Vol. 9
Did you know about half a million people descend on Amsterdam every year for Amsterdam Dance Event? I didn't know that until I was already there for it whoops. A lot of fun stuff going on in the self described Cannes of dance music, though it was a mild bummer to see they just announced a Vegas spinoff. Of particular enjoyment was Boris Acket and Djrum's Einder, a relatively simple to explain installation, two big pieces of fabric, some programatic lights and fans, and Djrum's soundscape in a warehouse, but a really spiritual event with just how simultaneously awe inspiring and relaxing it was, one I which gets a second, or third, or really touring life going forward. Much more spiritual than the ambient church variant they had going on, but let's focus on the positives.... like how much music has come out these past two weeks, just a true downpour of jams. Can't even bring up the new Jeff Mills! Or the Civilistjävel!, or the return of normal album art Oren Ambarchi, or the new release from SML's Jeremiah Chiu that came out on Tuesday! DJ Python's new thing is fun! That Djrum DJ Kicks mix might be my favorite DJ Kicks thing ever (admittedly I am way lower on their seminal projects than most)... but let's focus on the tunes we got this go round, and prepare for the continued flood of new jams in November!
Boo: As a WYGAS exclusive we have obtained what the original version of this new Maxime Denuc interview looked like
Alexis: Wendy Eisenberg - Wendy Eisenberg
Wendy Eisenberg - Wweennddyy Eeiisseennbbeerrgg
it's a funny occasion to be revisiting what was definitely one of my favourite albums this year, albeit one that confounded me a bit. wendy eisenberg's self-titled album soundtracked a lot of my phd writeupYou have a PhD? in the spring but largely disappeared from my rotation in the summer as i got out of the funk induced by an incessant, overwhelming deadline.
it was a really good album for holding a fractured mess of a psyche together to, it is above all an album of Processing and Development. the voices on it are of an older self observing, or remembering, their past, and understanding the transformation and arrival that has occurred over Time. time is another keyword, along with Change, haunting the moments of more opaque self-reflection ("You are the oldest you’ve ever been / Did you feel yourself change?" on the opener 'take a number'), offering a necessary vector for actualisation ("Only a month ago all of the habits of my old life died / Sounds so extreme, but it is not a lie: / All is new, everything" on 'the ultraworld'), most paradigmatically an indifferent vehicle for what is actually important, the relations and meanings accumulated across it ("Isn’t time like an improvisation, / Like money: sometimes moving / Meaningless except for how it moves things" on closer 'the walls'). scattered across the runtime are sharp and splintered realisations, of self-limitation and frustration, of the jagged edge of one person's agency butting up against the obnoxious resistance of the rest of the world, of acceptance of those limitations in a mature and better adjusted way. but enough about those lads at Dokai feel acknowledged and comforted by this fierce, lone voice tackling this impossible project of being okay with yourself.
except it's not often alone. Oh lord she's dancing the dialectic the vocal production leaves wendy hanging in starker and quieter moments, but frequently the songs swell to pick up opulent string and pedal-steel arrangements and add a vocal double. it's kinda breathtaking how close this builds to the refined, totemic feeling of some of the giants of 70s folk rock, i kept coming back to neil young's after the gold rush as an aspirational marker. but those songs use their drama as a set dressing for reportage and storytold drama; reflexive material sneaks out the sides of character masks. it's bracing and sometimes just confusing that these tracks are so forthright with this cracked-open, personal point of view, and i can't help but feel it was written with this boldness and difficulty in mind given the preponderance of repetitions and double-downs: no really i mean to reveal that, i mean to crack open my half-formed self and question how it got to be this way for you. indeed, it's almost that slick, but it isn't, it constantly reasserts its format as 4 musicians in collaboration, with a vocabulary very specific to their instruments, rather than a masterminded singular mouthpiece with an anonymous cast of supporting pieces rearranged however they, or a producer, sees fit. this album works through a band that it shows off just as transparently.
