more people to take east coast bass or electro and be smart and directed with it; if popstar, like cut 4 me, turned a cool random flirtation with club sounds into a pop vernacular, rather than being an endpoint and cul-de-sac. i want this to stick, so fucking badly. i want her to be loved in the way she has earned, i want to fall in love with a popstar from afar, and make every laptop screen playing short form clips after bedtime and queue at the house party her stage until the kids think it's really fucking uncool to put 'melatonin' on again and we need to go hunting for a new way to spectate superstardom together. until we have spent years where pop sounds like tinashe rather than the other way around. she's earned it. she's made it.
Graham: STERÖID
Don’t tell me what “egg punk” is. Don’t ask me what “egg punk” is.Is that not that indie game people like I’m not reading the Wikipedia page for “Egg punk.” I saw the term “budget rock” the other day as separate genre from “garage rock” and my eyes started to glaze over. Never using last.fm or rateyourmusic has finally paid off. That being said…
STERÖID are an “egg punk” band from Australia. The singer wears a chainmail coif. seeing that cover fried me For some reason, the vocals are all pitched up like the Chipmunks, every song sounds like it’s in the same key, and most of them are about rocking out and/or walking around a rough town (while rocking out), except for the one song which is about the Gulf War (“Thousands of tanks in the morning sun / Rolling through the desert / Yeah we’re having fun!) All of these are good things. Look, I don’t have a lot this week as I worked at 5am 12 out of the last 14 days. It’s possible that with a normal schedule I would like this album less, and lean more towards it being “annoying,” which, make no mistake, it can be, but for now…I will get röided up…
Claire: KIZAN518 - LO-BIT SPEEDCORE VOL.017
i have to start this edition off by saying i do not actually remember how i found this album lol. i think i was probably just looking at the word "speedcore" on a website (not even bandcamp to be clear, at least i think) and then the magic happened. i think thats maybe the most fun way to discover something, especially something as neat and singular as this!
but what is "this"? well, its lo-bit (the production style of deliberately making music in low bitrates and other limiting ways) speedcore! specifically, KIZAN518 here seems to also go for PCM synth instruments and the korg gadget???? thats crazy man!!! for the unfamiliar the korg gadget well hold on we all know the korg product line here right is a very stripped back daw thats focused on "gadgets", which are much stripped back compared to the classic VST paradigm. the supposed upside is that because this system is so discrete, it has a lower barrier to entry, including the fact that it can be a daw on a bunch of systems you wouldnt normally imagine a daw could run on. mobile? yup! pc still? yeah, as just VST plugins if you want that! vr and the dang ol nintendo switch? why not! cuz when lo-bit speedcore's on a bagel, you can have lo-bit speedcore anytime
and most importantly, the end result of jumping through these hoops is spectacular. the drums are some of the nastiest, grainiest motherfuckers ive heard. its not quite the same impact as the speedcore de jure method of really fucking up a 909 kick, or the speedcore also de jure if youre a bit of a hipster really fucking up a weird noise you made in serum, but it has a ton of power to it still. the PCM instruments do tend a bit towards the goofy but i honestly really like that. PCM instruments tend to have this issue where you can tell its an analog sound being treated in a way that's not quite complete and it really shines through here. tracks like the opener HI-SPEED GOTHIC (btw, if anyone out there wants to send me a shitload of gothic hardcore i will not say no!!!) or WERTHER EFFECT (my two favorites off the album btw) have this very 90s computing feel to them without just being like "DAE remember jungle on the playstation 1?????????" I like that SPEEDCORE BIAS appears to just have all the drums in one about it, very much appreciated. also im being too charitable because they would call it "the PSX" even though that name is pretty ahistorical (it was briefly used in prerelease marketing material mostly as a way to distance from the disastrous nintendo partnership, no one except marketing dipshits was calling it that!!!) ok but the average gamer power user desperately wishes they worked in marketing so what now and mostly a way to signal you are "hip" and "in the know" about one of the single most popular consoles of all time lmao. but this newsletterthing isnt about how much the conversation around classic gaming annoys me. instead, check out some lo-bit speedcore!
