With history and folklore as its backdrop, the Haitian band moves further away from Western styles to focus on Creole tradition and West African roots.

RAM 7: August 1791

Because spirit guides are an inherent part of RAM’s music, it is not at all surprising that sleeve notes to the newest album by Richard A. Morse’s Port-au-Prince-based rasin band contain dedications to two recently departed loved ones who also happen to be great beacons for RAM 7: August 1791. The first dedication is to Emerante “Emy” de Pradines Morse, Richard’s mother, a matriarch of Haiti’s modern folkloric traditions (and daughter of Kandjo de Pradines, a populist giant of Haitian song and strong believer in vodou’s cultural weight as part of the country’s identity). The second is to Jonathan Demme, famed Hollywood director and lifelong gringo champion of global rhythms, who in 1993 placed RAM, then at the dawn of their career, on the soundtrack of Philadelphia, his film about the AIDS crisis. Both are giant figures in RAM and Morse’s history, and on August 1791, the mix of personal and national accounts is the main story.
Morse grew up in the U.S., yet his Haitian influence was always strong. An island vibe can even be gleaned in the music of the Groceries, his late-1970s/early-1980s new wave band that played around Jersey and downtown NYC (often sharing bills with Regressive Aid, a proto-jazzcore group whose bassist, Andrew Weiss, went on to fame with Ween and Rollins Band; Weiss has been helping Morse make RAM albums since 2001’s RAM III: Kité Yo Palé, and his musical snarl is evident on RAM 7). By the late ’80s, Morse moved to Port-au-Prince to reconnect with his heritage and ended up running the city’s historic Hotel Oloffson. RAM formed there in 1990 (they still have a weekly residency at the hotel). They became aligned with mizik rasin, an ’80s movement of contemporary Haitian musicians who mixed rock and related styles with the folkloric ideas of vodou, especially its symbolic role in invoking Haiti’s revolutionary and spiritual history and African roots. (And its Carnival role of speaking truth to Haiti’s strong-man rulers.)
RAM is a long-term, multi-familial concern—Morse’s wife Lunise (vocals) and son William (guitar) are both members, while drummers Wichemon Thelus and his uncle, Dieuveut Thelus, are second-generation RAM players. Yet it also reflects Morse’s exploration of his ancestry; the more embedded he became in Haiti, the more the band’s focus did too. Where once RAM’s recordings fused post-punk’s global vocabulary with Haiti’s deeply rooted traditions into pop-like, world-music polyglot, most Western ideals have been receding. Which is why, like its 2016 predecessor, RAM 7: August 1791 is an all-Creole affair, consisting almost entirely of folk and ceremony songs that are deftly intricate (up to nine percussion instruments on some tracks), sonically blasphemous (fuzzy metallic electric guitar tones square off with single-note tin rara horns), and full of sharp rhythmic turns. The central joy of this album, which is named after the month in which Saint Domingue slaves first conceived their uprising against French colonists, is how naturally it melds the past and the future, consistently West African in its Haitian-ness as it strives to define the future sound of traditionalism.
Such fusions sparkle on August 1791’s upbeat numbers. The musical intensity of the juxtapositions—keyboard and horn lines from Caribbean dance music; the complex spiritual drumming of Ebo, Kongo, and Dahomey generations and Creole descendents; post-shredder guitar riffs, all mixing in the service of folk songs with ancient themes—can be overpowering. The opener, “Danmbala Elouwe,” musically recontextualizes a Dahomey ceremony piece, with Yonel Vendredi’s lead guitar bursting like sunlight through the drum line. The remarkable “Otsya” tackles herbalism as both practice and potential spirit-world currency, thrashing with abandon. “Dawomen Dakò” paints a Black Atlantic historical scene of an anti-colonial pact between Africans and Haitians. And “St. Clair,” a galloping medley of three songs—two traditional verses about Maman Brigitte, one of vodou’s grand spirits (Queen of the Cemetery), followed by an original RAM Carnival verse about a clairvoyant named Claire—stokes the flames at an almost soca-like breakneck. In fine folkloric fashion, most of the songs are short on lyrics and rich with choral harmonies, when Richard and Lunise’s solo voices are not leading a call-and-response refrain. This is big-crowd party music, first and foremost, ritualistic in the best ways.
The few reflective moments on August 1791 are no less important—full-body sighs and acknowledgements of loss that present RAM as a multi-dimensional vehicle, emotional troubadours and not simply tricksters, holy rollers and storytellers. Yet it’s never long before the band’s songs re-enter the narrative slipstream and begin stirring history’s racket anew. Their beacons are spirits, after all, continuing to breathe life into those they left behind.