at its best, it breezes through these scenes of development to shine lasers right at the kernel of infantile love and injuryreviewing the clubs light setup now? and its slow mutation into a liveable life via this process of metabolism and observation: 'another lifetime floats away' dips in and out of these formative episodes until it lands at wendy with a guitar and a notebook and a bundle of memories poorly organised. it's basically perfect, it's desperate and also inevitable. all of these highlights, obliquely arriving at the present via the excavation of memory, are among the best things i've heard all year: subtle, bracing things that bloom the deeper that personal relationship. it has rewarded me coming back to it in fresher states of mind immeasurably.
which leaves me with a kind of confused little blip to deal with. as these narratives of change and development get spun out, they are delivered by wendy eisenberg's voice, and it is stubbornly airy and plain. it feels entirely symptomatic to call it 'girlish' or 'childlike' though those are absolutely the adjectives i end up left with. i wonder a lot how i'd hear these songs if her voice were more weathered and battered, or more overtly theatrical. there are moments when the sweetness and vibratoless tone just land like they're a surprise to be in the open at all, or tiptoe around the most demanding figures without complete security.
the occasion for coming back was the release of a two-track reworking of 'meaning business' and 'the walls' into loose, galloping post-rock expanses, the first track takes the four minute pop song on the record and splays it out over 37. in these new versions, the painterly and careful posture is mostly shed, Imagine if they weren't the songs are the same but they're performed in a far more interactive and reactive mode, there is nothing to reach for beyond the band of four. there are improvisatory flourishes, little foibles (i am still bugged by a lot of the natural fourths in the violin part bumping up against the lydian guitar riff) and overt missteps and half-second reactions littered around. it's a jam record. but most clearly it affects the vocals: the first line, "Tooling through the junkyard," isn't even completed before wendy slides off the back of it and into the cradling arms of the band, it takes minutes to find the verse again. when it's just cast into the muddle like this, it's no longer a impassive or cloying thorn in the side and turns into a desperately vulnerable shard that cuts through the whole project. gotta be brave, gotta be strong, gotta put your best face on. the voice is the cut between wendy then and now, and the thing that can make it meaningful given all of the wounds it carries is, beyond all else, giving it a home and a context to cocoon it, and trusted people to populate this home.
a verse on 'the walls' that slinks out underneath the guitar in the album version but that lands like an anvil when extended out and uncovered: "A memory: when I was twelve, or thirteen, / I’d write songs close to midnight / And some of those would sound a bit like this one, even back then / I seem to be consistent". we have two ways for those memories to 'sound a bit like this one', one rangey and wrecked, the other artful and delicate. and what links them is the mazy creep of guitar building its little garden and a mind thrashing around trying to make sense of what the world is like in the middle of it. sometimes it succeeds, too, and can tell us about what it has learned.
I am happy this one passed me by when it dropped in July, it really is not summer Jazz to me, it lacks the pulse and verve I want while dealing with heat stroke. Coming to it in the fall gives me a delightful little ECM-style title to just play in the morning though, with the winds on Choral help set the mood. I think how you handle this record comes down to how much you enjoy silence I'm hearing it's the most beautiful soundbeing deployed in that ECM clean way, not in the Miles way or in the negative space of Dub, Rap, and so many other modern sounds, but in that way to let you think on what you've already heard rather than prepare you for what's next.
These sorts of jazz releases often get called fragile due to their timbre and moody openings, but to me that's like calling the ocean fragile, Chords and Weaving cover such vast swaths that it might seem placid, but there's such an emotionality to the interplay, especially with the unconventional percussion. Minimalistic Jazz walks a tight rope, how do you strip the sound down while keeping the emotionality that keeps the genre alive? Korsgade is a 3 minute treatise on this, the piano playing shaking at your heart. Felt's a cool label, happy to keep plugging away at it.
Iris: Nikki Nair - Majestic Animals
So I was gonna write about the new Avalanches album, however upon listening to the new album and finding it to be midthank god I decided not to do that. But the album did get me to check out Nikki Nair’s new EP Majestic Animals
I didn’t know what to think of this one when I first listened to it so I ran it back immediately and fell in love. me with his Foodman EP tbh There’s something extremely charming to me about music styled after animals, and these layered instrumental percussive tracks really do sound like their names. Groundhogs is a standout for me, local news stations every February 2nd bringing to mind a warren of busy subterranean animals bustling around. The toy pianos on Tapir Spectrum are also similarly silly and beautiful, totally bringing to mind everyone’s favorite dream-eating pachyderms. Nair continues to put out great work on hyperdub, following on the heels of last year’s amazing collab with Foodman.
