10-11-20
The Sundays ~ Here’s Where the Story Ends
Aaron Spectre ~ Impeach the Prez
Eugene Chadbourne ~ Der Fuehrer’s Face
Neil Cicierega ~ Superkiller
Bubblegum Octopus ~ Tough Guys’ Club
Beverly Glenn-Copeland ~ Ever New
Laraaji ~ Lifting Me
Loris S. Sarid ~ Toad
Grapefruit ~ Sokal Affair
Botany ~ Quiet Down
Pursuit Grooves ~ War Crimes In Space
Pure Rave ~ Loud Jackin House Jam Band
Rian Treanor ~ Opponent Process
Mark Fell ~ Manitutshu 1.3 Razorwire Dub
Eduardo de la Calle ~ Dead Tribute
Eki Shola’s fourth album Essential, the final third of a trilogy that began with 2019’s Possible, is much more vocal-driven than her earlier releases. While continuing with her earlier album’s themes of hope, healing, and comforting, this one has more direct, specific lyrics, drawing from her own life experiences as well as commenting on relevant social issues. The beginning of the album, however, is more of a series of healing exercises, with wordless vocals building in waves over slowly unfolding rhythms for the first two tracks. Subsequent songs are about freedom of thought and expression, with “Shattered Boundaries” giving a reminder that there’s no wrongs when it comes to creativity. “Ignorance Veil” is a huge rush of thoughts regarding global warming, reducing carbon footprints, loving nature but feeling like a hypocrite for contributing to its polluted state, restriction of women’s rights, and other issues which are certainly important to discuss, but can also put a toll on one’s mental health if dwelled on too much without any form of productive release or pause for decompression. “Eco-anxiety” touches on similar themes while also mentioning her desire to have a career breakthrough and make it as a musician. “Gift of Grief” (included in two versions) goes deeper into this autobiographical train of thought, mentioning her Tiny Desk appearance and other highlights that keep her going as an artist. Then “Change the System” more specifically relates to the coronavirus outbreak and our currently changing world, calling for universal health care and stressing the need for all of us to band together and make it happen. “Pause” wraps it all up with a reminder to step back from everything and relax from time to time; don’t overlook the importance of self-care. Musically, the album has some more jazzy, sophisticated, or experimental moments, with touches of drum’n’bass or trap rhythms or dubby effects on some tracks, but it never gets aggressive, and never distracts from the lyrics when they’re present.
I’ll be honest, I tend to avoid the majority of things that become hugely popular on the internet. I really can’t stand memes or most things that end up being described as viral hits, especially anything that’s supposed to be humorous. I’m not sure if it’s because I just don’t have a sense of humor anymore, or I chose to remain sober, or I don’t care for celebrities or pop culture or anything of the sort. I don’t understand why I’m like this, I don’t claim to be smarter than anyone or high brow or anything like that. Why should I act like I’m above watching cartoons or loving pop music? But with all that in mind, 20 years ago I was a high school student and I loved watching all of the weird Flash animations that ended up being staples of the pre-YouTube internet. All Your Base Are Belong to Us was a big one, of course, that dumb one with the squirrel that I still actually think about all the time, and the entire genre of Animutations that Neil Cicierega single-handedly invented with this masterpiece of culture-jamming absurdity. After a year or two I completely tuned out of this sort of thing, but my sister kept in touch with Neil and I’d occasionally hear about some of the things he did which ended up becoming huge online. For whatever reason, though, he didn’t cross my radar again until his mashup albums started doing the rounds, and getting WFMU airplay and all that. Since 2014’s Mouth Sounds, the arrival of each of these mixtapes has been a major event, and while a lot of the individual tracks on them can be hit-or-miss for me, I just find it jaw-dropping the way he draws connections between certain pop culture artifacts, and how elaborate his concepts and arrangements are. Mouth Dreams starts out by finding nuances in the Yahoo jingle that its creators likely never had considered. An early highlight is “Just a Baby”, which dices Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” lyrics over a freaking Hoobastank song, adds some Justin Bieber in the chorus, and strangely makes it sounds vaguely shoegazy. The lyrics gradually get more and more ridiculous (“stuck in baby prison”, “I shot a train, but that train was just a car” “Just a baby drinking coffee”, etc). It’s dumb, it’s blasphemy, it shouldn’t work, and it’s laugh out loud hysterical. “Psycho Killer” over “Superfreak” sounds like something that was probably done at least once during the Boom Selection blog era, but most mashup artists probably would’ve just done a simple A + B blend with maybe a few DSP tweaks here and there. This one has a lot of fun cutting up Byrne’s paranoid lyrics, especially the ones about his bed being on fire. And obviously it’s incredibly funky and would actually work at a party, and people might not even notice something’s fishy unless they were really paying attention. “Ribs” is almost painfully meta, seamlessly blending that Chili’s jingle with “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, and throwing Marilyn Manson in there because, well, do the math. Tracks like “Sleepin'” display Neil’s gift for making a dumb song sound even dumber through the power of repetition, as well as cutting in an awkward lyric as many times as possible (not Neil, but see also this classic for a similar example). “Cannibals” and “The Outsiders” demonstrate his deep fascination with production bumpers, stock sound effects, and voice-overs, and then “Whitehouse” grafts Jack White onto Raymond Scott’s perennial cartoon soundtrack favorite “Powerhouse” and scores a ton of Detroit-area music dork points. The classical mashups at the end are a bit of a stretch, but the modem squeal at the end is a nice touch, and ties in with the cover art… look closely. And WAKE UP.