Beach Fossils’ latest album distills the best of their daydreamy indie-pop with new wisdom and existential angst. But they’re just still as laid-back as you remember.

Bunny

When Brooklyn’s Beach Fossils released their self-titled debut in 2010, frontman Dustin Payseur had given little thought to his band’s name, which he’d offhandedly pulled from a notebook. By the time Captured Tracks released the band’s second record, Clash the Truth, an entire cottage industry of surf-pop acts had emerged in their wake, including Beach Day, Beach Vacation, and Horsebeach, just to name a few. As this initial wave of coastal indie-pop has rippled to new generations—see the surprise resurgence of Surf Curse’s 2013 track “Freaks” on TikTok, for example—Beach Fossils have grappled with their own identity, exploring washed out post-punk, paisley-patterned jangle pop, and even vocal jazz in reinventions that never quite matched their debut’s allure.
Bunny, their first project since 2017’s Somersault, folds together the best of each album in their discography. The scrappy, Flying Nun-inspired guitar tones that defined the band’s infancy are once again at the forefront, now supported by the noisy crescendos of Clash the Truth and the lush string arrangements that appeared on Somersault. In retracing these steps, Payseur has ample space to reflect on Beach Fossils’ trajectory, and in turn, his own growth as a person.
Payseur’s daydreamy lyrics remain steeped in memories of aimless drives and city skylines, but on Bunny, Beach Fossils’ celebrations of slackerdom find a wiser perspective in a concrete present. “Run to the Moon” and “Dare Me” open with similarly rowdy scenes of parties and basement shows, but branch off into separate trains of thought. On the former—a slide guitar-infused song that recalls the Byrds’ flirtations with country music—Payseur equates the sense of purpose he derives spending time with his baby daughter to the guiding light of celestial bodies, while the latter portrays an existential crisis spurred by life on the road. “Kill the cliché for a moment, and I’ll tell it like it is,” he sings. “Dare me to say something stupid: I think I need more than this.” The hesitance to get sincere is baked into the music, his disclaimers and defenses shattering in real time. “Is this a meaningful moment?” Payseur asks, interrupting an early morning bike ride on “Don’t Fade Away,” an ode to friends who’ve moved and subsequently lost touch. It’s true it may read like cliché, but in the anodyne world of Beach Fossils, it comes as a radical (and welcome) dose of reality.
Like rubbing fresh baseballs with mud to prepare them for regulation play, Bunny’s sound scuffs up the pristine mixing and baroque flourishes of Somersault with the gritty, riff-forward production that typified the band’s earlier work. “Tough Love” and “Seconds” do the best job of bridging each era of the band. On both songs, Payseur crafts complex latticework out of intersecting staccato guitar parts that could easily be slotted into Clash the Truth, but rather than meander as that album’s weaker tracks tended to, these verse sections build purposefully toward towering choruses. This sharpened focus also allows outright experiments in shoegaze like “Feel So High” to hit with the force of their early ’90s influences, instead of getting lost in a dense cloud of reverb.
Beach Fossils are still as laid-back as you remember, but in the six years since Somersault, the band has embraced a cozier mode of creative loafing, trading their old vices for melatonin, coffee, and Ativan. Bunny is not as uptempo and optimistic as the punk-adjacent guitar pop that put them on the map; instead it basks in its afterglow, as if spending the morning in bed after a long night out. The fleeting, unplaceable nostalgia that Beach Fossils helped proliferate during the chillwave era is now the object of Payseur’s own reminiscence. Bunny is proof you can look back while staying comfortably rooted in the present.


There's something about the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps it's being overshadowed by towering evergreens that instills a modest reverence ...