Bibio & Dorian Concept - Answers
Next up is an album I had no idea was even coming out that I got blindsided by but in no uncertain terms was it unwelcome. Bibio & Dorian Concept (two great DJs with the fakest sounding names) put out maybe the best ambient album of the year on the 16th of this month.
I was honestly blown away by this one. I am still processing a lot of my feelings about it but it’s the kind of ambient music that fills your body when you put it on. Last volume Alexis talked about Tinashe’s Popstar being a condensed, refined sound from the artist’s career and I feel very similarly about Answers although it is playing in a different musical space. Bibio and Dorian have been at it for a minute but this is easily a new height for both of them. This is a showing of what two guys making “chill-out music” for almost 2 decades have to say about “chill-out music” structurally. Whooshing synths, melodic guitars, and melancholic pianos are nothing new in the ambient space but the way they are presented here feels like listening to music played by friends in a back yard. These sounds are familiar friends, you know them from years of listening to this type of music but now you can really sit with them. Jelly Pencil is a great example of this, a sound and progression you know well opens the track and then over a few minutes grows that sound out into something big and complex and warm. Every track runs all over post-rock, neo-folk, dungeon synth, and any other music you might call “ambient”well hold on they keep making new kinds let's not oversell when ambient footwork and drill now exist rolling them up into neat little bon-bons of distilled calm. Big recommendation to my fellow writers and anyone who reads the blog regularly.
And last but not least, this is the time of year that I mourn a beloved friend of mine who passed away a few years ago. Her name was Helen and we shared all kinds of music together but more than anything Helen loved Prince. This is a blog primarily for recommending music to friends and I am sure, I am positive, that everyone here has heard Purple Rain before. But I have been listening to purple rain back to back and on repeat for weeks now so I will say: Check out Purple Rain. trueeee All eight minutes of it. Maybe you forgot, maybe you still remember, but it is just That Good.
Emi:
Claire: KIZAN518 - LO-BIT SPEEDCORE VOL.019
yuuuuuuuuuup. it turns out when i wrote about Volume 17 last time, we were mere weeks away from Volume 19 releasing at M3!!!!! wow!!!!!!!!!! we skipped Volume 18 because i liked the Volume 17 cover more. How I ended up changing the Stillmatic cover on iTunes anyways. the music. were back with more fucked up pcm-synth Korg what if they pronounced Korg like Moog Gadget speedcore! since we were just here, this will be a shorter writeup mostly focused on whats different this time around. this one is definitely a more lighthearted release compared to all the scary sounds of Volume 17. theres much less allcaps SERIOUS SOUNDING NAME I'm glad movie people got over this tracks and the composition reflects this, especially in the back half. weve got lots of pcm-vocal instruments being used. and even a few outright vocal samples from what i can tell.its still a very oddball sound overall and the drums are as nasty as ever (or even more in a couple tracks lol) but its a very floaty and ethereal album overall. the closing track is even giving a little bit of Portishead era Beth Gibbons , a comparison i absolutely stand by even if you get mad at me for it. i dont remember if i actually made this comparison last time so forgive me if im repeating myself, but in the best parts it really sounds like someone took the soundtrack to legendary 90s doujin shmup KAMUI (by Siter Skain) and slapped some speedcore kicks over it. and like im down with that! i like both those things! i hope you do too!
Astral Sky - Happy+Candy+Cloudy2
You can embed YouTube playlists? wow
im not even pretending to be looking at the wider hardcore scene this release. its just speedcore speedcore speedcore baby. max could learn a lot about self acceptance from youwahoo! this particular album has been a bit of a white whale for me over the last decadeish. exactly one track (Darkness Blightness) was readily available online while the entire rest of the album was locked away. apparently in the few years since i last checked this got uploaded on DoujinStyle though. thank you DoujinStyle! i will have a lot more to say about the non-DoujinStyle people in this chain of events at the end however...
