Crow's Nest 10: 031421
Sent to you at my regular hour in defiance of Daylights Savings Time's dictates
Good day,
Welcome to issue #10 of Crow’s Nest, and thank you for reading and opening as usual. Double digits, the big 1-0. Maybe not the biggest accomplishment out there but not nothing and certainly a sign of some consistency and/or commitment to writing this on my part.
The GRAMMYs are going on right about now, which I will only partake in or care about as meaningless retweets. I’ve always considered music and listening to be a personal and communal activity first and foremost, so a night of “universal”, manufactured pomp and circumstance of artists I don’t listen to has never really done it for me. I know a tweet calling 5-minute songs long and the implied attention span of the greater listening world rubbed me the wrong way earlier, but ultimately many people enjoy said work and my complaints are more in the “What Is Technology Doing To Us?” level of concern than about music itself. I try not to fault people for their taste in music nowadays; I just say it’s not for me. There isn’t necessarily a proper way to listen to music after all, though situating it in context and affording it the level of attention and care it deserves helps. So I will be on my couch trying to work through some chapters of an Existential Hungarian novel and listening through some albums in my backlog that have piled up in recent weeks instead. YMMV.
Daylight Savings time is here in the U.S. My neighborhood has been more active than it has been through the pandemic as of late though it is a St. Paddy’s Day hotspot. I received my first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine a few days ago, and then did a little festival lineup speculation with my brother as well. I don’t want to say “things are getting back to normal” as uhhh 2019 wasn’t necessarily great, as I was reminded in a book I read recently (see below). The end of the pandemic is in sight, though we have a ways to go, and hopefully the other side of this is a better world than we had before.
This one is certainly a deep record. Constantly shapeshifting between contemporary experimental electronic music and ethnic percussion drawn from the Chicago producer’s Honduran heritage, Cruz made this record during and in reflection of pandemic isolation, and dedicated it to his brother, who died of suicide a short while ago. Album-oriented electronic music can be fairly hit or miss—do not miss this one.
CURL, the label/club night associated with experimental composers including Mica Levi aka Micachu and Oilver Coates, released a one-off single for Bandcamp Friday between Levi and Coby Sey. It’s less than 2 minutes but that’s plenty of time for the syncopated strings and twitchy kick drum to do a number on you.
I’ve mentioned before that I am not especially keen on ambient music, but this drone-heavy work has really hit the spot recently. The solo project of the guitarist from dream-pop band somesurprises (I don’t know what that is, I should admit), this is a very, I don’t know, “active” or “liminal” album that hits the spot, imprinting a fuzzy memory and feeling in me where other similar work may dissolve upon impact or vanish upon completion.
I read The New Me by Halle Butler over the past 2 weeks. It’s a bit underdeveloped especially towards the end, but it is intensely relatable and cutting even if you weren’t living in Chicago in 2019. If you’ve ever worked an unrewarding temp job, been frustrated by the small potatoes of said job, or reflexively emitted a “Jesus Christ” when that coworker emails again, you’ll find something to enjoy in it, though you may get concerned by how close things hit to home. Its closest contemporary is Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation though without the magical realism and its artsy pretentiousness, which is refreshing for me compared to the NYC sect’s endless navel-gazing. A quick read of late Millennial ennui.
In time for the aforementioned GRAMMYs and some of my own descriptive hand-waiving within this issue and others is this New Yorker article from Amanda Petrusich on genre as a whole. I found it interesting for its considerations of genre not as sound but as a social consensus—“it’s country because the performers are wearing cowboy boots and the audience considers it to be country” is not an explanation I’d strongly considered before. It helps to explain my own inclinations towards post-punk and experimental dance music as well, I’d say.
This piece from Equikknoxx’s Time Cow on Jamaica’s virtual reality artists (not that kind) is an eye-opening look at how developed world technologies are reshaping the culture of the developing world. If you’ve ever wondered how the hell an artist you’ve never heard of can have millions of views/followers and what that’s like under the hood, it’s a great read.
In a recent issue I (finally) highlighted the work of the young crop of outer-borough NYC producers around the HAUS of Altr label making some of the most exciting dance music around. Two of the figureheads, AceMo and MoMA Ready, released hard drive-clearing loosie compilations for the latest Bandcamp Friday. I’m giving the slight edge here to MoMa Ready as I like his dub excursions more, but both are worth your time.
