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YtamoHuman Ocean
'Like a snowglobe shaken up to reveal a dazzling array of seasons contained within, MI WO is a strange and surprising trinket. It contains multitudes, seemingly endless strains of modern electronic thought and musical progression, but in the end, MI WO stands for nothing but itself. You can gaze into MI WO and see colors, textures, worlds, ideologies, or you can close your eyes and see MI WO for what it simply is. To behold MI WO is to know MI WO.'-- Ytamo
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18+Dry
'Much of the aura surrounding duo 18+ was built upon dying anonymity. From their early YouTube videos of anonymous, bikini-clad avatars, video game re-edits, and hooded figures over keyboards, the pair crafted a non-narrative through three mixtapes, hours of emotional labor in affective R&B crooning without face or body. Fifty songs in, we found love in a hopeless place, a vacuum of uncanny devices turned autoerotic infinities all screaming in unison, “Desire. Desire. Desire.” But all that changed with the release of their first proper full-length, 2014’s Trust. While for the first time the pair appeared without disguise, bold and unflinching in album art monochrome, Trust was, at its center, a rejection of binaries between “real” and “anonymous,” between the desirability of the avatar and the readymade decry of modernity with every verification captcha. Bold and precarious, the album repackaged 14 tracks from the duo’s mixtapes into an uncanny problematization of URL vs. IRL, authentic vs. selling out vs. whatever else could exist when we’re forced to confront anything beyond the limits of stock characters and hyperbolic internet anger. It’s Zizek’s “Virtual as Real” accelerated by 20 years, “Virtual” as “Real” in an endless cycle of sardonic air quotes, a case-by-case-by-case-by-case infinity on dizzying, unapologetic internet time.'-- Rob Arcand
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Tim HeckerCastrati Stack
'I started out with a concept, which is to fully eviscerate and interrogate the voice. I started with ripping medieval choral motifs, this composer Josquin des Prez, late 15th century. I don't know if you know about Melodyne, but there's technology now, you can literally rescore any piece of digital audio and its polyphonic contents … for sheet music. So you can take a Justin Bieber song through an MP3 and write it for digital saxophone or something. The software writes it. And that allows that game of appropriation and origin and source to become much more muted and vague and confusing and plastic. You can pitch it down one octave, you can stretch it out. Like the Bieber saxophone … what if you stretch it out 10 times longer? It does not become Bieber. It's like a whole bunch of more interesting conversations than sampling and dealing with the burden of that source material. … I gave Jóhann treatments of these 15th century pieces. So, I took Josquin des Prez and I pitched it down seven tones and stretched it out and pulled out some notes I didn't like. And he then wrote choral arrangements for these mutant pieces.'-- Tim Hecker
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The BodyWanderings
'With No One Deserves Happiness, Portland metal experimentalists The Body don’t add any new elements to their sound or introduce any new collaborators. Instead, they reconfigure their core elements — Chip King’s self-waged war between his shrieks and thick sheets of riff-noise, Lee Buford’s man-machine hammer, frequent collaborator Chrissy Wolpert’s vocals and chorus arrangements —and conscript them into their widening vision of the spot where metal intersects with other dark genres. Wolpert’s contributions over the years makes her almost a third member, and on Happiness she fights against the usual notion of women metal vocalists as pretty voices in the background or magnets for male gaze by becoming the confrontational center. The Body have often lashed out at the world through envisioning its end, and Wolpert turns that anxiety inward, proving that, yes, they can get more uncomfortable. The songs in which she has the heaviest hand are Happiness’ most powerful. Her chants of "go it alone" throughout leadoff track "Wanderings" feel like a visceral reminder of unremitting horror, and her chamber-pop instincts take on an alien tinge next to King’s shrill wail.'-- Andy O'Connor
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Bitchin Bajas and Bonnie Prince BillyDespair is Criminal