Astral Sky is the personal doujin circle of uma, an i would say smaller player in the touhou hardcore scene. not for lack of talent to be clear! seriously, listen to Lunatic Elf from the prequel to this album (and first release for this circle!) and tell me there isnt sauce here. Astral Sky simply releases smaller albums less frequently than their contemporaries, nothing wrong with that! what finally listening to this release in full taught me is that its because the quality is there. seriously, every track on this album is a fucking banger. i was shocked!!! usually i will find theres at least some relative (for me) duds in even really strong releases. not here! uma takes a very traditionalist mindset to hardcore producing and runs with it. none of these tracks are awesome or surprising because theyre doing something real out there. theyre awesome and surprising because youre shocked no one assembled all these obvious pieces into this exact picture. the opener, Dist Kick Carnival, is a great example. an arrangement of the famously difficult to make good ZUN original Because Princess Inada is Scolding Me (this shit is seriously only 42 seconds long! its only got two point five parts to it!) that turns it into an actually really fun club banger! i basically never like Princess Inada arranges! holy shit!!!! we then of course follow this up with lots of fast drums bullshit, my favorite! and then end strong on some great features. i didnt even realize Darkness Blightness was a guest feature until relatively recently, it just sounds like something uma would cook up lol. this album is awesome and feels like a little gap in my pretty extensive touhou hardcore knowledge got filled. its awesome! its historically significant! i reall hope you, dear read, check it out when you get a second!!!!! wow
and now for the part where i have to be grumpy for a bit. looking at the landscape of the main touchstone a lot of people are going to have for the doujin scene, Guy Who Uploads Thousands Of Videos Of This Shit To Youtube, i have to ask: why? why did it take so much longer for the rest of this album to hit the public net than Darkness Blightness? why did it take until TODAY (yesterday if youre reading this on WYGAS) for the album to be presented publicly as a full album experience, because im the one who uploaded it???? WORLDWIDE EXCLUSIVE WHOOOO KIIIIIIID why are we still uploading this stuff without its album art, but random pixiv crawl finds? are we scared that if the album cover has cirno on it but the song is mima's theme people will get scared? are you stupid??????? why are we ignoring that the foundation of modern music is the album? why are we making genuinely impressive looking multihour megamixes but leaving all the context around Your Favorites to languish in obscurity until a dickhead like me comes along? what is your problem??????????????????????????????????????????????????
i know we can do better. this is why I am cranky most of the time i think this is worth being the amount of mad i am about it, which is a moderate amount. conversely, i am currently extremely mad at youtube who thinks that a 2:58 video in suqare format is now a Short. i think youtube and google should have horrible things done to them, and thats facts. but why are you helping them be anti-art? can we all sit down for a moment and hash this out so we can cut the crap? keep doing the fun stuff, the megamixes and the like, but please do full album uploads with the cover as the default. trueeee Happy+Candy+Cloudy2 deserves to be experienced the way it was designed to be. dont you agree? as a fan of the scene and the genre? dont you think all these albums deserve to be treated the same way? i say this as literally someone who writes about music but im not an arbiter of taste! neither are you! we should allow these things to stand in their fullest form and let people find their own favorites. please!!!!
and to end by cutting off the most obvious counterpoint to me: ok why am I here then i hear you saying "claire/kurararara/some other weird name you know me by, why dont you do it then?" and the answer is: i would love to! like clearly i would. this is not even the first album i have created a public facing upload for in order to write about it for WYGAS. this is not anywhere close to my first time uploading weird/cool/neat shit that doesnt have a home elsewhere. but i cant do it at the level these people are! given that DoujinStyle can take years to get some of these releases, given that the Japanese music scene is still mostly very averse to the Bandcamp model of easily accessible digital releases, given that theres so much of it out there i would have to be importing this stuff from japan. and lots of it. i dont have importing stuff from japan in bulk money! i dont even have money to pay for my own dental care. i dont even have money to pay for my own healthcare. i now have to scramble to find a job as someone with low employability because im going to lose my public healthcare shortly. im not in a position to do this financially! maybe this can change if some magnanimous millionaire is out there who wants to indefinitely fund my modest weirdo lifestyle. if youre a woman we can even do sex stuff i guess. bang my line shawty. that is but until that happens i am forced to rely on community figures to do the work of preservation. and because i am forced to rely on them, i reserve my right to criticize their work. look me in the fucking eyes and tell me Happy+Candy+Cloudy2 has only one good song. come the fuck on. take music as seriously as it deserves to be.