Death Cab for Cutie: We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes

We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes

There's something about the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps it's being overshadowed by towering evergreens that instills a modest reverence for beauty. Perhaps it's the evergreens remaining ever green under the gusts of snow which keeps hope alive. Perhaps it's the cradling of cold coast and the Rocky wall. Whatever the causes, the Pacific Northwest has played womb to some of the most skyward, heart-wrenching, and gentle pop music of recent history.
The trademarks of the Northwest sound continue to be cherubic eunuchs on vocals, crisp production, slow rollercoaster melodies, and tales of crushes and the crushed. Built to Spill, Elliott Smith, Quasi, Sunny Day Real Estate, and even Modest Mouse and Caustic Resin, to some extent, all revolve around this central axis of Northwestern pop. In two short albums, Death Cab for Cutie have firmly established a stylistic nexus from which all of these bands spoke. Like history in reverse, We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes documents the proto-Northwest sound as a footnote to a decade of tranquilizing rock.
Death Cab for Cutie effortlessly weep gems like a band stuck deep in a comfortable career. Subcutaneous organ and glockenspiel infuse warm, rich tones which bruise slowly between skeletal percussion and waxy guitar pickings. Sometimes the band patiently fills wooden cathedrals with echoes of reverberating slowcore, like on "No Joy in Mudville" and "The Employment Pages". The latter builds to an e-bow climax that weakens like a welcome influenza. "For What Reason", "Lowell, MA", and "Company Calls" click along at quick clips, yet maintain the shroud of delicate beauty thanks to Ben Gibbard's lachrymose wails. From a distance, the group appears manilla. But even top secret documents come stuffed in manilla. Subtle technological flourishes glimmer under the organic pulp like microchips in lumberjacking valleys.
If fault can be found, it's Death Cab for Cutie's continual quest to shine a diamond from petrified wood and dark coal instead of letting some of the rough, raw rock pass through. But then again, that's why the Northwest gave us Modest Mouse and Built to Spill. Guitar heroics can be found elsewhere. Death Cab for Cutie have a killer name and lugubrious elixir. The hooks are barbless and coated in Novocaine. They pull through your skin and leave obscure scars. But in today's rock climate, this sort of gentle niche makes for a relaxing vacation with some good prospects of getting laid.


Brash, rude, and definitely not sober, the Yorkshire bassline trio return with a new mixtape full of soulful house samples and performance-art level idiocy.

