Hey there and Happy Holidays and welcome to issue #44 of Crow’s Nest. Hopefully any holiday season/year-end stress you are feeling right now is manageable. Thank you, as always, for taking the time out of this period to indulge in the contents within.
No essay in this one for me, I’m not feeling especially inspired by 4 PM sunsets (or, since winter sun is a rarity here, ‘sunsets’), need to shop for some gifts for people and figure out things like an eye exam before my benefits roll over in the new year. Ah well. Much of the music in this issue seems to reflect that in different ways, for what it’s worth.
I should note this will probably also be the last Crow’s Nest issue of 2022: as I’ve noted previously I’m not big on year-end roundups and lists, much less assembling them; parts of my listening queue are just now getting to November releases; and I’m sure as hell not spending time in exactly 2 weeks on this. I have an idea for a brief year-end one I may execute during that liminal Christmas-New Year’s week that also contains my birthday, we’ll see. Anyway, let’s get to it.
British producer pq, one of the essential figures connecting the UK dance underground to the East African dance music scene, was last in here a few months ago with his album Proprioception. Returning to his base label Spooky Shit, this 4-track EP is a mind-blowing mixture of the type of material one might find on Nyege Nyege Tapes, basement parties/labels in like Leeds or Bristol, and other esoteric experimental influences. Jumpy techno, wigged out synth lines, breakbeat cut-ups, the pummeling kicks of footwork and more combine on this one which, if you aren’t feeling tired, nevertheless may knock you out. In a good way.
Berlin hasn’t exactly been a hotspot for guitar music since … the wall fell (?), but this record and the handful of others I’ve featured in here from the city this year makes me think something might be up there. Hazy 90s noise rock might be the best descriptor I can come up with for this one—Sigur Rós writes a shoegaze record, really—pulling from psych, post-rock, punk’s DIY mentality, and dream pop to help things be more palatable, for a result that seemingly mandate earplugs for the best effect. Whoever the mononymous Adrie is, she’s quite talented and well worth supporting.
What’s this, music I can’t find on Bandcamp? While albums hosted on the service dominate my listening and browser tabs, I do listen elsewhere if it’s not too inconvenient to listen and all. And this one is worth it: a 1976 release fusing Brazilian influences with hard, psychedelic rock from another figure whose legacy is definitely worth paying attention to. 6th track Manda Embora a Tristeza, a highlight, features an accordion and disco bells driven line over a ripping guitar solo. I’ve heard little like it. One of those treasures that emerges after a fan uploads the release to YouTube and the algorithm brings attention back to it. Again, I don’t think it’s on streaming services proper but Courtesy Desk has some copies of the reissue still. The skeleton man riding 2 horses through hell on the cover is a surefire sign of a wild ride.
UK producer and Planet Mµ head Mike Paradinas has a long, rich legacy of expansive curation and solo work across decades of a career. Not everything he touches is revered in the way his contemporary and occasional collaborator Aphex Twin is, but dance music is better because of him, undoubtedly. He threw up this 1996 album from his Gary Moscheles alias recently, and I quite enjoy the experimental disco-breakbeat fusion work within. It’s a nice break from underdeveloped squiggliness and has some fairly novel mallet percussion lines throughout. It’s much brighter than much of the minimal takeover work that followed in the new millennium, for sure.
The bit of distance, geographically, linguistically and politically between Scandinavia and the Anglo west has proven fruitful for cross-cultural pollination and ideas exchanges. Even when it doesn’t prominently display itself, the results are often quite good, as demonstrated on this 2-album compilation of 70s psych out of Sweden. Lots of shredding, warm organ lines, and peculiarly inventive work within, such as the 1st track from Paul Edoh’s Class Breakers within. Correct me if I’m wrong but I can’t recall any American or British psych group writing a song about being the rock and roll king who stakes their legacy on providing a decent welfare state for his citizenry, like what opens this record.
The band Customer from NYC … honestly that kinda is all you need to say, isn’t it? You can tell the genre, mood, general sonic palette and lyrical themes off of that, can’t you? If you’re intrigued by that, or you can’t figure it out and want to know more, it’ll take you 4 minutes to listen to their debut single. Of course, there is a power-pop influence to the song that gives it a bit more of a UV-TV feeling than just another verbose egg punk release. Safe to say I’m looking forward to more from them and hopefully a gig in the area soon.