Liv: Loidis - From The Toolkit Of Lovers
What do you do when the person who runs the newsletter keeps telling you Loidis has gone "Prism Mode"? We get it Andrew you love Yokota I fucking LOVE I Would Be Glad On It btw, great Yokota tribute but for me it's more R&S and Vainqueur than those Prism releases, even if the mixing and occasional lack of snares is pretty indebted to your guy. That's right it just feels a bit silly to cover what has been the most hyped up album in the scene for the last month and change but when it's two hours long and most else of what I've been listening to it the username record and Tinashe, time to go back to the feelings well.
It's so horny, like that's the joke about the title of both the album and the tracks the restraint to not make an outro called I'm glad you came but early single Towlift not even being in the top 3 dance floor make out anthems on here is a shocker. There's someone figuring out how to put Pillow Fight over Dry Your Eyes and I can't wait to see their results. I made this joke to Jay but I think that dedication to sex is why this album is so long and why no song is short, we are here to go at it forever.
I hate to be the first person to complain about something in a Pitchfork review, because generally if you think Andrew is weirdly sympathetic to the Fork hey I fucking pay for it, but when Bromfield says the album doesn't feel truly indulgent enough I disagree, it understands it is gonna need to flow in between at least two people, and thus the indulgences has to be about propulsion, keeping things moving for others, like a good fuck should be. Running Rich just sounds like sex I do not get how an extended outro would help that. I get that people have to be nice about that Avalanches album no I do not lmao but like, the restraint is an affect, but a really good and charming one. Google Deep House!
Embarrassing crash out over a positive review aside, I really like how cohesive this feels as an album, for as much as I liked the songs on One Day it felt a bit made for his DJ sets rather than as an album at times, whereas here it just feels so whole. And yes I do keep hearing it in sets already, excited for the lovers fall we have in store.
Graham:
Max: Oklou - Choke Enough
In this life, it’s important to be able to recognise your flaws from time-to-time, Oh thank god you finally figured that out to introspect not to dabble in introspection? You are whelmed? and see if you can shine a new perspective on things, maybe find a path toward becoming a more decent person, a better friend. Now normally this practice is reserved for serious, sensitive matters, but as I sit down to write this week’s WYGAS I’m feeling kinda contemplative, so why not try the same with music? well music is incredibly important and you are doing Spotify's job for them by implying otherwise For a few years now I’ve been harbouring a musical opinion that feels a little bit like a flaw, and I’d much rather confront it and see if I can find something different than just continue to sit on it, there’s no fun in that. So preamble aside, it’s time to get deep, and talk about Oklou…
Last year’s “Choke Enough” is probably one of the most acclaimed and roundly loved synth-pop records of the decade so far. It’s a masterpiece of aesthetics, Y2K dance and pop music spliced together with medieval melodies(?!), we all fuck with chamber's heavy all swathed in downtempo haze, like being suspended in a dream. There’s nothing I’ve heard before that sounds quite like this, it’s a record that boldly asserts its place alongside similarly heady pop experimentalists of recent years: Frou Frou, FKA twigs, hell even Björk. And I say all of this and totally mean it, from the sound to the arrangement to the evocations of memory, there is very very impressive stuff going on here, but it’s an album that has always left me cold.