Disrespectful

Pressing play on Full Wack No Brakes, the debut album from Bad Boy Chiller Crew, felt like being slapped over the head with a sock full of pressed pills. Who are these semi-feral British twentysomethings, and why are they rapping so hard over such delightfully peppy dance beats? you might have asked, alongside questions like, Who thought it was a good idea to give them cocaine? and Why is one of them called “Clive”?
As the frenetic frisson of Full Wack opening track “450” faded away, answers began to emerge from the fog-machine mist. Bad Boy Chiller Crew is made up of three dudes: Kane, GK, and the aforementioned Clive. They proudly refer to themselves as “charvas,” a sort of post-chav British slang word which, according to the definition printed on the packs of rolling papers sold at their official merch store, is “a disparaging term for a poor or uneducated young person, especially one who behaves in a brash or vulgar manner and wears ostentatious clothing and jewelry.” They’re from Bradford, a staunchly blue-collar city in Yorkshire that, since the mid-2000s, has been one of the epicenters of bassline, a type of sunny bleep-bloop-ba-dump-a-bump dance music that the late cultural critic Mark Fisher once called “a fabulous sweet shop, full of delicious sugar rushes.” Bassline is the wellspring from which BBCC’s beats flow, which explains why they sound like they do. As for Clive, your guess is as good as mine.
Though Bad Boy Chiller Crew are still an underground concern in the States, Full Wack No Brakes set the trio on a path to becoming a genuine force in their home country. Since its release, they’ve signed with Sony and put out an EP whose single “Don’t You Worry About Me,” which also appears on their new mixtape Disrespectful, notched them a UK Top 40 hit. They made the cover of NME and became the subject of an ITV reality show. Their 2022 live schedule includes sold-out shows and festival appearances from Manchester to Croatia. In a recent video interview, Clive says he used to work construction and Kane talks about training to be a glassblower, only to get laid off after completing his apprenticeship. You get the sense that the group is still in a state of shock that any of this is happening at all.
Part of their appeal, beyond the exhilarating oddness of watching three young men who still look like teenagers rap about doing drugs over not-particularly-fashionable dance tracks, is that outside of their music, BBCC turn abject dumbness into something approaching performance art. The group got their start in part by making goofy and often gross comedy skits, and they’ve remained true to their roots. In recent months, they’ve filmed themselves enthusiastically diving into frozen puddles, throwing poop at their manager, tattooing a fan’s forehead, and holding a contest to see whether Clive could drink a fifth’s worth of Jägerbombs before GK could chug a two-liter bottle of high-gravity cider (this last video has been deleted; GK finished first but Clive threw up more, so I think it’s safe to call it a tie).
But to focus solely on their antics would be to overlook BBCC’s actual music, which is often genuinely thrilling and not quite like anything else out there. When it comes to hip-hop artists rooted in a hyper-regional sound who’ve freshly aligned themselves with a major, the concern is always that the label will water down their style in an attempt to chase mainstream success at the expense of what made them interesting. In the lead-up to Disrespectful, it momentarily seemed that this was the direction the group might have been headed. In July 2021, Kane told Mixmag that their future releases would be “proper music mate, commercial, stuff that you hear on charts ‘n that. We’re going for commercial, we’re not going for the underground.”
On Disrespectful, though, it turns out that Bad Boy Chiller Crew’s idea of going for the big time mainly involves ditching the hooligan-esque chants that populated Full Wack No Brakes in favor of soulful house samples, rapping about cocaine slightly less often than they used to, and recruiting the Grammy-winning Newcastle producer Riton to do the beat for “Come With Me.” The rest of the instrumentals are handled by their DJ, the Bradford producer TACTICS, who uses his expanded role—he had a handful of credits on Full Wack—as an opportunity to push the group to embrace a broader constellation of dance music. Thanks to him, we have the Craig David-esque two-step garage of “BMW,” the R&B balladry of “Stick Around,” and the kitchen-sink Ibiza-rap of “Wasting Time,” probably the best example of the form since Tinie Tempah’s “Pass Out.” The brightly stuttering synths of “Bikes N Scoobys” and filter-happy sample populating “Somebody Else” make the tacit argument that idiosyncratic regional scenes often do a better job of recreating the warped pop of early PC Music than PC Music itself ever did.
Lyrically, these guys aren’t exactly reinventing the wheel. Rarely do they deviate from their preferred subjects of A) going crazy with their boys on the way to, at, and back from the club, and B), offering heartfelt apologies to their girlfriends for the dumb shit they pulled last night when they were out with their boys. Which is fine—write what you know, and honestly, the less said about this mixtape’s forays into not-particularly-convincing raps about how good the individual members of Bad Boy Chiller Crew are at sex, the better.
But Kane, easily the most skilled MC of the three, finds creativity within this constraint, rapping with such fire that even verses about drunk-driving stolen whips to a rave begin to resemble intense expressions of Bradford pride. On “Somebody Else,” probably the tape’s finest track, he takes his breathless, minute-long verse in unexpected directions, beginning with braggadocious lines about stealing cars before dropping the cool-guy facade, rapping, “I’m from a place where kids wear Nike Air/This shit a nightmare/I don’t wanna die here.” Over the throbbing Chicago house of “Come With Me,” he offers street-level sociology, painting a picture of a hometown full of “daylight robberies, raiding properties, kids in poverty, messed-up morally.” In these moments, he places the rest of the tape in context: Bradford is the fifth-most income-deprived district in England, youth unemployment is high, and nearly a third of adults did not finish secondary school. They don’t just party because it’s fun. They party because everything else around them sucks and there’s not shit else to do.
But these unexpected forays into depth are the exception that proves the rule, and Disrespectful is still largely a mixtape meant to get you so pumped up that you’ll feel like chugging Strongbow out of a traffic cone. The trio clearly understand that Kane is their most valuable asset, and tend to place him front-and-center on tracks, allowing him to rap for the majority of the song and then bringing in GK and/or Clive for a quick clean-up verse or two. Each offers a distinct sensibility—GK tends to favor a nimble stop-and-start flow that provides a nice counterbalance to Kane’s verbal acrobatics, while Clive’s thick Yorkshire accent brings personality to every line, even when it’s something like, “Shots at the bar, I’m lit!” Their levity throws Kane’s this-rap-shit-is-deadly-serious-mate vibes into sharp relief, helping to spotlight his genuine talent while injecting a sense of fun into the affair.
Like a Tasmanian devil with two 40-ounces duct-taped to his hands, Bad Boy Chiller Crew are a wacky, manic perpetual motion machine leaving chaos in their wake. Disrespectful sounds like the rap equivalent of a cartoon tornado, which is what makes it hard to dismiss them as a novelty act or an organically grown version of People Just Do Nothing’s hapless Kurupt FM crew. In a recent interview with MTV, GK described them as “a real boyband from Bradford,” only for Kane and Clive to erupt into giggles. Looking at the trio, the joke is obvious. They don’t look like pop stars; they look like three young men plucked out of any low-wage job in Yorkshire. They’re brash, they’re rude, they’re definitely not sober, and through it all, they come across as genuinely wholesome and heartfelt. At a time when new artists are actively encouraged to act like miniature tech startups, prioritizing your own charming idiocy can go a long way.