'Epic Jammers and Fortunate Little Ditties is absolutely a jam session—an improvisational democracy where everyone has equal footing. Oldham takes a step back here, letting himself become part of the greater stew of Gamelan instruments, organ, synthesizer, and acoustic guitars. Nobody takes a full-on solo; they meander, coming in with a prominent contribution before drifting back to the sidelines. Everything repeats multiple times for swirling, serene eight-minute stretches. Repetition is key to Bitchin Bajas' sound—they thrive when they're given maximum space, taking time to experiment and explore different pockets of a song. In photos from the recording sessions, you can see Oldham sitting cross-legged on the floor with the band, all four of them playing assorted keyboards. Dan Quinlivan and Cooper Crain twist knobs; Rob Frye's flute lies close at hand in case the right moment presents itself. (On several occasions, it does.) This is Bitchin Bajas' ideal, off-the-cuff zone. They revel in the freedom to chase a sound "based on the energy" of a given moment.'-- Evan Minster
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The RangeFive Four
'James Hinton uses samples like he invented the entire concept. The Brooklyn-based producer, who just released his second album as the Range, doesn’t do anything with the technique we haven’t heard before. Quite the opposite in fact—the songs on Potential touch on instrumental hip-hop, dubstep, twinkling electro-pop, and more, and they’re defined above else by their immediate familiarity. But Hinton dives into his samples with the verve of a producer who just this morning discovered the jolt of creative joy that comes from flipping a vocal fragment just so and finding a way to repeat it that brings a cascading wave of emotion. His work may not feel new, but it crackles with a sense of discovery.'-- Mark Richardson
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InnsyterCoffin Time
'We can act with technology for technology, or we can act with technology for us. Syncopation can be metaphysical or clinical — it depends on your point of view. Actress’s Ghettoville was, like a Brutalist hospital, a healing place that some feared to enter. The stream of 12-inch releases from Brooklyn’s Long Island Electrical Systems over the past couple years has left many bodies sweaty and strangely aroused. Sometimes I listen to (L.A. Club Resource label head) Delroy Edwards’s SLOWED DOWN FUNK tapes and think about sinning. Sometimes I listen to Container’s LP and think about never writing anything again. Like all of these reference points, Innsyter’s debut album cultivates errancy into a vibrant life form and shapes noisy unities into ecstatic mixtures. The distortion many producers toil thanklessly to purge from their mixes becomes a compositional touchstone. But Innsyter's Poison Life repels comparison to other works just as easily as it invites association with a musical tendency. Again: poison has no history on the timeline of separate events. Errant syncopation is a denial of the metaphysical urge to distinguish between machines that create and machines that copy.'-- Will Neibergall
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WinkieAt Night They Dreamed Of Revenge
'An album shrouded in dark shadows, cold nights and industrial noise, Come To My Party dredges up not so much those long, drawn out summers that seemed to last forever but instead those nights when your parents would argue viciously until dawn, or those times when next door’s massive German Shepherd would growl at you before eating your ice cream cone from your hand, or the sheer distress of your sister catching chicken pox not too long before your birthday party. And that’s before we even consider the weapons grade levels of bullying and gauntlets run at school. Not that this is an album that overtly concerns itself with such matters, but on a surface level, Come To My Party is what Todd Solondz’s Welcome To The Doll House would sound like in sonic form. The eight songs contained here are the noises in your head when confronted with emotional oppression, a mechanised grind that taunts and pokes at your very psyche. The vocals, as delivered by the mono named Gina, are childlike in their delivery and more akin to the whine of an infant tugging at its mother’s sleeve demanding sweets when none will be forthcoming. But what really adds to the sense of menace that pervades this collection is that those vocals are compressed and battered to the extent that they sound like messages from the netherworld.'-- Julian Marszalek
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DJWWWWHometown