I think the fundamental issue is that whilst Oklou is incredible at rendering sounds that I love (especially early PC music style arpeggiating synths, this album is a feast if you like that stuff), here she has no interest in using them to make me happy. It turns out this is a very classy project, a nuanced album all about texture and restraint; it also turns out that this is a serious problem. It makes me feel like a philistine, but when I hear production and sounds this assured, such perfect raw materials for dance pop, I don’t want to scratch my chin I just want it to EXPLODE. You want that pala to boom This is the exact same problem as the horribly disappointing new Danny L Harle record, except this one at least has something else distinct to fill the void. It's gonna suck so much to see people retrofit the Danny album into being interesting So it goes, listening to this is a continual tease, a constant cycle of excitement and disappointment as songs gesture towards the obvious path to euphoria before deflating themselves in search of something pretty or hypnotic (or lame, which is what the medieval stuff is to me whenever it doesn’t sound like the runescape soundtrack) instead, steadfastly refusing to give me what I want even though it’s so close I can taste it, like a dog who’s been given too many treats.
For a while it felt like a cruel joke, and that feeling only increased as the world fell in love with a sound I thought was very clever and brilliantly done but fundamentally betrayed a music style I love in service of an aesthetic exercise- ooft heavy stuff!! As time has passed though and I’ve mulled it over, I’ve realised maybe it isn’t so severe, maybe I don’t need to pin everything on this one difference in vision. After all, we’re not so different anyway, we obviously love some of the same music- there’s not a whole lot of big pop artists I can say that for, even less who can nail sounds this well. Maybe I should just take a chill pill and enjoy the beautiful production moments littered all over this album: the pillowy synths that gild bladee’s sections on “take me by the hand”; the summery effervescence of the climax of “ict”; the magical way that “choke enough” transitions from crushing stormy peak to nimble, bouncy outro; the gorgeous acoustic noughties pop of “blade bird”. Yeah, sometimes a little distance is all you need. I still don’t love this album without reservations, but my heart is open to it now in a way I could never get to before, and it feels like a much better place to be.
So consider this self-reflection a resounding success! resounding is crazy In celebration,I also wanted to talk briefly about some less well-known Oklou songs that I do in fact love wholeheartedly, and have done so even when my feelings about “Choke Enough” were more complex. These tracks are both remixes, and taunted me a little for being the thing I always wanted her to do more of, but they also gave me some faith and a reason to come back, the thing I really wanted to recommend here all along.
bladee & Mechatok - Rainbow (make it double Oklou Mix)
Way back in 2021, there was already a lot of evidence that Oklou was someone deeply interested in pop construction and aesthetics. She had recently released her debut “Galore”, a pretty dull record that nonetheless feels like a dry run for many of the ideas that would come to flourish in “Choke Enough”, but that wasn’t all. For nearly a decade in the lead-up to this she had been releasing singles and EPs, initially self-released before a release on the trendy NUXXE label, all of this after having done her time in music conservatoires and choirs. It’s interesting going back through all of this early work, seeing an artist who hadn’t yet discovered her sound but clearly knows a lot about music, showing an eye for smart production tricks and a desire to reframe and recontextualise pop. The most obvious example of this is probably (“Dawn”)[https://youtu.be/7tKbQ_BS_-M?si=rZaKTty-iY_2fJ-Z], a very of-its-era piece that looks to imagine “Run Away With Me” as cavernous Tranceparty comedown anthem. I’m not convinced it works and it’s more than a little contrived, ur contrived :( but the track is certainly eyecatching, and evidence that perhaps I should never have relied on Oklou to give me the pure banger I wanted.
On the other hand, my first serious engagement with the musician was via her remix of (“Rainbow”)[https://youtu.be/Bl0nrcbMjI4?si=KKTLGICLy6U5Nm-0], one of the better tracks on bladee and Mechatok’s collaborative album. The original tune is kind of quaint, quirky even, built upon a squeaky, very “euro” beat that stomps along as bladee does his thing. Oklou’s treatment of the material is revelatory, turning it into the kind of surreal dream journey that he seems to be evoking in his lyrics. How? Well first she breaks it free of the rigidity that underpins the original, proposing an entirely new structure and form. Secondly, she takes the euphoric synth line that follows the original chorus and builds the whole track to be an ascending trance pop banger centred around it, the exact opposite approach she takes across her own material. Of course, being Oklou it isn’t quite that simple, Max respecting women's complexity omg and here the “make it double” of the title isn’t just a trifle. Starting with bladee’s repeated mantra planted in a gorgeous bed of warm synths, the track slowly grows before we hit the chorus and a new urgency takes hold, the beat rising and rising to a drop so close you can taste it, before it is ripped entirely from our grasp, the whole track dropping out as a vocal soundbite comes in. And then it starts up again, whirring, rumbling, even more lush than before, and we go back through the same verse, the same chorus, getting closer and closer to the end of the rainbow, and then it drops and it is perfect, and just as soon as the climax hits it is over, with Oklou herself providing a final version of the core hook to close us out.
