Well hello there, and welcome to issue #29 of Crow’s Nest. I’m sure you know the deal by now but that doesn’t change the fact that if you’re reading this, thank you for doing so, I hope you find something within to enjoy. It does mean a bit to me.
Americans: My attorney (whom I tend to call ‘Dad’) has informed me there’s a class action settlement for Zoom users and you may be eligible to receive $15+ if you file a claim by March 5th. I don’t but you might. A newsletter that pays you instead of you paying for it, what a world.
The so-called CD revival has reached a critical point in The Discourse over whether’s it’s actually a thing, on the verge of becoming a thing as the ongoing 2000s style revival gathers steam, or it’s just a bunch of media people reading too much into what some teenagers are up to, yet again. Champions like Ryley Walker certainly have a point that vinyl manufacturing has become far too impractical for many working musicians who don’t have (at this point) a year to sit around waiting for their order to be processed, let alone convince their fans to purchase increasingly expensive slabs of wax, and that CD-quality sound has always been great. I’ve also thought for a while that, rather than try to invent a new paradigm that (finally) compensates musicians fairly for their work, it should be easier (in theory) to try to sell them a $10 jeweled disc in a somewhat outdated format.
At the same time, critics who’ve argued that ~1% year-on-year growth in a market ~5% its size compared to its peak—growth which can largely be attributed to sales of a handful of blockbuster mainstream titles—are on to something as well. A few niche TikTok accounts and a handful of novelty purchases does not necessarily make a trend.
I’m not sure what to make of it all. The convenience of digital listening, even the mental capacity to switch between apps on my laptop or phone to hear music not on the current platform I’m listening to, still is key for me. This will sound lazy but the inconvenience of pulling out a title and the gear to listen to it on means I can barely recall when I last ever did so. As someone who spends a lot of time at their day job thinking about how to best organize information on a screen, there’s no comparison as to how much information one can take in from the analog world than some pixelated glass. That is a point in CDs’ or other physical media’s favor, and certainly I would prefer to have a visual reminder to encourage me to listen to music I was intrigued by even a short while ago, yet when I purchase a tape or CD, it’s less to have that physical embodiment of the record and more to put the $ into the artist’s pocket than anything else. I like stuff and yet the hassle of stuff is also quite a lot, even for me.
It didn’t immediately come to mind as the first pieces began appearing, but more and more when I contemplate this so-called revival I’m thinking back to last spring, when my brother and I spent time working through my late uncle’s voluble media collection he de facto bequeathed to us, ~10,000+ CDs and all. After a record store running friend helped us pull the maybe 1-2% of “Target-core” releases he might be able to flip in his shop, we wound up consigning the rest to a specialty CD reseller to properly inventory and sell. My brother and I wound up receiving, as a part of that, a small sum of money that amounted to, quite literally, a few pennies on the dollar of each disc’s original purchase price. Not that he and I concerned ourselves with that amount so much, our concern was trying to do justice, in a sense, for the collection and try to disperse it such that it would wind up in the hands of people who would go on to appreciate it themselves. The fact that we were able to help sustain small music businesses in the process mattered more to us than getting paid for it. I kept a handful of my uncle’s CDs as mementos and things I’ll (maybe) get around to listening to. Hopefully this so-called revival may help them even more than we expected. It’s kinda funny how the life of something contemporary turned obsolete turning retro-chic (?) can have a continued impact and presence like that.
This one came out of nowhere for me. (Ok, buried in the depths of the latest Turntable Report. However …) A fusion of krautrock and post-punk, the 2 genres, combine on this record in a way that feels fresh to my ears—I’m finding myself halfway through it before I realize I hit play on it yet again. The yellowed, artifact-pointillist cover art feels fitting for the desiccated, dreary sound others are comparing to Joy Division/New Order/Factory. I would’ve placed the group as coming from the Southwest based on their sickly desert rock sound but Cincinnati, sure, I don’t think they’ve gentrified their full waterfront yet. It doesn’t feel explosive but the menace is quite apparent. One to keep an eye on just in case.
