It's been nearly 2 years since we've mentioned Miranda Soileau-Pratt's amazing project The Spatulas. In fact, since the last post, she's moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Bloomington, Indiana.
Miranda Soileau-Pratt's work with The Spatulas and other projects with Nowhere Flower and The Blimp have consistently shown a love of New Zealand sounds (The Garbage and The Flowers, Alastair Galbraith) or Kiwi adjacent (Barbara Manning - actually the Bandcamp notes mention the SF Seals!), and "Flowers" is no different. It's currently the only song streaming from "A Blue Dot", the new album due in May on Post Present Medium.
"A Blue Dot" was recorded by Emily Robb in Philadelphia in February 2025.
Walnut Brain is a Philadelphia noise/experimental duo made up of electric guitarist Steve Heise and diddley bow player Alina Josan. Their first full-length, Weird Wire, came out earlier this year on Petty Bunco records, full of jangling half-percussive, half-melodic metallic string vibrations that sounded like blues from outer space. In her review, Jennifer Kelly wrote, “The sounds that Heise and Josan make are far removed from the Delta tradition, consisting largely of staccato banging on strings, a rain of notes from both instruments that morphs and changes in the air, finding strange harmonies, dissonances and complementarities on the fly.” Here's what's in heavy rotation for them right now.
France — Destino Scifosi
We have been playing this one on repeat for many months. A live recording from the masters of the one chord jam with plenty of hurdy-gurdy screeching and shredding. The bass player and drummer show tremendous restraint and never stray from their initial simple groove.
Didona — PIZMA
This is a great Romanian noise pop group that sometimes reminds us of Fugazi in the best possible way. The cassette label it's released on, Beach Buddies, is putting out some really interesting and challenging music from Eastern Europe and beyond.
Nowhere Flower — Heat Dome
Really cool murky songs with distorted drum machines and twangy guitars. The lyrics are pretty much indecipherable which is how we prefer them.
De Vlaamse Primitieven — Lucht Van Een Andere Planeet
You can tell these guys are really good musicians. But they don't overplay. Instead, they use simple riffs and repetition to create these great hypnotic acoustic pieces.
Group Inerane — Marhajan Bianou
Many years ago, I (Steve) obsessed over live videos of Group Inerane on YouTube. Then a few months ago out of nowhere Sublime Frequencies released this album of live recordings from some of those very same live shows. Some of the best guitar rock jams out there.
Bohannon — Disco Stomp
A perfect song that's somehow both mellow and a foot stomper. We listened to it a lot this year. Heey, Philadelphia!
David Nance and Simon Joyner — Bedspring Symphony
David Nance has made a ton of great music since this one but it's hitting the spot these days. Originally released under a different name; one look at the art and you'll figure out what that was. Some of it sounds like soulful singing from the bottom of a well, some of it like raucous one-take rockers: perfect. Really looking forward to the return of his Astute Palate.
Marlen Haushofer — The Wall
This is a novel that we both read in turn this year and loved. Survival in the post cataclysm world while getting to better understand animals is going to be bittersweet.
Lale Westvind — Void Packer
Lale's phenomenal Grip is still one of the best comics I've ever laid eyes on along with her many others. Those beautiful drawings and stories have real power, electricity and humor. It's been a treat to wait for issues of Void Packer (what a great name!), now four in number, and see the main story take shape along with shorter ones that are dystopian and hopeful in turn.
Pat Finnerty — What Makes This Song Stink
Pat Finnerty videos are evergreen for us. We've watched each video many, many times. Pat is doing the real work of dissecting the worst music out there. We eagerly await the next episode.
Miranda Spatula and Nowhere Flower — Around and About You (Post-Present Medium)
“Oak Parks” is an entropic blues, its sweet, heart-tugging hook corroded by murk and echo, the slash and clamor of guitars paced by a slack-gaited drum machine. Fuzzy, sleepy, faintly dissonant vocals slip and slide over the melody. Consider it an acoustic, home-spun version of Bardo Pond’s most shamanic moments, or a Linda Smith cassette left to warp in the afternoon sun. This new collaboration between long-time Dusted favorite Miranda Spatula and her West Coast sometime bandmate Lila Jarzombek is beautifully, dizzyingly unstrung.
Miranda Spatula is much loved around here for her rough but charming work with the Spatulas. Lila Jarzombek sometimes plays guitar in Spatulas, but her primary project is Nowhere Flower, a low-fi guitar and beat machine ditties. The two worked together on this project, collaborating both in person and via digital exchange, making songs that sometimes turn into drones and drones that equally tend to coalesce into songs.
Some of the cuts are relatively well-behaved lo-fi pop songs, as, for instance, the rambling title track, which strums and bashes around a thready murmur with a wild squall of middle eastern woodwinds going off in the background. Pitched somewhere between the Jeannine’s gem-like garage pop and the Shaggs’ self-taught anarchy, the cut is raw and dream-like, but very much a song. There’s a bit of early VU in these trance-y sounds, a use of dissonance and overhanging tones to suggest a pathway to transcendence. “Riffs” especially howls with a Velvet-y way, letting the guitar wind sinuously through shadowy realms of hiss and moan.
Two late album cuts, titled “Art, Dance, Movement” parts I and II, sink further into third-eye reveries. The first one floats a buzzy long note under muttered spoken word, the poetry almost swamped under the drone. The second slows down mystic, psychedelic guitar to a crawl, a vocal melody careening and eddying within its molasses-slow arrangement. It falls apart in the most beautiful way, dissolving into a pool of sensation that shimmers like the rainbows in a puddle of motor oil.