It’s a strange track, one that nakedly combines its euphoric delights with a healthy dose of play oh is this why Ranka revealed their thoughts on "Play" and some real friction (it’s basically impossible to play in a club sadly). And yet whilst I could have asked the same thing of it that I did “Choke Enough” (“why not just give me the dance track?!”), like that album at its best there is a loving detail to the production here that is impossible to ignore, that makes it such a delight to spend time with. Under the YouTube video, Oklou herself jokingly comments “working on this caused me permanent lower eyelid twitch”, and honestly I kind of believe her. Every sound feels just right, and the amount of texture and depth feels staggering in comparison to the much more straightforward original track. It sounds like a labour of love, someone conjuring up a whole world in a remix. It’s the sort of track that had left me waiting for Oklou to give me something I love as much ever since.
Oklou - harvest sky ft. underscores (Milkfish remix)
And then 3 years later, the tables were turned. When I first heard “Choke Enough” and found myself feeling underwhelmed, one of the moments that calcified this feeling was hearing “harvest sky”, featuring underscores. It’s one of the tracks whose beat rises above a pulse, a lowkey dance track emerging from farty synths and pagan allusions, kept at a simmer by a very restrained vocal performance by Oklou. Of course, underscores isn’t somebody who does “restrained”, and within a line of her introduction is struggling to hold in an infectious, searing energy that I wish was matched anywhere else on the album.
So it makes sense that on being invited back to remix the track she featured on, underscores was always going to go full mask-off and turn it into a rager. It’s not complex or clever, Max minimizing Filipinas omg moving a little bit like the premier version of what might come up if you typed “harvest sky nightcore” into soundcloud, but wow does it bang. I’ve said it to death at this point, but I truly believe that Oklou loves this type of rave-first dance at its heart, and the bones of it are all over her music even when she’s not inclined to give it to you straight. Here underscores simply takes off the chains and gleefully throws open the door, letting “harvest sky” run free. We begin with a spare opening section, tempo clearly up but cards still held close to chest, before we are hit with a furious barrage of synths from which the central hook emerges accompanied by airhorns and hardstyle drums. There’s no huge structural tweaks here really, just a desire to turn every instrumental section of the original song into an enormous drop, channeling all of the latent rave energy into something that will turn a dancefloor on its head. It’s buoyant and infectious, the perfect type of victory lap follow-up to a success story like Oklou’s and one which gives me hope that maybe she’ll loosen the reins again every now and again, put one out especially for the suckers like me.
Andrew: Agazero - Dissidente
First of all I would just like to say many of my best friends are sound technicians and I respect all that they do.... this shit is so hype oh my god. My girlfriend sent this to me while I was in Amsterdam and it just worked its way into the rotation so easily, even with all the aforementioned new, and often lengthy, release we've had going on. She's trying to get me in on a general label deep dive with Halcyon Veil but I gotta work the Yokota out of my system first but if this and those Rabbit releases are anything to go by that's a gem label.
So what the fuck do DJ's actually do? Isn't going to the club best summarized as just playing to go home? Do you think Craves Vain Attention was named before or after discovering just how powerful that baseline was? How is this shit only 19 minutes long? Agazero's exploration of the inferninho is so cool, it's got reconstructed footwork, a reminder that Arca used to have crazy good production, and one of the coolest violin samples going. I wish I could see what some of these songs would be like sketched out over 5 minutes or more, but that's always a great sign. Can't believe I missed out on this when it dropped, hop on now!
