Hello again,
Welcome to issue #8 of Crow’s Nest, and thank you for reading/opening it as usual. I’m a bit surprised I’m even writing this now given how the past few weeks have gone, yet here I am. I didn’t feel up for writing last week and work was fairly brutal this week but I have this Sunday for myself. In general things are still not exactly great but there does seem to be a palpable sense of things easing up and getting better. Which isn’t nothing.
I don’t have a whole lot to say about Daft Punk breaking up, the big music news story from the past week or so. My short-term memory is kinda shot for remembering of-the-moment things from even a short while ago; this newsletter is brought to you by my ingrained habits of my music-tracking spreadsheet, ever expanding Bandcamp wishlist and inability to close tabs on my phone and laptop. It feels weird to write this but Daft Punk were a bit “before my time” as I was too young to know/care about/go to their pyramid shows so I’ve only got the Daft Hands vid and Random Access Memories to go off of. The latter remains a great album but it always rubbed me the wrong way given how they were paying tribute to the “humanity” or earlier music eras yet were one of the groups most responsible for “dehumanizing” that, so to speak. They also hadn’t done anything super public since 2015 (?) so it’s hard for me to feel like this is “the end of an era” so much as a heads-up. Had they called it quits a few years ago when big, EDM-related music festival bloat was setting in it probably would have felt different.
Congratulations as well to Mogwai on their first UK #1 after 10 albums and 25+ years as a group. It’s a decent record but I personally don’t think it’s good enough to merit full inclusion in this issue. I got my first-ever setlist from a show at their 2014 one at the Vic, which was also the inspo for me wearing earplugs to all shows. As the return of (normal) live music approaches I cannot recommend getting a decent pair or two of them enough; I’ve heard a rumor Daft Punk broke up because one of them has tinnitus so bad he can’t really hear anything nowadays (I’m guessing that’s Guy-Manuel since Bangalter has been fairly active as of late). I have worn low-end Etymotic earplugs to shows for a few years and it’s no exaggeration to say they are probably the best $30 or so you could spend in your life. Way better self-care and a quality-of-life improvement than getting takeout because you had a rough day at work and don’t feel like cooking.
Said setlist from that show
Alright lecture’s over. Let’s get on to the tunes and that. Decided to put in tweets from this issue but I’m really debating whether or not to continue including them moving forward. They feel like a high level of effort for a low payoff of padding these issues so they’re not solely about music. I’m trying not to be that type of guy which I feel like the tweets help with but idk how this issue is perceived beyond me. If you feel strongly either way let me know through this issue or my Twitter @embirdened.
I’ve got the notification that even before I added in my own pictures, this post is too long for email. So add it to your web browser tabs for everything within.
I’ve mentioned in past issues that I am not a big fan of singer-songwriter and folk music in general, which I attribute to my comparatively low verbal comprehension skills (the same thing applies to hip-hop). Which is to say I was prepared to dismiss the hype surrounding Ignorance by The Weather Station when it came out and write it off as “not for me”. After several weeks of having this on heavy rotation, particularly when I’ve been feeling down or queasy, I am here to say that I am wrong with this. This is a truly gorgeous album that does quite a lot with a significant amount of restraint and poise throughout, particularly the opening combination of Robber and Atlantic. I would hope you give everything in these issues a try but you definitely want to spend some time with this one.
I’m trying not to load these issues with references to the past ones, but in the first issue I highlighted greetings by glass salt, especially noting the bedroom percussive grooves it has on display (and the postcard they mailed me out of the blue). As I was writing the last issue this release of outtakes from greetings landed in my inbox, which carries on in the same vein.
The postcard the group sent me
Among the more exciting developments in dance music as of late is the group of young outer-borough NYC producers—AceMo, MoMa Ready, Kush Jones and more—centered around the HAUS of ALTR label, taking ideas from juke, footwork, bass and other more experimental, high-energy strains of dance music and hybridizing them with more conventional house and techno. The most recent one to catch my attention from this loose collective comes from DJ Swisha.
Munich label Ilian Tape is a staple of the dance music underground and those of us who like Impressionism. The latest release comes from a new alias of producer Mark Kastner, best known for his work as Galaxian. This is certainly a Galaxian-style record though not as hard as his other releases, I wouldn’t expect this to wind up in the DJ sets of supporters like Helena Hauff and (if I’m not mistaken) Aphex Twin, but it’s not a turn to ambient either. Perhaps more a warm-up or ending with the sun coming up tunes like the scene on the cover, painted by the mother of the Zenker Brothers who run the label.
I’ve not read as much as I would like recently (or perhaps ever, really), work stress and its knock-on effects and that. I’ve been working through Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai and as you might realize, a 450-page work of Hungarian existentialism centered on fine art and going psychotic from fine art does not lend itself well to brief summaries. Ah well.
-Liz Pelly, who is always worth reading if you have any interest in the music industry, published a piece in Real Life proposing a public streaming library alternative to Spotify et al. It’s an intriguingalternative that does not necessarily involve cryptocurrency and gets a bit more concrete than a typical speculation does.
-Liz and Jenn have also launched a newsletter cryptophasia that should be worth a subscription too. First issue is out tomorrow or, if you’ve not gotten to this point today, now.