Bleak name, not so bleak music, perhaps because it sounds like it fermented within the same stew as the Blank Generation or their contemporaries over in Manchester. But no, this is a pandemic lockdown record full of punk bite and fury at that summer’s reckonings with an energy level to keep you dancing like we did so little of then. That being said, this band is from Los Angeles and sings in Spanish, which helps it feel like more than a revival record too. Essential listening for just about anyone living in a period of decay.
While post-punk is the most frequent site of rock-dance music crossover—I think Daft Punk really liked The Rapture, for example—the actual attempts at selling your guitars and buying turntables can be quite hit or miss. Oakland experimental disco duo Flex TMG, consisting of Fake Fruit’s Hannah D’Amato and Blues Lawyer’s Rob I. Miller, keep things freaky and fun on this slab of wax with a good sense of momentum. The weirdness is quite present but balanced and sensibly restrained by good mixing. The digital is annoyingly overpriced and the two don’t really sprawl out their grooves at length, but this deserves a spot in your crate near Maximum Joy.
Really nice, pocket sized gem from Russian musician Kate NV. The 80s sound palette suggests she hasn’t fully abandoned the world of BINASU even if she’s fully expanded into art-pop since 2020’s Room For The Moon, the synth stabs at the end equally suggest goth-y coldwave and challenging contemporary classical … are those synthetic field recordings and birdsong fleshing out the background? Just a wonderful miniature all around.
… And in the time between when I wrote the above and publishing this, Kate announced her new album WOW will be out in March. Looks like the album itself will be of the post-vaporware 80s sound, in a manner that suggests something more substantial than the latest farts coming from Orange Milk.
Egg Meat sounds like one of those out there British ‘foods’ that I’m halfway tempted to try logging in to my old Neopets account to see if that’s an item in there. More appealing while equally quintessentially British is this project by artists Georgie McVicar and Laurie Uziell, on the appropriately named label Alien Jams. Woozy, spaced out dubby electronics with semi-intelligible poetic lyrics and high-detailed percussion at times, Oï les Ox and Beatrice Dillon spring to mind as reference points. Others in the mix include JASSS, ambient footwork, model home, a lot of stuff on labels like Disciples, PLZ Make It Ruins, AD 93 etc., the extended Mica Levi/Tirzah/Coby Sey universe, maybe Dean Blunt though I no longer listen/care about him etc. etc. etc. you know the deal by now bruv.
I recently attended a time management training seminar for work, and one of the takeaways from it is that you can’t do it all, but you can choose how to best control and manage your circumstances to be productive at what you choose to do. I still struggle with curation and decision making in some aspects, and similarly Italian producer Ikävä Pii has made that theme central to this EP. Hi tech, off-center, tightly detailed electronic tracks that feel as suitable in a cool kid club as they do soundtracking an amphetamine binge in your apartment. No judgement, just my take on the matter.
Miami might be best known for sun, ‘fun’, cocaine, an increasingly dense concentration of The Worst People You Know, and shallow hedonism, but dig under the surface a bit and a more substantial, valuable legacy emerges. Regional developments like Miami Bass and being IDM’s first American beachhead have helped solidify America’s legacy in dance music, while the community centered around producer Nick León is one of the most fruitful scenes in the country at this time. This survey compilation from the Omnidisc label helps fill in the gaps and demonstrate this decent underside to the city. At 44 tracks you probably won’t like everything, but I found the sections of Feph—Deroboter and Coffintexts to the end very much up my alley.
Let’s round up this issue with a solid EP of modular-y, braindance-y tunes from Bristol producer Surgeons Girl.
And that concludes issue #44 of Crow’s Nest. You made it! Congratulations and thank you for reading, as always. Despite how you may be feeling due to the weather, (lack of) sunlight, how the past year or so has gone for you or what 2023 may hold for you, hopefully you found something new within to enjoy. Until next time.
Customer was a ray of light in a particularly bleak week in our part of the world. Gotta love 4:15 sunsets.