First getting into music in my teenage years a little under half my lifetime ago (side note: fuck), discovering Animal Collective during the post-Merriweather Post Pavilion praise felt like the first thing that was truly ‘mine’, not unlike anything else I’d been hearing elsewhere and too weird to be mainstream or pop or spun ad nauseam on the radio. Looking back that seems a little naive considering they soon after headlined an 18,000 person music festival (my first too), but the excitement of hearing something so off-kilter compared to the mainstream landscape was easily the big starting point for me getting sonically to where I am now. (And probably attending some Grateful Dead concerts in the womb. That too.)
The past decade or so of their work has been less frequent or high-quality as the first that led to MPP, the band and their other projects less focusing in on a particular approach for an album and tour than seemingly adrift between territories already explored. Time Skiffs, their latest album, sees the payoff from that intermediary stretch. Their strongest work since, though not better than, MPP, it feels like their previous ideas have coalesced into something that’s mellowed out a bit with age but representative of the group as a whole throughout its existence. Watery textures and drips, Beach Boys-indebted vocal harmonies, musings on life as middle age beckons, it’s been well toasted by the same Millennials its past psychedelic hedonism was emblematic of. Take some time and let it drift over you, the voyage is worth it.
Longform durational audio works—here I’m thinking things like The Disintegration Loops, Everywhere At The End of Time, Prolaps’s Ultra Cycle—challenge most humans’ capacity for attention, especially without consistent visual stimuli to prevent focus from drifting. While the works are frequently quite rewarding to dive into, they are also a lot (in a literal sense) to get through. It’s little wonder that some people have constructed challenges around listening to them in one sitting, documenting their reactions throughout. Still, even if one manages to accomplish the task, there’s usually little desire to do it again right then and there. So consider it a compliment that immediately after finishing this 2-hour recording, I hit play again on it.
Hermeto Pascoal is a Brazilian musician whom Ted Gioia has called “the most musical man in the world”. That’s a hell of a claim but Gioia is onto something, for sure. Perhaps best known outside Brazil for a stint with Miles Davis for Live/Evil that ended when Pascoal sued Davis over writing credits, Bruxo’s work is beginning to filter out into the world and I need to spend a lot more time with it. The album in question here is a February 1981 live recording of Pascoal’s Grupo septet at Rio’s planetarium. Over the course of 2 hours—surprisingly, mostly a 2-chord vamp centered around Carlos Santana’s secret chord progression, per Gioia—there’s cosmic drum battles, ecstasy, audience participation and more, a lot more than you might expect from that description. Dive in when you can.
Just a couple of readings have stuck with me these past few weeks:
-Just in time for the Super Bowl, Fingers, Dave Infante’s excellent newsletter on drinking culture and industry trends in boozing, wrote about how the military-industrial complex and its creepy as hell robot warfighters are using America’s other favorite pastime—the subject area of Infante’s newsletter—to normalize their presence in life.
-Sorry if you’re rolling your eyes at me including yet another link to Ted Gioia’s work, but I enjoyed his recent article on how forthcoming streaming platform consolidation is likely to strongly cripple Netflix. There’s some intriguing historical argumentation within I especially liked.
Big Thief’s multifaceted restlessness puts them into a league of their own, with little competition able to match their quality or output, let alone both, in any genre, even if not folk rock. Their double album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You puts this multifacetedness on full display—inconsistent only in that threading together 4 separate studio sessions and their varying fidelity, and condensing it into 1 coherent standard LP statement would lose sight of the essential humanity of Adrienne, Max, Buck and James in the process. There’s something for everyone within—for me atm, that’s primarily ‘Simulation Swarm’—which makes this sprawl worth it.