-Another piece from Real Life I enjoyed recently is this one from Lewis Gordon about how your gaming chair is trying to kill you.
-Finally, Frazier Tharpe and Flo Ngala at GQ were there to capture Bobby Shmurda’s first day out of prison earlier this week.
Despite being the world’s 4th most populous nation Indonesia tends to punch below its weight in terms of cultural output, especially once you get past the charismatic megafauna in its rainforests and Bali. That’s beginning to change as of late with the hybrid forms of electronic music being taken seriously by Western audiences and particularly the music and advocacy work of Yogyakarta duo Senyawa. A couple weeks ago they released their latest album Alkisah across 44 labels worldwide which has garnered a fair amount of attention, but I want to highlight this accompanying remix album featuring acolytes including Slikback and Gabber Modus Operandi. I’ll definitely be keeping a closer eye on this moving forward.
Something’s up with dance music in Ecuador. This has been hammered home to me by the ‘place :’ compilation the Air Texture sublabel put out last year of work from the country and this EP from Nicola Cruz on Rhythm Section.
Braids, the Montreal indie rock trio that I consider to be one of the best and most underrated live acts around, have enlisted DJ Python to remix last year’s Shadow Offering single Young Buck. It’s not a combination that springs to mind at all, but the pitch-shifted vocals and Python’s deep reggaeton treatment of the single works and is well worth a spin or two.
Indie dance music group (if I’ve got that right) Mr Twin Sister released a new single on Friday which immediately caught my ears on first listen.
This is a bit of a weird one from Fire Talk, a label I’m always keeping an eye on for their getting-less-lo-fi indie rock. In addition to flute, vocals and iPad beats, multidisciplinary artist Cal Fish also sourced sounds on this record from cassettes they found on the streets of Berlin in 2017. The name references the, yes, plastic flags they sewed together and incorporated into their performances while workshopping this material. It’s a nice suite of tunes for sure.
Here’s an EP of certified deconstructed club bangers from Mexican producer Siete Catorce. I preordered it during the last Bandcamp Friday before it came out a few days ago and I have no regrets for that.
Leeds post-punk group Mush have released their second album Lines Redacted just about a year following their debut 3D Routine. There isn’t a song on the level of Alternate Facts on this one, but the second half of the album takes things into high gear on a more experimental level than the more conventional first half, so I’m not disappointed there. It’s definitely a bit bittersweet to listen to this knowing that guitarist Steven Tyson passed away shortly after this album was announced, though this record feels like strong testament to the group as a whole.
Rian Treanor’s File Under UK Metaplasm album from last year, synthesizing the experimental ‘deconstructed club’ sound with the rhythmic ballistics of non-Western dance music centered around Kampala’s Nyege Nyege, was a highlight of music form last year. This followup EP of sorts on Planet Mµ continues on that vein with these incredibly staccato, pointillist club tracks.
I do not have a good ear for jazz music, particularly when there isn’t a consensus of whether the album is great or just some noodling. I re-took the Clickhole quiz which determined I am a Little Jazz Boy while writing this up, which I’d be concerned if I wasn’t tbh. So take this one with a grain of salt if you don’t already roll your eyes at some of these blurbs, but volume 3 of BBE’s J Jazz series, highlighting deep cuts from the 60s, 70s, and 80s namesake scene that collectors with more money than sense go ballistic over, is excellent.
Ireland’s premier producer-cum-shitposter Lighght has announced his next album Holy Endings on Doom Trip Records. It’s being billed as an electroacoustic album, which has never really been a genre taken seriously outside of academia if not labeled as ‘experimental’ or ‘ambient’ instead from what I can tell. If there’s anyone who can take on this balance of serious composition against an unserious social media presence it’s Lighght, so I’m excited to hear the rest of the album.
I often find it hard to describe certain electronic music given the fact that, for most releases nowadays, you can listen to it yourself in just a few clicks and a decently accurate search query. That being the case I encourage you to give this album of electronic music from Dravier a whirl as I have a few times in the past few weeks. If you think of a quality descriptor or two for it, let me know.
Another issue #1 highlight, UK post-punk group Dry Cleaning have announced their debut album on 4AD New Long Leg. Opener Scratchcard Lanyard got lodged into my head again last week so you could say I am definitely excited for the full album coming out in, shit, about a month.
House music has a long tradition of politicized vocal samples among its anthems, provided you ignore whatever the fuck David Guetta thought he was doing last year during the George Floyd protests. They can be a bit didactic though nowhere near as bad as most of IDLES’s last album. Surely this isn’t the first but when I got the Bandcamp notification for this EP from pseudonymous producer La Fraicheur, I was taken aback to hear Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez filling that role here. Here’s to many more and another solid release from Lobster Theremin too.
Well, here we are at the end of this piece. Thank you once again for reading if you’ve gotten this far. It’s just about if not already March now, which I’m sure is causing a mix of feelings considering how the now for sure full year of the pandemic has been, but hopefully this March feels better than the last. Until next time (probably later this week for a Bandcamp bonus issue), take care.
Hopefully the worst of this seasonal weather is past us now. Here’s a pic from Diversey Harbor from my walk last Sunday.
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