Deathbomb Arc may not be beaming their releases into my dreams yet, but they did apparently hear my fervent wish of "fuuuuuck i dont have a second thing to review this time around, fuck fuck fuck" and dropped this bad boy in my lap the weekend before my submission was due. thank you Deathbomb Arc, im glad were starting to close the distance between us. once strangers, now something...more? [ANDREW PLEASE INCLUDE ATTACHED FLIRTATIOUS LINE STICKER] ok was very confused at what the picture was for
what makes Poop Disco worth talking about on a level deeper than just posting "yuuuuuuuuuup" and dusting my hands off for a job well done is its something different! im sure my legions of adoring fans remember my glowing review of POSITIVE VIOLENCE and its crash through your ceiling energy, and honestly i was expecting this to be a second album of more of that. its mostly not! wow! lets talk about what it is instead!
seemingly not content to just scream over Death Grips samples for the rest of their career, BBBBBBB got real funky with this one. theres lots of falsetto singing for one lol. theres tracks like the aptly named second track, 2, hurt there is a sex 2 but no pussy 2 that are just completely normal songs (though 2 is very smartly used to build into a third track that i think is worth the diversion). there is still a liiiiiiiittle bit of hardcore (punk) screaming (and also a Death Grips sample because i lied, teehee) but this album is a lot more about exploring the base elements of constructing a BBBBBBB track. and i really dig it! its not as frenetic and blood pumping as POSITIVE VIOLENCE, but there's still plenty to love. theres a few shining moments where the track becomes so focused on construction, so intent on just taking a sound and playing with it until its threadbare and falling apart, that they hit on a comparison i need to like actually step aside to explain lol. i know several of my fellow contributors know exactly what i mean here, i VERY STRONGLY HOPE the rest do but cant say for sure, and i expect most of our dear readers wont lol. i am of course talking about the LEGENDARY Foodman track, Thicket. its not quiiiiite hitting the Thicket level genuinely what does but there are moments where everything falls away and were just doing some bullshiiiiiit with vocal loops and drums. maybe theres a synth in there, sometimes. its honestly awesome. it makes me wonder how this album is gonna land because Thicket was quite famously shit on by a bunch of Good Enuff listeners who heard a track that's 5% less Crystal Castles four on the floor than theyre used to and got really scared. but my hope is the intervening decade (literally! oh my god its been a decade) it will take centuries for society to fully heal from crystal castles tbh and the fact that its on a good label like Deathbomb Arc means this oddball but really awesome album finds its people. czech it out sometime, when you get a second!!!!!
Andrew: Fukushima - Sinsuke Fujieda Group
I had completely missed this release last year, but Flying Steps came on while at Waltz, my favorite cocktail bar in London and the location of the aforementioned WYGAS London meetup, and was immensely hooked, though was hard to find much information online other than the original vinyl pressing immediately became ridiculously expensive. I think with all the avant-garde jazz, jazz fusion, and the recent Coltrane/Pharoah Sanders retrospectives, hearing some really well done modal jazz just threw me for a loop.
The title track alone is worth the price of admission, with an opening minute of Fujieda's solo sax setting a terrific mood. In immediately wanting to highlight a solo does bely my main problem with the album however, a lot of the sidemen are inconsistent, with violinist Fumiko Takeshita the only one I would just uniformly praise, especially on Nobody Knows. The drums are just all over the place, great on the title track and Abstraction Jazz Mode, but pretty annoying on Jiva, almost overshadowing Fujieda turning in his saxophone for a bamboo clarinet.
Still, as Pharoah Sanders birthday reminds us, someone playing the hell out of a sax can go a really long way, and Fukushima is really worth checking out for that alone. I'm also just really charmed by finding this through a random night at Waltz, which is something that obviously can't be recreated via a newsletter rec, despite the communal vibe we've done a great job of cultivating here right. Modal jazz is just a really nice thing to have either first thing in the morning or the last thing before bed, especially right now as I need something to take my mind off getting a frozen shoulder on my dominant side.