'The sounds of Arigato move in every direction, on all sides, with the ponderous frenzy of a ancient city or colosseum, bursting, merging, or avoiding one another, taking up sonic mass, drowning in the vaporization of their own phenomena. If you want to don your trench coat & tommy gun, take up thy magnifying glass & investigate this album’s microcosms; it beckons you forth, like the ring in Lord of the Rings. But, you don’t have to, of course. Because, like a fresh crime scene, with footprints & fingerprints, there’s a narrative to all the commotion, juice-pressing you into its Japanese-style noir-collage. This album investigates, as much as it can, the complexity of a future with no future. Sampling becomes not a nostalgic weapon but a surgical one: placing a sound here, or there, with tweezers so small that the sounds get lost in the digital stream’s incision, the digital beams of light lighting our faces on our smart phones. In these kinds of blizzards, there are escalators, escape routes, & emergency exits: ways for us to cling onto the sample, using it topographically, or, vice-versa, passing it by, & getting entangled in the mania.'-- Tiny Mix Tapes
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Ash KooshaBiutiful
'With the sort of freneticism and energy that is becoming customary in modern electronic music (think Arca, Brood Ma, or Oneohtrix Point Never's latest mish-mashing of styles), Iranian-born, London-based producer Ash Koosha rips his way through all notions of genre, identity and idiom on I AKA I; an exploration of music traditions twisted inside out through technology. Taking inspiration both from his homeland, which he had to leave as an asylum seeker after spending time in jail, and the modern Gotham of the UK's capital, Koosha has synthesised a wealth of sounds into a new form of electronica that defies easy categorization. The idea of East meeting West in music has long animated the minds of musicians and composers, from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and their album of the same name to Fatima Al Qadiri's "sinogrime" album Asiatisch, but Koosha takes a novel approach in dissolving both archetypes into one another, avoiding the potential pitfall of focusing solely on a mannered interpretation of a particular form of exoticism. I AKA I isn't an attempt to capture the elusive mystery or charm of Persian music using the codes and language of Western electronica, but a cohesive whole born equally of the DNA of each. The album's title hold the key, as if Koosha is saying that whilst he uses a pseudonym of sorts (his real name is Ashkan Kooshanejad), his music is deeply personal, a reflection of himself without obfuscation, and as such his grasp on the diverse strands of influence within it is complete and without artifice.'-- Joseph Burnett
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Horse LordsMacaw
'Over the two years since their critically acclaimed self-titled debut, Horse Lords have become fixtures on the American DIY scene, touring with Matmos, Guerilla Toss, and Guardian Alien, and playing festivals such as Hopscotch, NXNE, and Fields Fest. Recorded and mixed by Chris Freeland (Wye Oak, Lower Dens), on Hidden Cities Horse Lords square the circle, making music that is alternately tight and loose, real-time risky and process oriented, reconciling the sweaty force of a killer basement show with the icy precision of conservatory training. A floor burner at their live shows, “Macaw” builds rhythmic tension and release before coalescing into a unison burst of festivity and abandon. Bernstein’s woodblock figure pulls away from Haberman’s steady beat and the resulting groove plays out like a krautrock duel-in-the-sand between two offset patterns competing for dominance in a vivid strobe effect. By the ten-minute mark, Gardner’s guitar hits a Bo-Diddley-meets-Group-Doueh sweet spot and the track lifts off in a final spiral of ensemble unison hammering.'-- nna tapes
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Robert PollardMy daughter yes she knows
'For his first solo album of 2016, Of Course You Are, Pollard’s picked a good one: Nick Mitchell, a member of Pollard’s current side project Ricked Wicky who also produced the album. Mitchell’s production hews closer to the major-label slickness of Isolation Drills than the broken-speaker effect of the Bee Thousand era, Pollard’s vocals coming in clearly while resting comfortably in the middle of the mix. But Ricked Wicky’s—and presumably Mitchell’s—prog-rock influence comes through most clearly in the instrumentation. Straightforward guitar-rock tunes like opener “My Daughter Yes She Knows” are adorned with arpeggios and other fancy flourishes, and “Instant Pandemonium” coalesces Pollard’s recent obsession with classic rock into a rousing series of power chords evoking long-haired rocker dudes in wood-paneled basements. Beyond the guitars, Of Course You Are gets even more adventurous. More so than prog, the prevailing influence seems to be late ’60s pop: Minor-key ballad “Come And Listen” is backed by orchestral strings that lend poignancy to Pollard’s raw vocals, subtle organ hovers in the background of the mid-tempo track “The Hand That Holds You,” and the psychedelic electronic soundscape swirling behind twin acoustic tracks “Contemporary Man (He Is Our Age)” and “Losing It” nudges the record into Elephant 6 territory.'-- A.V. Club