I’m reticent to say or write this producer’s name, for obvious reasons. Never quite figured out why the Angolan-Portuguese producer born Rogério Brandão chose it—gotta assume it’s a reclaiming the term thing like occurs here in America. Here’s what I will say: listening to his debut EP O Meu Estilo for the first time was quite the revelation in the middle of one of my university’s dining halls sophomore year. I’d never heard anything quite like its energy before, and that sensation is one of the things I continue to search for in new music, whether from Portugal or anywhere else. (Yes, it’s the origin of my fascination with Portuguese music.) His latest EP, while it doesn’t—can’t—match that initial listen, it still expands the palette of sounds artists in and around Príncipe work with. Just listen to that delirious synth loop on opener Madeso or the countermelodies on his team up with DJ Firmeza and try not to get sucked into his world.
Russian producer Hoavi broke into wider consciousness last year with a pair of albums showcasing amorphously ambient and club-leaning sides to their work. Less than half a year later we have another album, this time out on Quiet Time. It’s inspired by the winters of St. Petersburg, so I might consult a medical specialist before you press play in case your SAD is easing up as we approach the vernal equinox.
Chilean producer Massiande put out this EP a few weeks ago, and considering I’ve given it more spins than I usually might for similar seeming stuff, I thought it was worth inclusion here. While the aqueous sounds of dub no doubt have appeal near large bodies of water, they don’t get quite as direct (or good) as something like ‘Dub on the Beach’. The rest of them may not be as drenched in effects but they’re still worth a pondering.
Leslie Burnette and Sims Hardin bounce around in the greater Philly scene—the latter being in Mesh, a rising post-punk group on my radar thought not yet blurbed in Crow’s Nest—and this project from them caught my ears. Short and a bit of a sour acquired taste, it’s a lo-fi post-punk/krautrock fusion which sounds quite different from The Drin above. That variety despite the shared elements are what keeps drawing me back to these genres, I reckon. The peculiar synth work keeps you on your toes even if you’re not into the namesake jewelry.
I’m not quite sure how to process this split 7”. I think it’s contemporary though styled like something buried in a record shop bin for a few decades. It’s a Latin American (Cuban?) dance-Northern Soul fusion per the notes, two genres I’ve never spent much time with. Nevertheless it slaps, and if I were a serious music journalist I might be looking more into the rise of these old-school sounds reemerging on contemporary dance releases.
I’ve not listened to the whole thing, just the Bandcamp preview tracks, but this 25th-ish anniversary deluxe reissue of Phoenix shoegaze group Half String’s singular album. As you might expect from the timing this wasn’t necessarily the most well-appreciated at the time, but the percussion sounds solid and, well, the band referred to their sound as “beautiful noise” which is pretty darn hard to dispute, as far as I can tell.
Those who’ve spent a significant amount of time on 4chan’s /mu/ imageboard—the sort for whom the emergence of Godspeed’s All Lights Fucked … tape was, as an acquaintance noted, the equivalent of Bigfoot showing up at a family barbecue—might recall one sharethread poster who would dump large volumes of 60s and 70s Swedish folk-rock music with the obsession of a crate-digging radio presenter. I have no idea if that person was involved in assembling this compilation of post-counterculture Swedish Christian rock, but regardless it’s an excellent release. Even if, like me, you’re not an active faith participant and are turned off at strong in-your-face displays of religion or Biblical citations, it’s a solid set of tunes worth a spin or two. So this is what the black metal dudes might have been rebelling against.
Detroit techno luminary Terrence Dixon makes another appearance across the pond on Berlin’s Kynant Records. I’m not familiar with their back catalog, though Mike Parker and O Yuki Conjugate are familiar names. As you might expect these are minimal numbers infused with some quite woozy, dubby synth work.
You might be aware that I tend to use post-punk as a catch all for slightly off-kilter yet sophisticated guitar-centric music you can kinda dance to alongside some existential musings. I could brush up on particular styles and knowledge about different subgenres or adjacent stylings, but I’d rather listen and try not to ruin the gestalt with the technical details. Deep within the sprawl of Melbourne, Hooper Crescent seem to feel similarly, labeling their racket ‘Post something’ and leaving it others to describe it. I’d start with ‘good’ for this.
And with that I’m going to call it an issue. If you’re here, perceiving this, thank you as always for doing so, I appreciate it. @embirdened on Twitter until next time, take it easy until then.