I really did not have EBM revivalism on the bingo card but what's so fun about gyrofield is how she zags when everyone zigs. While I would have loved to know what her dub techno album would look like and what first single Great Jobs (Don't Wanna) points to, I am more than pleased with the industrial distortion on Mid Journey, a song that I keep finding new little twirls and flourishes on. You don't have to read the companion substack to get the general themes of the album, the whole 2026 of it all, but it is a glaring reminder gyrofield is still a 24 year old, something that the clarity of her releases generally elides. Burls gives a bit of a through line to her past works as the most DnB tune on here, with a shimmering effect I've had stuck in my head for the better part of two weeks now.
Still not a huge fan of Forced A Smile, even with the context the aforementioned substack provides. There's just always gonna be my hangups on the spoken word stuff, sorry! It does lead into Deafening Overdub, an incredibly ominous number that I feel does exhibit just how much she's working out of her system, the metronome flowing in and out of the track, more clattering on it's return, has a bit of that wonderful panic attack energy.
That metronome effect only speeds up on Ende, becoming a barrage of bleeps that power the album closer more than any part of the percussion, giving it a very urgent feel, particularly around the 2:30 mark when some bells start in the top of the mix to really round out the discontent. Great Jobs probably has the most downer vibes of anything I've covered on here so far? Maybe that's part of the reason it's so EBM instead of dubby, an attempt to pierce the veil of just how wrong everything feels right now, and that does make the album not really slide into my daily listening schedule as a lot of other current releases. But the dizzying drums on Ma Sacree keep calling me, so I keep carving out the space for Great Jobs,
Prism - Fallen Angel
Prism has really grown to be be my favorite Yokota alter ego, despite how good Ebi is (both as a food and a producer of the album Zen) Prism just ohhh Diamond Head just came on I love how much the first five seconds of every song on this album hits me like a truck still. Ok yeah Prism just has that little bit of extra energy to me, and as a resident Deep House Junkie I have to be truthful to myself. Metronome Melody's Acid House Licks give way to a lusher, warmer vibe, very much in conversation with what was going on in what we now call the Skintone series(we love retrofitting narratives to construct histories don't we folks), with album closer Simple Life almost directly leading into Will's latin house euphoria. Black or Color manages to finesse jungle into a nice back half change up, with some seemingly simple synth work gets slowed and throw'd into itself on Crystal Mist bringing the cool out jams back in play.
Circle Game has always reminded me of Donuts, probably because I first heard the two albums close to each other but that Heavy Percussion into a vocal sample just feels so Detroit to me. Also I guess with how both these albums have a twinge of psychedelic sounds but it doesn't really define them, and again how distinct the first few seconds of most of the tracks are. Not to be all ways of seeing (hearing?) with it, but I think the Prism releases in general and Fallen Angel specifically really work if you want to figure out what you are looking for in your various flavors of house/downtempo dance music. Yokota was making these as he was very much burned out of club life (not that I ever will) so Fallen Angel's Deep House as inquest nature makes sense, it's a a very reflective album, highlighted by the remix sections at the end, questioning how some of these tunes feel before you even are familiar with them yourself.
The way the bass chases the back end of the piano trill on Tears of Nymph is magic in how effortlessly it comes across, entire dub techno albums I quite like never hit that timing high. If someone can one day ask Shinichi Atobe what he thinks of Decalogue and what it did to him I would be so happy. As Liv mentioned, I may or may not think this pairs really well with the new Loidis album, so try that pairing out for yourself when you got four hours to kill if you love me.
Akii - Akii back
YUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP
Kiosk Radio x Lot Radio - Amsterdam Dance Event @ Doka Studios
If you are ever in Amsterdam and see an event at Doka take the plunge, another great sound system going on, and a nicely laid out little space. Was an 8 hour long party and I spent maybe 90 minutes of it off the dance floor, none of which was during Livwutangs sexy scorcher of a set, mixing RnB, Deep House, Afrobeats, and much more that confused some of the annoyingly British men in the crowd but was just a great time for me. While I am happy that she's seemingly succeeding at becoming another member of the Brooklyn to Berlin pipeline, I will miss getting to see her once a month.
Sorry I am a bit scatterbrained in my writing this week, blame the jetlag/my alarming descent into an XCOM 2 Long War campaign, we will see all of you for a very special Volume 10!
