TOP40BRAINWASH

"NEW" MUSIC FOR CONTINUAL AURAL LEARNING

[top40brainwash]

foodman - Kakon (Sun Ark, 2018)

Is this a foley reel? Is it a Casio percussion preset slowly gaining cognition? For about two and a half minutes we’re placed in a beatless landscape of chatty digital approximations of timbales and woodblocks ticking like a chorale of out-of-sync clocks. A menacing horizon appears, 30 seconds of disciplined arpeggiating that dissipates like a mirage leaving us with our rhythmless percussionists seemingly at a loss. 

[top40brainwash]

Acid Bath from the Jaded Jungle by Fountain

Fountain - Cracked Cup (Self-Released, 2018)

Over 3 long years since the wiry and immediately timeless “Fountain 2″ album and the Montréal rock group deliver this third record, trading the passages of flighty guitar interplay for chunkier, Beefheart-grooving blocks of interconnected rock, push-and-pulling, always flirting with melodic normalcy. A sneering confidence has infiltrated the previously detached vocal delivery and track after track, tongue-twisting refrains are belted with newfound gusto. The earnestness present on Acid Bath is a deft shift in tone, a fundamental and daring reinvention achieved while maintaining the spirit of their past work.

[top40brainwash]

Lorde - Supercut (Melodrama, 2017)

Not sure a pop song has made me feel like Lorde’s Supercut does since I heard Teenage Dream for the first time. Lorde turns Katy’s day-dream fantastic lens around, entering the narrative as Ella the human musical artist with meta-language more common to contemporary hip-hop than anything else. Over a seamlessly dynamic, pulsing track - one that itself plays as a supercut of the different textures and moods present across the whole record - she sings about the hard-to-articulate love that exists after its loss. The whole last third is an ambient coda, 24fps playback after scatterbrained scrubbing,

[top40brainwash]

Fly Pan Am - Pas a pas step until (N’Ecoutez Pas, 2004)

A pastiche approach to Neu!-cribbing: they’re unafraid to unsubtly rock out of the gates, they’re unafraid to keep it reeled in structurally. This song is everything I want out of my guitar music listening. It’s ramshackle but tightly wound; it’s sonically adventurous but sounds like rock’n’roll; it has sung lyrics but feels like an instrumental track. It’s five-and-a-half minutes of relentless energy, a sprint towards the gold. Jubilant, hooky, and punk. 

[top40brainwash]

Jan Jelinek - Im Diskodickicht (Kosmischer Pitch, 2005)

A marriage of the contact mic’d vacuum cleaner in the other room with nice tape delay school of ambient music to hooky beat-driven bliss. This record floods your headphones with unabashed, nebulous sub-freqs faded up like your ear’s the stylus. It underpins these washes with pulsing, splintered rhythms. It’s warm like a fireplace, music that is ambiance, but it paces with a nervous energy usually eschewed by other offerings. 

[top40brainwash]

& She Takes It by Nihilist Cheerleader

Nihilist Cheerleader - & She Takes It (Single, 2017) Restrained, uneasy, and poignant. Nothing flashy. A few motifs and phrases that are put to work, greatly outweighing the sum of their parts, kindling excitement via tense but vigilantly unmechanic repetition. Love the feedback guitar solo-bridge-vamp and it's all over right when your larynx steels itself to shout along.

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The artist backstory here is interesting, alluring, provocatively human, and I’ll skip it. Here is a breathtaking, haunting 16-minute work of music. Genre terminology becomes crass with regard to these vibrations. It’s music like this feels physically tangible, like a cocoon that sheathes you in time-lapse. When people stare at a Rothko I think they feel what I feel when I listen to this in my headphones. It’s not a contest, but I often am in awe of how much bigger music can be than visual art. Sound is untethered motion and can fill a space like a liquid. I love to see this sort of music expand, to experience the magic in between all peaks and valleys of the slow, steady waveforms. 

[top40brainwash]

Susumu Yokota - Zenmai (Acid Mount Fuji, 1994)

I got very sad when I learned of the death of Susumu Yokota in 2015 at the tragically young age of 54. A few of his records were staples of my KUCI years, lovely, subtle tracks with some baroque leanings. He defied master-of-none mentality, successfully straddling ambient long-form works, minimal, fleeting pop-natured compositions, and formal, capital D dance music. His oeuvre and aliases run deep and his illustrious but subdued legacy lives on through his work. Even on this album, presented outright as an acid house record, his watermark is clear immediately on track 1, in the textures and tones that both carry and delineate the expected genre elements. 

