Hi, I’m Ryan and welcome to Crow’s Nest! [Jackass guitar riff] This is issue #28 of Crow’s Nest and if you’re reading this, thank you for doing so, I hope you find something within you enjoy.
No tweets within this issue, nor are my thoughts congealing into an essay. I managed to finally get back up-to-date on my new releases playlist (though there’s plenty I still need to give a second listen in it, lol), but things are piling back up again between the flood of Bandcamp Friday stuff and an emotionally tumultuous past few days in my personal life. So I’ve not yet spent any time with, off the top of my head, the new Animal Collective record all the Millennials have been toasting, the Grouper x Jefre Cantu-Ledesma LP, or the alleged first Godspeed You! Black Emperor tape that surfaced online after 27 years. I feel like one of the street-parked cars outside my apartment that haven’t been brushed off or shoveled out after the past 2-3 snowstorms. But that’s ok, there’s plenty of time for that and if that’s the worst of my problems, I’m doing pretty good atm.
My focus with Crow’s Nest is to highlight new music on my radar, usually on Bandcamp, and while my favorite find of the past few weeks is new to me, it is neither of the former. Tracy Wilson, whose Turntable Report is an essential rundown of indie music worldwide and more, tweeted about Super Wild Horses’s 2010 debut Fifteen, and since the first spin I’ve been hooked. The duo, from Melbourne, make emotionally raw post-punk, beating you down with pilfered riffs revised to avoid the lawyers and loop pedals to rapidly switch between instruments and build the songs up quickly. Strong Palberta vibes from this one, or perhaps Erica Dunn (Tropical Fuck Storm, Mod Con, Palm Springs) making bedroom no wave. I’ve not listened to their followup much (yet), and hope they’re still around making waves down under.
Previous issue highlight The Soundcarriers have taken a well-deserved victory lap after releasing Wilds and reissued their previous album, 2014’s Entropicalia, finally putting it up on Bandcamp. That’s good enough to write about it here. It’s not as good as Wilds but that’s like complaining about getting an excellent meal at your second-favorite Michelin-starred restaurant because it’s not the first. The highlight here is second-to-last track ‘This Is Normal’, a 12-minute Ege Bamyasi-style jam featuring a monologue from Elijah Wood. My apologies if you did not grab the wax before it sold out.
I try not to get overly nostalgic about 90s dance/rave culture—I wasn’t there and I’d rather look forward and see what happens on the dance floor I’m on than think about how a past one might have been better—but there’s no denying how important and good it was (from what I’ve been told). Above Board Projects’s latest reissue highlights this. This is deep, ambient leaning techno possessing enough self-confidence that you don’t need to turn up the volume. It feels like a looser, more sprawling version of Lost Trax’s Mind Over Matter from a few issues ago, and considering the latter’s anonymity it very well might be earlier work from the same people. Another one for the decks.
The past few weeks I have been slowing working my way through JR Moores’s Electric Wizards: A Tapestry of Heavy Music, 1968 to the Present. It’s a great read documenting the titular sound, which Moores defines as electrically amplified, guitar-centric music invented by McCartney with Helter Skelter, refined into its fully realized form on the first four Sabbath records, and from there has proliferated into a sprawling colossus of sounds reverberating throughout music today. Valuing group camaraderie, emotional sincerity, texture and density over technical proficiency, it’s an intriguing way of thinking about music that helps clarify what I value in certain music over others, while opening up appreciation to new work. As Moores put it in the intro, these aren’t “Electric Brain Surgeons or Electric Cirque du Soleil Acrobats. They are the Electric Wizards.”
Moores is judicious in selecting case studies to detail different genres, frequently passing over the biggest names for keystone groups and albums around which the big players and sounds cut their teeth; TAD get a chapter to themselves separate from other grunge acts, for example, and I’d never heard of Cows (the band) before reading about them here. The largely linear place-and-time narrative fractures in the 80s especially as Steve Albini begins recording them all, but the focus on different genres and key players seems to cover all the bases you can imagine. And when Moores is writing on a genre he clearly despises, his work remains high-quality, seemingly covering it so well he never has to touch it again. In addition to the albums I immediately added to my above listening playlist and the 8-page Select Discography at the end, there are at least a dozen pages I’ve dog-eared in my copy to go back to for future listening. One of the issues with reading about music is, no matter how many words you put down about a work, it’s still more likely to take way longer to listen to than to read.
That being said, the book definitely isn’t perfect. Some of that is a reflection of the choice of subject matter and historic racism and sexism in the music industry, but this is still largely the domain of white Anglo men with some convenient trips elsewhere that would appeal to them. While the only (known) unrepentant misogynist to get more than a paragraph is Marilyn Manson—who receives a multi-page hatchet job detailing his exploitation of industrial rock’s mainstream turn for his own vile ends—women don’t show up in significant numbers until Sub Pop signs them. The book can be insightful on class discourse, but you may come away thinking racism was solved in 70s Detroit and ??? from there. The focus on guitar music at the cost of synth-led works means important groups like Coil and Nurse With Wound are only mentioned in passing, which is definitely unfortunate considering the breadth and innovation of those works and their poor documentation compared to rockers.