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Not WavingHead Body
'Alessio Natalizia has been on our radar for what seems like forever, operating under a variety of guises: the dreamy, distorted romance of Banjo or Freakout, his Kompakt-signed cosmic dance duo WALLS with Sam Willis, and most recently the prolific Not Waving, a channel for his post-punk and EBM-skewed passions. Hooking up with Diagonal last year gave Natalizia a welcoming home for his increasingly fierce and off-kilter club music, finding common ground with label boss Powell’s deconstructed take on ‘80s industrial, no wave, acid and freak music of all stripes. His first album for the label, Animals, came out last week and is easily one of the most diverse and satisfying records in Diagonal’s history.' -- Fact Magazine
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Lust For YouthBetter Looking Brother
'Over the past five or six years we have seen a proliferation of stylish, sonically innovative bands from Denmark building adoring fan bases over here. Iceage, First Hate, Communions, and Damien Dubrovnik (Christian Stadsgaard and Lust For Youth's Loke Rahbek) have all found widespread appeal outside of Denmark. With Lust For Youth's latest album, the trio from Copenhagen have firmly positioned themselves at the top of the pile. Their sixth album Compassion is something of a departure from their previous work. In many ways the album signals the apotheosis of their transition from an industrial-tinged synth band to the polished synth-pop group they are now. When Rahbek, and later, Malthe Fischer joined the band, they could have retreated further into harsh industrial sounds, but instead they have moved towards a more upbeat and, at times, more melancholic, emotionally sincere mode. The sound of Compassion and their recent work holds meticulous, clean production as a more important attribute of their music than the low-fi sound of both their previous releases and Rahbek's side project Damien Dubrovnik.'-- Christopher Sanders
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Ceramic TLThis Looks Just Like It, The Answer To My Prayers
'Recording as Egyptrixx, Toronto's David Psutka helped to define the sound of London's Night Slugs label. His albums Bible Eyes and A/B Til Infinity took techno rhythms, gleaming synth melodies, and noxious ambient atmospheres and spun them into exciting new variants. His new project Ceramic TL represents a break with Egyptrixx's style: The beats are gone and the melodies have run dry; with an emphasis on buzzing drones and detuned bell tones, it's all atmosphere, and it is more noxious than ever, heady as huffing aerosol.'-- Philip Sherborne
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New Dreams Ltd.Blue Earth
'Sleepline is more than a meager revisiting of vaporwave by an artist accountable for some of its most captivating releases. Initially assembled in 2013, this collection is neither a rehash of past compositional ideas nor a tribute to them; it’s a coherent and distinctive assemblage that identifies how Xavier has shifted her approach to curation. Each track is sewn together in a way that seamlessly unites the various mediums of source material, and where these sounds might otherwise dissolve into the background and fall away from our lives forever, there exists something sensual and structured within their anonymity (provided that you are unfamiliar with the manipulated languages that have been used). As “Blue Earth” remains perhaps the most stirring and emotional piece of music I’ve heard this year, Xavier makes it clear that this is more than a timely flashback.'-- Birkut