The first collaboration from increasingly-mellow producers Diego Herrera (aka Suzanne Kraft) and Dang-Khoa Chau wades into sedate territory that’s tentative but promising.

D.K. / S.K. EP

By most accounts, Los Angeles is a relaxed city, but when Angeleno Diego Herrera decamped for Amsterdam a few years ago, his music took a decidedly more mellow turn. As Suzanne Kraft, Herrera released warm, loopy disco-rooted house back in 2011. Over the years, his music has slowly sloughed off its chunky beats and drifted off into the ambient ether, with last year’s What You Get for Being Young his headiest soundtrack yet.
In this musical trajectory, Herrera’s not alone. Parisian producer Dang-Khoa Chau has also moved on from the sounds that first brought him attention in underground music circles; his early singles for the L.I.E.S. imprint were lo-fi and off-center, his boogie beats revealing some grit underfoot. But Chau’s more recent releases have been slicker Balearic affairs, full of glistening surfaces and gentle ripples. Collaborating together for the first time as D.K. / S.K., Chau and Herrera wade deeper into the sedate end of the spectrum, to where it’s difficult to parse just which sound belongs to which party.
“Burn” is iridescent, its filigrees of piano and guitar floating 10 feet off the ground, but aside from echo in space, there’s little momentum in the piece. That the patches are warm and radiant should come as no surprise on “Xerox,” but the fragmented drum sounds never cohere into a steady pattern or make their purpose known; the flanged, disjointed beats do little more than act like gravel in a Jello mold. The hand percussion patterns on “No Man’s Ground” provide a bit more texture and break the inertia that opens the album, giving the piano and deep bass tones something to bounce off. The synth mists and eerie ambience suggest that a more foreboding side of the duo’s ambient sound might soon manifest.
It doesn’t quite come, but as the album proceeds, the duo become more comfortable with one another. The back half of the set lingers in the memory more than its opening tracks. “Hammond Blue” has a melody that worms around the fuzzy bass and measured ticks that reverberate like crystals dropped into a cave. A sound like a rustled bamboo windchime trickles around the edges of “Bricks in White,” soon joined by swells of synth and sizzling cymbal tones. The piano line is reticent, picking its spots between the clattering sounds around it, but the emergence of an arpeggio provides an uptick of pace. Numerous sounds arise, but Chau and Herrera are effective in making the track feel natural and uncluttered. It feels like, beyond its seven minutes—were one to follow its tributary further along—it might flow into the Orb’s Orbus Terrarum, Donato Dozzy Plays Bee Mask or Steve Hillage’s Rainbow Dome Musick. Closer “Fade” returns to its gentle beginnings, but rather than feel like a tentative interaction between the two, it suggests that—were the duo to work together again—they might move towards more of an invigorating middle ground, one that covers the full scope of their range.


The Kenyan producer occupies his own switchbacking lane, blending global bass music and regional African rhythms with bits of grime, trap, and drum’n’bass.

