Crow’s Nest 79: 011225
New Year, same issues coming up with subheadlines (and similarly excellent tunes)
Howdy folks, and welcome to the first issue of Crow’s Nest for the year 2025. Doing alright? Have a good new year? Ready for what we all know is coming? Let’s get to it then.
Also, thanks again for everyone nearby who came out to help me celebrate my birthday a couple weeks ago. I hope you agree that it was a lot of fun and worth it.
The Jeff Parker ETA IVtet’s last/debut album was not billed as a live album, even if the 4 tracks were culled from live recordings of the group at their namesake venue. The Way Out of Easy cuts down on some of the post-processing Parker and taper Bryce Gonzales did on Mondays, consisting solely of material from the group’s January 2, 2023 gig, though the result here is no less of a stunning, patient listen for fans of jazz, ambient music, or simply one of the best groups around in the recent past. Several times when I’ve spun this recently I’ve found myself thinking, ‘Man, it is incredible I am alive at the same time as groups like this’. The IVtet has released ~3 hours of music, and Gonzalez purportedly taped hundreds of shows across the 7 years of their residency. Something to look forward to for a while.
Water Damage release monstrous LPs at a steady clip, but if the Texas drone rock troupe’s studio output isn’t enough for you, they also record their live shows and release them to Bandcamp for those unable to see them live. (Surely an Empty Bottle or Sleeping Village headliner will materialize soon?) The sound can vary a lot based on the group’s composition gig-to-gig, and a highlight among the ones I’ve gotten to so far is from last February. James McNew of Yo La Tengo sat in with them, and the results sounds like a extended Godspeed You! Black Emperor crescendo played in the middle of a downpour, broadcast over a staticky radio. Or, you know, The Dead C. Drone on heavily below:
For all my knowledge of good music and upcoming (local) shows likely worth peoples’ time, I still frequently find myself encountering new-to-me bands on bills that might equal or surpass those I know. Maruja were one such name, listed on the Empty Bottle site to be performing there in March. That meant nothing to me, until a Line of Best Fit article profiling their jazzy, noisy post-rock got me intrigued. Yes, they come across as bloviating, full-of-themselves Brits, talking a big game for a group without a full album out, but then you listen to something like The Vault, a collection of jams recorded to one of their phones, and you realize there’s definitely something there. The energy, passion and intensity the quartet bring to their music is uniquely their own, and even if they wind up being a bit more restrained/structured in front of an audience, I definitely don’t feel I’ll regret grabbing a ticket for this one.
A number of music publications with dance music focuses claimed last year was the year dance music shook off the ‘unseriousness’ of high-energy, cheesy edits that supposedly dominated post-pandemic dancefloors in favor of more ‘serious’ material — notably, dub techno, as heralded by Loidis’s One Day. I’m going to be honest, I don’t buy this narrative at all. It might be selection bias among the dancefloors I frequent, but I haven’t felt that empty calorie, low effort edits are as omnipresent as claimed (and surely they occur far less frequently than flavorless hard techno running on autopilot); one of the dub techno acts championed in these reflections, Purelink, didn’t put out a significant release this year beyond a handful of loose tracks and remixes; and, as much as I like it, I’m strongly skeptical that a genre as conflated with cannabis consumption is truly serious when its intellectual pedigree so closely resembles a dorm-room smoke session conversation. Like with that godawful Baffler article on the state of electronic music journalism that got praised by people whose critical faculties are out-of-shape, I feel a better explanation is this is a natural cycle of social media-driven dynamics (where an unexpected blast of pop trash is easier to tweet about from the club than an exceptional hour of fine-tuned mixing) growing tired of a subject and finding something different to talk about.
I’m not one to (fully) let other people being annoying, reciting other people’s talking points, or lacking self-awareness about the dynamics surrounding them define my opinions for me—music like dub techno that’s both good for dancing and getting high to is great—but this did rub me the wrong way as last year slowed down culturally. I also came across this record by Medici Daughter around that time, which clicked things into place. 113 takes the constituent elements of dub techno, fractures them, and reconstructs them into a series of miniatures that makes it an outlier in the sound. It’s exactly the sort of fresh ideas a genre needs to stay relevant and distinguish the new wave from the old guard. None of the tracks here pass the 5-minute mark, which feels a bit sacrilegious; at the same time Stefan Betke aka Pole mastered it, which seems as strong of a stamp of approval among the gatekeeper’s figureheads this side of Brian Leeds’ setlists. I’m all for a dub techno revival of sorts, particularly if records like this can cut through the foggy delay and leave an impression that lasts longer than any high.
Crossing over to continental Europe, Thin Consolation bring us an EP that hits like an LP from (I think) Brussels-based artist Angie Schaeffer. It’s labeled as ‘post-krautrock’ which, for all of the influence that genre has, does not really have a cohesive ‘post-‘ genre identity like punk, disco, rock etc. Droning synths, knotty and repetitive drumming, and other eerie sounds abound within, with the closest contemporaries probably being Beak> and Cavern of Anti-Matter aside from other peers operating on the periphery. It’s an intriguing mix worth keeping an ear on in my estimation.
I’ve only been to fabric once, and without getting too much into it, it wasn’t a good time imo. Nevertheless, the club and it associated labels and extensions remain a flagbearer for British dance music and the grounds between the mainstream and underground. Enzo Siragusa is a new name to me, but he has quite the pedigree and career stretching back years, so I suppose it’s not a surprise this EP of breakbeat rave is a heater. To my ears it reminds me of the stuff producers like Ploy and Overmono were churning out before the pandemic struck, with lots of detail and sick drum work within to glom onto.
I’m not the best at IDing tracks as they come up—some of my Shazams for stuff I should know feel embarrassing—but I’m confident I’d recognize the kick drums in ‘Multiplying My Absurdities’ as originating from Helena Hauff’s setup. It and the other tracks on this EP out on Tresor show off her 303 wizardry and why she’s been a staple of record bags and behind the decks for over a decade.
Contemporary Bristol meets contemporary Miami on this collaborative EP from leading lights Batu and Nick León. Deep, muggy shufflers perfect for a low-lit basement or back room at 1 AM wherever you may be.
Fire Records has been remastering and reissuing the back catalog of 90s iconoclasts Royal Trux over the past year. I’d be lying if I said I truly ‘get’ their music or understand how/why Hot Chip in particular love them, but I have found myself drawn to their 2002 record Hand of Glory in particular recently. A pair of collagist pieces allegedly laid down in the mid to late 80s, the A-side sees Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema throw everything and the kitchen sink over a hand percussion loop (my preferred side of the two), while the B-side is a noisy cutup of tape loops and, again, them throwing the kitchen sink at things. While you wait for Fire to repress the rest of their work back into circulation, their Bandcamp page does have most of their primary catalog for you to consider if you’re not already familiar.
Suso Saíz’s career stretches back in to the 80s, per Music From Memory’s liner notes on his recent LP for them. That might be grounds for a career retrospective, but a few minutes into the side-length titular track here should be enough proof that his contemporary work is still going strong. Longform drone-ambient bliss that lives up to the album name, it’s easy to imagine Saíz sitting down at a synth getting to work, but intriguingly the liner notes state no synths were used in making this record. It’s an intriguing twist to an already incredibly beguiling suite of work.
And with that, I’ll call it issue #79 of Crow’s Nest. Will we hit triple digits by the end of this year? What will the rest of the year have in store for us all? Honestly, who knows. We’ll find out in due time, of course, but until then, thank you for reading and listening, hopefully something within tickled your fancy.