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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. Very glad his work interested you. Oh, that piece by you looks excellent. I'll read it post-haste. Everyone, Mr. E has written a very fine looking think and memory piece called 'One Upon a Time in WeHo or My Body, My “Selves”', and you are strongly encouraged to read it by clicking this. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Ah, that is the right park, cool. Yes, it looks like it's in pretty good shape with just a very enticing post-life gloominess. If you go, yes, please, I would love it if your camera borrowed moments of your eyesight. I don't remember the female character in 'TPiNP' very well, but your characterization rings true. It is awfully nice to be working on my novel again finally, yes. How did your thesis work and relaxing friend-time go? My day was working on stuff mostly, and making a couple of plans to see and do stuff. Copies of the French edition of 'The Marbled Swarm' exist as of yesterday, and I have to go spend the afternoon at my publisher's office signing copies to send out to reviewers. The French, or at least my publisher, have this funny, charming tradition where authors are asked to sign review copies of their books complete with personal notions to the reviewers. In the US, that would seem like an attempted bribe or something, but here it's expected and not doing it would apparently be taken as rudeness by the reviewers. Curious. Have a superb day! ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. I'm so pleased that Hannah's work interests you. I don't know if it was clear but Hannah has an ongoing series of paintings that feature 'Hardy Boys'-like young sleuths of his invention called The Shipwreck Boys. There were three of those paintings in the show. Yeah, I am so unspeakably lucky vis-à-vis my French publisher. You basically can ask anyone here to say what's the best French publishing house, and they'll immediately say Editions POL. ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey! It's really good to see you, man! Well, my new literary gif work drops here on Friday. I'm not sure if I'll do another book of them. Maybe. I had felt like I had maxed out the literary gif form in 'Zac's Control Panel', but I'm still driven to make new ones that do new things, and I've managed maybe 4 or 5 since 'ZCP' that I'm very happy with. Paris is good. Settled ... oh, you mean post the attacks? Pretty much, yeah. Feels pretty normal again, but the stuff happening in Brussels right now is spooking people here. I don't know of 'Wake in Fright', but I'll hunt down info on it at the very least. I'm working on my novel again after about a year and a half break, so that's the big news, for me at least. Take care, man. ** Bill, Hi. Yeah, Zac and I will introduce the film at Alamo Drafthouse and do a q&a afterwards so we'll be there. I'm not sure for how long. It's happening at a busy time. But, yeah, I'll get to see you, I hope. Awesome! ** Unknown/Pascal, Hi. Well, yeah, I'm the world's luckiest guy. Interesting question. I don't know. All I've been told is about how a lot of the machinations in the novel had to be more submerged and semi-glossed over in the French version. No one's mentioned what might have arisen in French. That's an exciting idea. I'll ask. I hope your mother will be going okay while you're there. It's very good of you to go, obviously. Well, I'll look forward to seeing you whenever the occasion and impetus and signal arises on your end. Safe trip. ** _Black_Acrylic, Huh, I did not know that about your history as an artist, Ben. That's very interesting. Do you no longer have any interest in pursuing your former style? ** Steevee, Hi. Ha ha, I see lows that low on Facebook every day, but, yeah, that's a gross one. My feed was relatively calm for four or five days until the AIPAC thing yesterday, which was obviously going to make everyone there who's into turning the election into a stress test reposition themselves and start yelling again, and so it did! Great about seeing the Akerman and writing about it and the doc. I have to wait for a subtitled version to see it, but Zac saw it and loved it. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Very pleased you liked the art show. No, it sounds like you got it. Hannah's work is pretty 'what you see'. Big up on the Wrestlemania visit. I hope whoever you and LPS want to win will win. Your days don't sound so different from mine apart from the gym thing, and I'm not boring, I don't think, so I think you're aren't either probably? ** Kyler, Hi. Oh, yeah? I don't mind endless single paragraphs without quotations but it has be done amazingly and few can. I think my instinct to skip that novel sounds like the right one, so I'll keep on not keeping on. Thanks for the input/output. I know nothing about this 'American Psycho' musical. This is the first I've heard of it. Hm. ** Okay. I've been listening to some new music that I like, and I thought I would share the shit out of some stuff from that current playlist by making you a gig post. You know what and what not to do with it, so do that. See you tomorrow.