Lasakaneku / Tomo

The first thing I heard about Slikback, a year ago, was his prolificacy. A friend, an events promoter, returned from Uganda’s Nyege Nyege festival raving about the young talent who had wowed audiences at multiple performances during the four-day festival, shaking jungle foliage along the banks of the Nile with his unique blend of global bass music and regional African rhythms. Not long after, he performed a similar trick at Poland’s Unsound festival. In the scant 18 months that Slikback, aka Fredrick Mwauru Njau, had been making music, he had reportedly completed hundreds of tracks, the majority of them never heard outside of his live sets or his studio. The first five arrived in June 2018 on Hakuna Kulala, a sub-label of Nyege Nyege Tapes; the next six followed in February. Now, both of those digital-only EPs have been fleshed out with three new tracks and repackaged as a 2x12" vinyl (or digital) release, making for an opportune moment to catch up with one of East Africa’s most exciting electronic musicians.
Where many of the acts on the Nyege Nyege Tapes label work in accordance with specific regional styles—like Otim Alpha’s electro acholi, or the Tanzanian singeli of Bamba Pana, Jay Mitta, Duke, and Sisso—Slikback occupies his own switchbacking lane. The tempos are all over the place, from the slow-motion dembow snap of “Just I” to the 175-BPM assault of “Venom”; a few tracks, like “Bantu Zen” and “Shell,” ride syncopated pulses not too far from late-’00s dubstep. But the tempos of Slikback’s tracks are often a question of perception: “Acid,” which opens the album, starts off torpid, with sludgy 808s punctuated by staccato vocal chops, but a double-time groove soon takes over, flipping a sloth-like creep into a full-on headbang. The same thing happens on “Gemini,” as drawn-out digital death gurgles spin into a rolling footwork rhythm.
In place of melody, Njau tends to concentrate on texture and tone color, and those harsh, brittle timbres might be the most distinctive thing about Silkback’s music. Aside from the occasional nod to the TR-808 drum machine, most of his sounds are resolutely synthetic and wrenched apart from any obvious source. A see-sawing riff in “Venom” might be bowed strings or a weeping alien; the main feature of “Rage” is wave after wave of thundering digital feedback, amplified to a speaker-destroying volume.
Plenty of contemporary club music—particularly of the “deconstructed” variety—favors this kind of crashing, concussive palette, but little of it displays the rhythmic dexterity that Slickback does. Njau had little guidance when he began producing his music, but a stint working at Nyege Nyege’s Kampala studios changed that: There, Nyege Nyege founders Derek Debru and Arlen Dilsizian introduced him to producers like Jlin and Errorsmith, along with labels like PAN and Planet Mu. After that, Njau told The Quietus, “I began to learn how to let go of what I thought music should sound like.”
What he’s come up with so far bears trace elements of those influences, along with bits of grime, trap, drum’n’bass, and singeli; in places, his music has affinities with South African gqom and the spirit, if not the specific sonic tropes, of Afro-Portuguese batida. But mainly it sounds placeless and otherworldly—music from everywhere and nowhere at once. The new tracks here—“Shell,” “Kite,” and “Senshi”—are self-evident standouts that refuse to slot into a predictable pattern. “Kite” is apocalyptic trap; “Shell” could be mistaken for a Livity Sound or Timedance single; and “Senshi,” the heaviest of the bunch, might be a footwork remix of Ben Frost.
Shortly before Lasakaneku / Tomo dropped, Hakuna Kulala and Shanghai’s SVBKVLT label jointly released a pair of new Slikback EPs, Slip A and Slip B, far more extreme than anything he’d done previously. Some of that might come down to newfound collaborators like Yen Tech and 33EMYBW, both figures from China’s avant-club underground; mostly, though, chalk it up to Njau’s rapidly expanding vision and chops. Just a little over a year ago, Slikback seemed to appear out of nowhere; now, with his staggeringly original productions—by turns forbidding, malevolent, and scarily disciplined—he’s leading all of us into the unknown.


Though an accomplished actress, the French star fails to sell her cover of Kanye West’s “Runaway” on an EP that otherwise amounts to a deserved victory lap.