[top40brainwash]

A looping, lumbering stand-up bassline and a digital shaker wallpaper the room in which this song is sung, upon a basement jazz club stage. A voice floating like a butteryfly stinging like a bee into an old broadcast mic. The strings nauseatingly swell and break the facade, letting seep in the diegetic, ethereal world of the many Julias singing haunting backup and flipping the script on the tune. Her voice becomes the sun, pulling and pushing; the song’s first half is a winking precursor to the “Green Wild” of the second half. “I can’t hear and I don’t know.”

[top40brainwash]

Maria Usbeck - Moai Y Yo (Amparo, 2016)

When I heard the 808 clicks I knew. Within 15 seconds the ecosystem of the track is fully established: we’re near water, celestial bells are chiming, digital claves and the driest snare buoyed in the passing stream. Once the vowel-heavy backing refrain and lead vocals start there’s no escape. Maria’s got you. It manages to gleefully, anxiously, dangerously toe the line: new, old; future-leaning, nostalgiac; post-global, traditional. I love this perfect song and I love this music video. They make me feel a goodness. I think a Gibson Thunderbird bass guitar is a funny aesthetic counterpoint, also.

[top40brainwash]

Foremost & Fair by Home Blitz

Home Blitz - Tell Me There (Foremost and Fair, 2015) I saw Home Blitz on a bridge in Austin during the twilight hours in the early twentyteens. They played before Thee Oh Sees and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t waiting for them to just wrap up so the show could go on before inevitably getting rolled by APD. In the past year I’ve thrown myself headfirst into their catalogue only to discover how much there is to love amongst the muck and tape hiss; their 18-minute set last week in LA strengthened this bond. Home Blitz is a punk band that seems to make a point of ignoring every punk trope and trapping. Daniel DiMaggio’s voice, somehow snotty and sincere simulteneously, is the sun around which these exceedingly weird and well-written songs orbit - when they orbit around antyhing and aren’t blown-out tape loop experiments or Earth-gone-4-track feedback missives. An honest rock band.

[top40brainwash]

Jlin - Challenge (To Be Continued) (Black Origami, 2017)

44 minutes of articulated percussion. Immediate, immersive, intense, impressive. Somehow both raw and organic and calculated and synthetic. There is more tension and drama present in between the frequencies of the shakers and zills than a well-cut action movie trailer. 

[top40brainwash]

Swamp Mom//Lost Dad by Tongues

Tongues - Adore You (Swamp Mom//Lost Dad, 2017) Had the luck to be billed alongside this relatively new band in the “6.” Immediately floored by the breadth of their songwriting and the seamless genre-hopping. Any touchstones are elegantly used as springboards into a cohesive, confident voice. These are hooky, inventive songs without pretension.  

[top40brainwash]

Black Bombain & Peter Brötzmann - Pt. 2 (Black Bombain & Peter Brötzmann, 2016)

The immediacy of the off-time onslaught fully neutralizes all thoughts and feelings until I’m groundless, like Wile E. Coyote fruitlessly pedaling his feet in mid-air. Guitar and bass play cat-and-mouse until Brötzmann becomes the elephant in the room. Nothing like the incomparable honk of this septuagenarian to serpentinely squeeze the psychedelia out of this rock. 

[top40brainwash]

Woo - Make Me Tea (Into The Heart Of Love, 1990)

A bit of sun tumbling through a gap between the curtains in a hazy room. The understated wit and elegance of Penguin Cafe Orchestra coupled with the warmth of Board of Canada. An incredible album of songs floating in space like stars, humanized by the 1-2-3 count-ins and sweet words every so often. Woo sounds like conscious dreaming.

[top40brainwash]

Martin Glass - Sound & Image (The Pacific Visions of Martin Glass, 2017)

Maybe an ampersand is the fast track to my heart. Maybe the (just okay) book I recently read about escaping drollness via a 1-way ticket to the South Pacific burrowed too deeply into my id. The juxtaposition between the unabashedly idyllic, uncanny aerial footage of sand and sea and the abstracted visions of the alien world beneath the water transcends: this sounds and looks like an advertisement but digests as meditation. There’s a conceptual dustiness to the neo-excotica presented here. With light, broad brushstokes and a hundred dollars in stock footage, I am gleefully tranquilized.

[top40brainwash]

Storm&Stress - Guitar Cabinet Stack Way High Is Freedom or Gravity Gives Us Rhythm (Storm&Stress, 1997)

The oft-forgotten middle child. Largely unconcerned with the myriad loop matrices of melody and aggression balanced and popularized by their revered older sibling or the crystalline future rock of their dreamy eyed younger step-brother, Storm&Stress make plaintively true their name&heritage. The wildcard pairing of a young, jazz-weened Kevin Shea in the hot-throne coupled with Don Cab’s most iconic and disciplined string rippers is an unruly, undisciplined, and uninhibited cacophonous wreck, free music like molotov cocktails exploding in midair, timid ocean waves, finally spotting a constellation amongst the stars. I like Ian’s sheepish croon too.