Constellation Records has wrapped up their longform Corona Borealis singles series with this piece from the pan-Arabic group. I’m not sure what instrument is playing but the sounds angle towards something akin to digi-dub throughout, which I have found myself returning to frequently since it came onto my radar.
In the last issue I mentioned New York Haunted as one of many prolific labels whose output I enjoy but I can never find myself actively returning to or leaving a strong imprint on me. Speak of the devil, their latest EP, from Brooklyn’s Semita Serpens, may be the one to change that. It’s EBM influenced techno with a heavy drone accompaniment on top of the synths and percussion you might expect, and there’s just something about it, like Josh Medina’s album above, that just gets to me. It has to be the interplay of the drone alongside the rest of the tracks, remixes included. This is why I listen through all their releases, for gems like this.
As far as defining what the center of my taste is, as I’ve been referencing a lot within this issue, you could do worse than “gritty post-punk you can dance to”. That’s not quite what it says on the tin of this one from L.I.E.S. but it is for sure the end result.
New Orleans queer punk group Special Interest had a breakout year last year with their album The Passion Of. As the remix album of The Passion Of indicates, the group has a strong interest in electronic music as well, and member Ruth Mascelli has since released an anthology of solo productions as Psychic Hotline. The tracks vary in style from HI-NRG to industrial and more … I believe you know where to go with this.
Belgium’s Strapontin and Philly’s Zillas on Acid (what a name) are both producers who are on the edge of my musical periphery as a result of their release streams. I don’t have a strong opinion on either but this team-up on Optimo is a nice bit of psychedelic joy to listen to.
Here’s a 2-tracker out of Buenos Aires that has been in my ear since coming to my attention during the last Bandcamp Friday. Both are very hard-driving pieces of electro, the first one very heavy on echo and reverb, the latter moving further afield towards some dank corner of a warehouse rave.
My friend Cam, who recently started Peels & Reels to discuss films and show off his cocktail creations, recently messaged me to ask for the name of this Japanese psych-blues/metal group I raved to him about while barhopping early last year, having caught their mindblowing show at the Hideout a few months earlier. That inspired me to listen to their latest album again, and I can confirm it is still quite the mindblowing piece of hard rock.
Industrial/post-punk/dance legends Cabaret Voltaire, now a solo project of Richard H. Kirk, are still going strong. I wasn’t too hot on Shadow of Fear, the album from last year, though I have really enjoyed the tracks on this EP, the first of 3 for the early part of this year.
Lily Konigsberg is in a number of groups in New York in addition to her solo work, including Lily and Horn Horse and Palberta. You may recall me heaping praise on their latest album Palberta5000 earlier this year (it’s still my album of the year so far). Earlier this week she announced a best-of (so far) compilation of her solo work on Wharf Cat Records. I’m not sold on this based on the lead single, but it did take until the initial playthrough of Palberta5000 to fall in love with that so I will patiently wait the 2 months or so for this before deciding on it.
Lost Horizons is the duo of Simon Raymonde and Richie Thomas of Cocteau Twins and Dif Juz, respectively, 2 seminal groups whose names I’m familiar with but have never really listened to (I know, shut up). Their second album sees them collaborating with a wide variety of singers and artists both familiar and not to me, but it does manage to hold on to its nostalgic monochrome aesthetic well. (I’m not a fan of that but if I didn’t like the music, I wouldn’t write it up.) I Tweeted that I thought lead single “I Woke Up With An Open Heart (feat. The Hempolics)” sounds like it’s destined to be plugged in a Roaring 20s throwback commercial for a mid-tier booze or clothing brand, again not necessarily a knock on it but that’s what I feel. When pulling up a Bandcamp link for this I discovered the song has a pair on On-U Sound remixes too, which is a nice addition.
And I’m calling time on this here. If you’ve gotten to this point in the email, thank you again for reading and subscribing. I hope you found something worth your while inside.
Here’s a pic of a black-crowned night heron and its lunch I snapped last week while on a walk through Lincoln Park. Cheers!