Take 2 EP

Whether you blame Keanu Reeves and his grunge band Dogstar, DMX and his turn in Romeo Must Die, or any other entertainer who tries to parlay musical success into movies or vice versa, the public seems to have a general suspicion of that particular crossover, as if the two arts must sit eternally apart. Since making her film and music debuts in 1984, Charlotte Gainsbourg has been a pointed counterargument to this stubborn belief. She seems to ladle her voice and on-screen performances out of the same dramatic well, a sense captured by her gift for interpreting songs so that you believe them. “Lemon Incest,” her 1984 single alongside late father Serge Gainsbourg, prompted French scandal, as an entire nation seemed to fall for its provocative suggestion of pedophilia.
Take 2, the five-track follow-up to 2017’s excellent Rest, brings Gainsbourg’s interpretive skills to the fore with mixed results. Produced by French techno star SebastiAn, Take 2 includes a few brilliant cuts, but the most notable surprise, a live cover of Kanye West’s searing mea culpa “Runaway,” feels disingenuous. Gainsbourg replaces the air of bombastic apology with the atmosphere of cocktail-hour soul, the stuff you would tune out in the lobby of an upscale hotel. So often an instrument of understated tension, her breathy voice and cut-glass accent feel meager and meek; she doesn’t sell her own appeal to Kanye’s rogues’ gallery of douchebags, scumbags, and assholes. Swapping the original’s puffed-up charm for wafty synths and apologetic drums, the music follows her down.
At least the other live track, a take on Rest’s “Deadly Valentine,” fares better. Onstage, Gainsbourg can be restrained to the point of seeming timid, not prone to flights of vocal fancy. The first four minutes feel superfluous here, only slightly muddying the original’s edges. At the end, though, Gainsbourg’s band delivers an immaculately built freak-out; the nerve-shredding string rises are probably the closest Gainsbourg will get to the detuned power of the Velvet Underground.
For the EP’s three studio originals, Gainsbourg reprises the mixture of dramatic tension and disco fantasy that make Rest a lingering joy. “Such a Remarkable Day” combines a magnetic harpsichord line that nods to Serge Gainsbourg’s own 1960s work with florid synths and strutting disco drums. Gainsbourg relates the kind of tersely mysterious prose that could double as a promotional pitch for a classic spy film: “There’s blood on your hands either way/How can we ever pay your due?” During the similarly melodramatic “Bombs Away,” she undercuts the song’s underlying tension with an air of sly humor, infusing the spoken-word bridge (“The Queen is marching back to Paris tonight/The priests are praying and preparing the rites”) with campy intensity. “Lost Lenore,” meanwhile, mixes orchestral splendor with creeping menace, Gainsbourg’s theatrical whisper the sugar dusting atop a rich mix of bells, horns, and clavinet.
Familiar sounds win out on Take 2, so the EP feels largely like a post-Rest victory lap. Sure, the hopes might have been high for some full-blooded and unorthodox take on Kanye, but Gainsbourg instead dwells in Rest’s sweetly dramatic glory. As every good actor knows, there’s much to be said for taking your bow when the audience demands.


The Nigerian-born, London-based artist returns with his strongest work yet, celebrating black selfhood in expansive, richly textured songs rooted in Afrobeat and electronic soul.