Have to get this off my chest: the groove on Single~Eyed just reminds me of Bumblebee Unlimited's disco classic Lady Bug.
Now then with that out of the way we have an album of pretty crunchy electro-acoustic excellence. The original draft used goodness but this album is far too morose to feel comfortable using the term. It whips through all sorts of not quite right vibes, Coda is quite dancey but the dance is taking place in one of those incredibly beautiful and deeply harrowing 80's British flicks. Orange 28 is a mirror of house music, all these free floating parts assembled so well, but in a way that just feels constricted and suffocating instead of liberating. Single~Eyed is sort of what if you tried making a disco track while George Clinton was fucking with your comedown. Dali De Saint Paul's vocals just make me feel underwater. It's a great time here! That Susumu Mukai is Vanishing Twin's Zongamin makes the just downer piano and wet ass drums on ROSEROOT make so much more sense. Valentina Magaletti drives a lot of the percussion here, haunting all these old drum machines. The ringleader of the group is one Al Wootton, who architected the specific sort of dub as evil psychedelic vibes that weave the album together. Yes that's right I am once again writing about something dub inflected, but I like to think that speaks more to the stranglehold dub has on the current moment of electronic music more than my own predictability, right?
Wootton has been a name I've recognized as a sign of quality for a while now, but mostly from going "ah that was sick" in NTS sets or when he's been "On The Lot" as it were, so I am excited to see what else he has in store for me. Admittedly it's hard to take that as something that will happen in the near future due to the whole Yokota situation I find myself in. Speaking of.
Having opinions on Sakura is like having opinions on Dostoevsky, Dezaki, or Duchamp, both something you should make sure you. have, while being mildly overwhelming to convey anything beyond "well yeah that's god I guess" but all the more reason to start the Yokota journey here. I can't pretend I have anything novel to say about Sakura, but when you are one of the greatest albums of all time the superlatives do all sound a bit the same.
Last volume I laid out my favorite track on the album is Kodomotachi, which I continue to hear pop up in sets so maybe I am just a dickhead for thinking Yokota has fallen to the side, but it's even more powerful in the album context, the capstone of a six song run that starts with Hagoromo. Genshi's bounciness seems miles away from the empty snare caverns of Hisen at first blush (going off a friends comment at least), but when you've listened to the album for over half your life the scaffolding just appears, Yokota is showcasing his obsession with ki-do-ai-raku (the four emotions of joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness) by playing around with BPM's and density, but the building blocks are intentionally kept quite similar. Gekkoh's deep moodiness makes sense as part of this larger project. It's like when people talk about playing Aphex Twin songs at half/double speed but with something better than a 3/5 but drawn out in these different arrangements. and then you realize the songs preceding and following the run compliment it as well, Uchu Tanjyo with it's spoken word and flute interplay is the warm up to the event, Naminote's piano is a bit like the club lights coming on at 4AM telling you to go home, wiping the slate clean then and there.
I don't want to undersell the tracks outside of the run, Tobiume is many people's favorite for it's sublime guitar's and pristine piano, Shinsen's a fantastic example of how to have a high BPM become soothing, and few songs have ever sounded as much like their name as Saku, that shit is blooming. It's one of the greatest albums of all time of course I like all of it, but I think that run through the middle is key to understanding how to construct a real sense of narrative in ambient. Like Reich Yokota fully understood how to use these creepy little moments to make the overall landscape that much more soothing, it just feels so deeply lived in. It's such a gift to share this album with people. I'm still not entirely sure what Yokota I will cover next, but glad I got over my initial "well a bit playing the hits innit" apprehension of starting with Sakura.
Yu Su b2b Moopie - Making Time 2026
When I told my girlfriend I might have to go to making time next year because of this set she said that was the funniest reason anyone's ever had to go to Philly, however when she sent me the NTS b2b they had earlier in the year I knew I won. It's a bummer Fader uploaded this without a video, as Lot Radio's strongest soldier I have to say that of course, but also for their NTS gig the clips of them dancing around the studio helped make it a subject of WYGAS. Also I want to know who is doing what, who dropped the Jeff Mills!