Aaron Spectre has been on a roll with all of his recent releases, but this one hit me so hard that I think it might just be my favorite thing he’s ever done. He describes it as “🍄 80% chiptune, 20% noise 🍄”, and it’s a whirlwind of LSDJ-processed breaks, Chuck D samples, robot speech, 8-bit bleeps, and screeching noise. It’s hyperactive, rage-filled, funky, convoluted, and just straight-up fun. “Impeach the Prez” might be the craziest one, but really they’re all explosive and mind-blowing. Well, “Take It Back” is shorter and not quite as hectic. The other tracks, though, too much. A definite flashback to the early Amiga days of breakcore, and one of my favorite recent releases of the genre.
ESP Summer (or E.S.P. Neighborhood, or ESP Continent) is Pale Saints’ Ian Masters and His Name Is Alive’s Warren Defever. The two released a 1995 album which remains well-regarded among dream pop aficionados, a more abstract 10″ EP (which I prefer to the album), and a 1997 7″ EP, and eventually a digital complete discography in 2009. They’ve continued to collaborate remotely (Masters lives in Japan, Defever is a Detroit-area native), and they’ve entirely unexpectedly released two recordings on Bandcamp so far this year. Here is a 4-track EP which is far more dream than pop. Gentle acoustic guitar melodies are threaded throughout, but the tracks make heavy usage of field recordings and strange textures. “Guitar & Mirage” is a bit closer to the noisier moments of HNIA’s Return to Never, but blasted wide open. “Water & Piano & Birds” has all of those things, but there’s also a barely audible phone message which may or may not date from HNIA’s 4AD days.
ESP Summer: 天国の王国
天国の王国 (or Kingdom of Heaven) is more song-based, starting out with Masters drowsily sighing “the kingdom of heaven is within you” while being serenaded by a Cocteau-school drum machine waltz and blankets of guitar effects. “熊虫” alternates between fuzzy dripping, ethereal piano vapor, and (for a brief moment) more of an aggressive stomp, with Defever’s guitars having the same type of raw bite that they did back on Livonia. “宇宙” revisits the lyrical theme of the first track, but surrounds it with a panorama of flutes, knocky percussion, and spindling guitars, then douses it with some frosty feedback. Then it turns into a nostalgic ballroom dream montage, and eventually the windswept guitar comes drifting back in, elevating it all into something dramatic and mournful. Masters delivers his mystic message one final time on the last track, starting out with clear vocals and trippy guitars before drifting to a reserved coda.
Jordana LeSesne is a legitimate pioneer of American drum’n’bass. She was highly active as 1.8.7 throughout the mid-to-late ’90s, played at countless clubs and raves, and received a huge amount of college radio airplay, as well as exposure on MTV’s AMP, which is how I discovered her music when I was in high school. If you aren’t familiar with her back story, her Wikipedia page and this recent-ish interview posted on LGBTQ site them. are essential reads. Also, her old albums and most of her 12″s on Jungle Sky are all available on Discogs for dirt cheap; I noticed I didn’t have The Cities Collection so I just bought a sealed copy for $3. She’s posted tracks on Soundcloud for the past decade, and a couple months ago she launched a Bandcamp page filled with newer work and rarely heard older material. Full Colour is an unreleased fourth album dating from around the same time as The Cities Collection, and like that album, it all has an intense, live-sounding feel, as it was all made using hardware and samplers recorded to DAT. The tracks are complex, elaborate, and HARD. Each track almost sounds like a DJ set condensed into 7 minutes; there’s just so many elements moving in and out of the mix, from jazzy guitars to twisted breaks to phone message samples to filtered vocals to rave riffs. There’s some calmer parts here and there but this is definitely not the type of drum’n’bass that would’ve wound up in car commercials or trendy cocktail bars around Y2K. This is strictly a relic of the underground scene, like her first 3 albums, and it all sounds just as vital today. Favorite tracks include “Strange Bird”, “Tidal Surge”, and “Annihilate”, a bonus track originally released under the name murder0ne on a rare 12″ in 1998. I totally would’ve lost my mind if I’d heard these back then.
