:Episode One Hundred Sixty-One: 10.25.2019
| Artist | Title | Album |
|---|---|---|
| Twink w/ Moths & Locusts | Sara from the Sahara | Think Pink IV |
| Tunes of Negation | The World Is a Stage / Reach the Endless Sea | Reach the Endless Sea |
| NANI ∞ GURU | Nebula In The Pocket | Vovivizm Vol. 1.5 |
| France Sauvage | Brex me down | L’homme à zéro |
| Ka Baird | The Orion Arm | Respires |
| Chris & Cosey | The Gates of Ancient Cities | Trance |
| Teebs | Atoms Song | Anicca |
| Zann | Gaya's Gone | Strange Ways / Inside Jungle |
| Francis Plagne | III | Rural Objects |
| Kreidler | Eurydike | Flood |
| Sunn O))) | Ampliphædies (E) | Pyroclasts |
| Deathprod | Occultation 1 | Occulting Disk |
| Zonal | Alien Within | Wrecked |
| Lankum | Bear Creek | The Livelong Day |
| Sol Oosel | Fare Il Proprio (Autres Directions) | En allégeance à l'inconnaissable |
Listen on Spotify
* Not on Spotify:
NANI ∞ GURU - Nebula In The Pocket (Acid Mothers side-project alert)
France Sauvage - Brex me down
Description
Among the highlights of this week's show:
A track from the debut album of Tunes of Negation, the incredible new project from the electronic music producer Shackleford (known mostly for dubstep, but, as I point out during the show, a variety that sounds much closer to Burial, say, than Skrillex) which takes elements of 4th World and kosmische and... any number of other influences (I even hear a bit of Nina Hagen in some of the operatic female vocals) and re-contextualizes them for a contemporary audience (i.e. doesn't make them sound too overtly retro) in a manner that I find quite singular and compelling. It's so good, in fact, it even made me break one of my rules for the show, whereby if I play a track from an album, I can't play anything else from it for at least 6-12 months (my reasoning, to co-opt a Latin phrase (that I know from the NYT Crossword, like nearly all my highfalutin cultural references) is "music longa, show brevis"). I played the lead-off single on a show a few months ago, but put it toward the end, and after listening to the album itself, and being completely floored by it, wanted to give it the attention I think it deserves.
The most recent album by Ka Baird, a wild freakout that reminds me of NNCK, Finnish outsider noise à la Kemialliset Ystävät or Uton, and even the godmother of avant-garde rock herself, the inimitable Yoko Ono. This style of "freak-folk," as it was labeled by the music press (even though it's not typically all that folk-y) seemed to reach peak cultural relevance about a decade and a half ago, with the success of Animal Collective (who immediately ditched that sound and became the acid house Beach Boys), Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom, and then (to my disappointment) faded almost immediately from view. So it heartens me that it still has a few torchbearers.
A Halloween half-block (which for my show generally means no more than 2-3 songs) of dooooooooooooom, from three of the modern masters of the genre, Sunn O))), Deathprod, and Zonal. The latter two, being more electronic-oriented, tend, for whatever reason, to be classified not as doom but rather as "dark ambient." It's a label that isn't unfair, but that I find slightly inapt, as their sound is not nearly subtle enough to be considered ambience. Hence I tend to think of them more as... just doom. But electronic. (There have, in the past, been attempts to label this genre more precisely, but all the suggested names - electro-doom, doomtronica - make me think of the soundtrack to the original Blade, and other artifacts of the pop-culture of the late-90s, which I consider the aesthetic nadir of the past 50 or so years).