There are also a number of bizarre editorial choices within the case studies format here. The chapter on funk begins with a digression on Neil Young (he had been in an early James Brown group). Lemmy gets about as much ink in the punk chapter as either John Lydon or Andy Gill. Sonic Youth and Lou Reed only really show up in the new millennium as champions of the underground noise scene and for Lulu, respectively. Much of the material was written pre-pandemic, clearly, and while I wouldn’t expect the book to be up-to-date on things like the deaths of Takashi Mizutani or Richard H. Kirk, recent nu-metal revisionism or Steve Albini’s latest Twitter thread, the disparity is noticeable. While Moores makes excellent use of archival material for quotes and getting things correct, considering an anomalously large number of critical persons to heavy music are still alive, the paucity of interviews conducted is striking. I’m surprised he didn’t, for example, ask Bardo Pond their opinions on Sabbath or what their early experiences in the underground were like when asking for photo permissions.
As Moores himself would probably concede though, this is a tapestry of the music, and you’re free to weave your own from the source material. Criticism aside, the book is an excellent tome of material with a fresh perspective on a number of different styles of music. Pick your poison (or none), find something new to queue up, and praise Sabbath!
An excerpt of the book, on Butthole Surfers, can be read—where else?—at the Quietus. Speaking of them, the San Antonio Current recently published an oral history of their time in the area before decamping to Georgia to stalk REM.
No Bells, a blog that is something like Tone Glow for underground rap, published this article by Kieran Press-Reynolds about the proliferation of microgenres on Soundcloud and some more musings about what constitutes a genre. A fascinating look at other web bubbles outside my own standard realms.
UK jazz bandleader Emma-Jean Thackray released Yellow last year, putting her in the ever-expanding group of excellent British jazz groups leading a phenomenally innovative resurgence of the genre in recent years. A couple weeks ago she released this followup EP of live takes on the songs from different high visibility performances as those opportunities have reemerged in the past year. Once again I’m hoping she’ll cross the pond soon to bring it here to Chicago.
Experimental pop group Broadcast’s influence feels everywhere in my world and the contemporary music landscape as a whole. Yet as common of a comparative it is for me, listening to one of their records quickly reminds me just how few manage to get anywhere close to the magic the late Trish Keenan, James Cargill and others who’d been in the group made during their time together. That’s obvious on their cover Nico’s Sixty Forty serving as a the lead single to a trio (!) of rarities their home label Warp Records is releasing next month (alongside vinyl reissues of their major records). As someone with a soft spot for their Black Session, I am especially excited for the live BBC Maida Vale Sessions records in the group. RIP Trish. Thank you James for continuing to keep the flames of this burning.
If Super Wild Horses above didn’t satiate your thirst for ramshackle Melburnian post-punk, give this a play. It’s a double LP compiling demos, recording sketches, and other rough material from the group which, to my ears at least, manages to cohere into something more substantial than reference materials for ‘proper’ releases. The sort of stuff you get from an unfamiliar opening act touring with a better-known name operating in the same vein. I need to track down their other albums and give those a spin soon.
Not the state, country or UK dance-adjacent musician, GEORGIA are a ruthlessly prolific experimental electronic duo, who churn this material out as a side project to their lives as creative professionals. The IDM and new age music adjacency and Autechrian wordplay certainly don’t reduce the pretentiousness of it all, but the quality is such that they get a pass from me. This is actually 1 of 2 albums they released last Bandcamp Friday; this one is more beat-heavy experimental dance than the ambient leaning Traonekami. If either floats your boat there’s plenty of wake to navigate as the two “[Surf] Electronic Music’s Astral Plane”.
Lisbon electronic group NIAGARA released this rarities compilation on Bandcamp Friday. It’s the sort of thing that joyless heads who think a monthly inbox cluttering constitutes a real problem have liked to drag recently, but it does stand out from those unspecified others. Many in the middle sound more industrial-techno mechanical than I’ve come to expect from Portuguese artists, which is a bit refreshing even if I hope the style remains rare.
This is the final ‘rarities compilation’ present in this issue, I swear. Before diving deep into synthesizers under his given name, the prolific m. geddes gengras was putting out small-batch releases in the early millennium noise underground slash freak folk scene. This release compiles some of that for last Bandcamp Friday, “presented warts and all (and let's be clear, it's mostly warts)”. If I get back to this before I finish writing up, styling and double-checking the rest of this issue I’ll put in a highlight track or 2 for this.
Leeds (?)-based underground producers Spooky-J, Ekhe and pq, if my memory is correct, have been instrumental in supporting the East African dance scene centered on Nyege Nyege reach western ears. Releases from them on their label Spooky Shit are always worth checking out. The latest is an EP of all 3 improvising live together. High energy material moving into breakcore and gabber territories at times.
Marissa Nadler, whose recent The Path of the Clouds I highlighted a couple issues ago, released this followup EP of album outtakes and covers a few days ago. It’s more spectrally haunted folk music that appeals to my ears. Her cover of Alessi Brothers’s Seabird that closes the EP is quite nice.
Beau Wanzer, a local producer and DJ whose sets around town I should go to with some frequency, probably, was a frequent collaborator with the late Dan Jugel, among others. This archival EP of jacking techno came out a couple weeks ago and is worth your time.
And I’ll call it done on this issue. If you’re reading this here, thank you for doing so, I hope something within spoke to you. Until the next one, take care.