It's just a ripshit two hours what a joy. Absolutely adore all the friction from 50 minutes in until the incredible "You’ve Made Me So Very Happy" flip 15 minutes later pops everything open.
NTS In Focus: Steve Reich
Reich being the titan that he is gives you a lot of great work to mix and match sure, but still just a wonderful little piece of curation, love the interview interludes. Not much else to say in the honor of minimalism and your time since this will take you three hours already.
Leya in Berlin / Terrence Dixon @ Tresor
As part of the WYGAS team building exercises Alexis understood she needed to provide a very Brooklyn experience for me, so going to some not quite music venue to see Leya do their harp and violin tricks, as Adam made fun of Berghain and European weed. a really nice and intimate show.... perhaps too intimate with how crowded the floor was. Only real way to tell this was in Germany was how apparently dire the cutoff time was for the set, not even a chance for an encore on a Saturday night. The highlight of the show was unintentional, as the lights all went out as Adam bellowed out the finale for one of the tracks only to immediately clarify that was unintentional and he'd like the lights back on.
So then Alexis abandoned me with drugs and I had to go to Tresor myself, complete with having to stand behind a group of like 7 guys I knew would be bounced the whole time. It was part of a 35th anniversary event for Tresor but I was there to see one man in his orange coat who makes some of my favorite techno. Reporting From Detroit is one of the decades best techno records, with album closer Star Garden being a personal, deeply Millsian highlight. Another way he is like Mills however is his very private nature, two decade old boiler room sets are the only full video ones online, most everything else is just highlights or of questionable permission, which as you can imagine hurts someone who mostly communicates through linking radio shows. I've managed to catch him in New York twice but seeing him on his home turf, with all the extra equipment that entailed was extra special, not least because he opened the set with Yu Su's Wanli. After a few more downtempo gems we got some of that live hardware fun, with a 303 and some other machines getting beamed into our souls until a few pantomimed fake outs and failures led him to the decks and the room to about 90 minutes of beautiful buggy Detroit techno, with a lot of focus on funky grooves and songs powered by the wonders of the 303. Foolishly believing there would be anything to do in Berlin on a Sunday I left Tresor at the end of his set, but no real regrets except walking back to my hotel meant walking through Alexanderplatz, Berlins attempt at bringing the sprawl of the American southwest to Europe.
Kasra V all night at OM
The morning after Tresor I did my monthly check in with Kasra's latest NTS show and he brought up playing OM, a new(?) spot none of my London friends had been to, so off we go. Now then let's get the self indulgent club kid shit out of the way... Nice sound system they got going on there, incredibly crisp while letting you still go "that was sick" to your friends easily enough. How much of that was the the relative lack of bass in the house music going on that night is hard to say but a great first impression for a club I will only be able to go to at most twice a year ha. Only real downside was the crowd was very addicted to playing bumper cars, but I try to show grace via a combination of "this is one of the last weekends out before it gets really cold, and that M-CAT does seem to be quite a annoying drug to be on"
Max can't provide editors notes but the milky baby can be quoted so the capsule Max review is: [Kasra V] had remade Balearic house from first principles, in a very complimentary way. I have to agree, was a very fun time to be had in that first chunk of bouncy brightness, but what really ended up impressing me was how he shifted between all sorts of house styles, hitting a lot of the hallmarks besides deep house (we did leave before 4AM which is the ideal deep house hour so this is a lack of evidence is not evidence of absence situation), carrying that mesmerizing nature we all love losing way more time than we thought to the DJ. All of the songs had been ripped from his own CD collection earlier in the week it was a lot of on the fly mixing and transitions, and while there were a few warts in that.... if you aren't a Jeff Mills or Nobu level tactician I would prefer the warts of trying stuff out than just keeping it safe you know. Kasra also now joins the increasing list of DJ's I've seen on multiple continents this year alone, a list that will, uh, keep growing by the time Volume 9 hits.
But that's for Volume 9, see you all then!