Jordana: Numerology
The second release on her Bandcamp is Numerology, a collection of tracks from 2003, when she was living in England and spinning garage as Lady J. She explains that she was descending into poverty and had limited equipment to record these tracks, but there’s no sacrifice in quality. The title track is a lush roller, perhaps with a bit more space to breathe than some of her earlier work, but still swift and exciting. “Chemistry” (with vocalist Gabriella Hardy) and “Finalé” are glimpses into Jordana’s pop side, while “Without a Trace” is a turbo-charge darkside rave nightmare, and the two tracks surrounding it are breathless future-ragga blasters. “Dirty Basses (aka Boo’s Tune)” indeed has some vicious, filthy bass, hard as anything she’d done prior.
Jordana: Resistencia E.P.
Finally, Resistencia E.P. is a preview of Jordana’s upcoming album, consisting of tracks mostly written a few years ago. These are all strong, intensely detailed tracks in the newer, more hi-definition d’n’b style, filled with even sharper details and a grander, more epic feel. “Rainbows Not Enough (It All Goes Dark)” is a particular tour de force, especially during the middle where it flicks between metal guitars, softer guitars, dubstep roars, electro breaks, and then of course there’s her lyrics directed at the source of her misery. “OVNI (Ever Present)” is a 9-minute epic revisiting the UFO-related themes of her first album, When Worlds Collide, filled with levitating trance synths and loads of samples of military and airline communications. All of these releases are quality and well worth supporting. Black Trans Lives Matter.
The seventh studio album from Stephen O’Malley and Peter Rehberg’s KTL project is a completely stand-alone work unrelated to theatre, film, or installations. It consists of five disorienting pieces which merge sickly strings with hazy feedback and electrifying noise, sliding and swirling like a sort of gigantic radioactive lava lamp. “Lee’s Garlic” is the only short track, and it’s one of the more busy, destructive ones, but the others stretch out for extended mind alterations. The first side is much more caustic, trippy, and frankly quite head-spinning at times, particularly “Silver Lining”. The second side calms down for a while with the 14-minute “Tea With Kali”, but then “Frostless” edges back into the brain-frying zone again, applying a heady layer of fuzz to warm, oscillating drones, with the results being more pleasant than frightening.
Electro innovator and longtime Ostgut Ton/Panorama Bar regular Steffi revisits an obscure alias for her first release on Dark Entries, fitting in with the label’s ethos and exploring her dark new wave and EBM-influenced side. “Gravitational Field” has a sprightly metallic bounce with shades of ominous clouds overhead, and “Scalar Property” is more of an injection of cruising Detroit electro-funk. “Family of Waves” is where things get grittier, with a rigid minimal-synth beat kicking the track off, then gets elevated with creeping, bubbling synths, keeping paranoid thoughts in the back of its mind but losing itself in club energy. “Diffusion of Heat” has more of a steady house beat, and similarly keeps a balance of effervescence and sinister feelings.
10-4-20
Molchat Doma ~ Toska
Jordana ~ Tidal Surge
The Terrorist ~ RK1
Sully ~ Swandive
The Fear Ratio ~ LM3
Botany ~ Once We Die
Pure Rave ~ ᴮ¹
Laurie Tompkins ~ Sweat
Satans Tornade ~ 03.DAT.128
Forrest Fang ~ Chasing Stars
Eduardo De La Calle: Mindfulness Hipernormalisation
The Madrid-born producer adds to his discography of well over 100 releases with a full-length of paranoid abstractions accompanied by ultra-creepy cover art (although the vinyl version has a generic white sleeve with a sticker at the top). Way different from the various forms of techno and house he usually makes, this is far closer to Y2K-era IDM, with skittering beats and calm ambient melodies, resembling dozens of thoughts at once, some more still and contemplative, others racing ceaselessly. When things calm down and straighten up a bit, it’s for a peppy ode to cryptocurrency called “Get Used to Electronic Money Happily”. Following a slightly twisted requiem called “End of a Generation”, the album returns to braindance-y beats and melodies with “The Getaway”, then later mellows out a little with “Chords From My Own Narcissism”. The album is based on a documentary called The HiperNormalisation which I haven’t seen, but it stands on its own as an inventive, hyper-aware soundtrack to a changing world.
The Answer Is In The Beat 