Which Way Is Forward? EP

Obongjayar is a musician taking his time. After releasing a clutch of EPs in 2016 and 2017, and then a handful of singles and collaborations (with Danny Brown, Wiki, Jesse James Solomon, and Richard Russell) in the intervening years, he returns with his most accomplished work to date. Slightly longer than his previous records, it’s still relatively compact—running to just seven tracks and a shade over 20 minutes in total—but finds him exploring new, more fruitful ground that goes beyond the art-school spoken word and deconstructed, Frank Ocean-via-James Blake instrumentals of 2017’s Bassey EP. What’s most striking about this growth is that the Nigerian-born, London-based musician’s voice has become more instrument than deliverer of sermons. His vocals have a magnetic, elastic quality: Half coo, half gravelly, wizened intonation. The resulting juxtaposition simultaneously suggests both naivete and long-toothed wisdom as he navigates issues of identity, racial politics, and belonging.
“Our fathers put us in the sand [...] we’ve been paying for it ever since,” Obongjayar hisses on “Soldier Ant,” interrogating what it is to be a black man in the modern world. He reflects on a society that serves constant reminders of his skin color—“I get it everywhere/From the bobbies on the beat/To the airport security”—and uses the shifting register of his voice to wrestle with conflicting portrayals of black masculinity. Ultimately his message is one of defiance. “Keep your head up, press your weight against the winds that try to throw you,” he murmurs on “God’s Own Children,” before launching into a full-throated refrain: “It’s your world now, can you feel it?”
Just as his songs explore a sense of being, the music feels lived in. It’s sonorous, enveloping stuff. There’s a meditative quality to the interaction between his voice and the arrangements it inhabits. As a performer, Obongjayar offers an enormous sense of presence, too, channelling the traditions of Afrobeat bandleaders like Bola Johnson and Fela Kuti. Yes, Kuti is an obvious reference point—perhaps too obvious—but Obongjayar shares an undeniable sense of both gravity and drive with the activist Afrobeat pioneer.
The songs’ textural depth belies the fact that they are the work, for the most part, of a solo artist. Writing and producing all the tracks himself, with assistance from multi-instrumentalist Barney Lister (and Oli Barton-Wood on “Soldier Ant”), Obongjayar pulls from a vast instrumental palette: slinky guitars rubbing against space-age synths; sharp, disembodied yelps; a railway rattle of hand drums. Sonically, Which Way Is Forward? sits somewhere between the mystic expansionism of Kamasi Washington and the colloquial, upbeat grooves of the Dur-Dur Band. He borrows the clipped, precise percussion of any drummer who’s tried to emulate Tony Allen and the tight songcraft of contemporaries like Moses Boyd or Sampa the Great.
If there is any complaint, it’s that Obongjayar hasn’t allowed Which Way Is Forward? to spill out into a full-length album. With a little extra room to stretch out, the songs’ tempos and densities might not feel so uniform. But there’s reassurance for those left wanting to hear more, as he purrs on “Still Sun”: “I know who I am/This is not the end.”


This new compilation adroitly selects high-water marks from Strummer’s solo career while never quite ameliorating the “what if” questions that haunt the Clash’s legacy.

Assembly

Among the great songwriting teams of the second half of the 20th century, perhaps none suffered more self-evidently from their cleaving than the Clash’s Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. They were two powerhouse talents whose skill sets uncannily complimented one another. Strummer was an idea factory whose burning intellectual curiosity and far-flung travels as a diplomat’s son gave the Clash a panoramic sweep that set them apart from their more provincial peers in early British punk. The glam-loving Jones was a natural studio technician with a masterful ear for melody and arrangement, and a knack for streamlining Strummer’s peripatetic concerns into something palatable to a large audience. After the band’s breakup, both would go on to make excellent work as solo artists (and occasionally collaborators), but neither would again achieve such a harmonious and productive partnership. Strummer lamented their parting of ways for the remainder of his life.
Following the unfortunate dissolution of the Clash, Strummer’s erratic tendencies became further ingrained without the organizing principle of the band. He globe-hopped relentlessly, indulging both his curiosity and his appetites, a culture-shifting punk icon turned genuine nowhere man. Creatively, he remained as fertile as ever, but without Jones to challenge him, his sundry projects with backing bands the Mescaleros and Latino Rockabilly War varied wildly in quality. The groundbreaking dub and electronic interludes that populated later Clash records Sandinista! and Combat Rock frequently drifted into inchoate sketches, while Strummer’s well-honed ear for hooks clearly needed Jones’ singular ability to bring them to the fore. In this sense, Strummer’s entire solo career was a lost opportunity. Still, inevitably, the highs were high and in many ways well suited to the best-of treatment, which manages the editing that Jones never got to do.
The new compilation Assembly adroitly selects high-water marks from Strummer’s solo career while never quite ameliorating the ”what if” questions that haunt the Clash’s legacy. The collection commences with two of the best songs Strummer recorded with his longtime backing band the Mescaleros: The winsome opener “Coma Girl” is a chugging singalong whose parade of roaming outcasts would fit comfortably in Thin Lizzy’s firmament, while “Johnny Appleseed” is a slow-burning union anthem that functions as a kind of spiritual sequel to the Clash’s epochal “Clampdown.” Following 40 years of systemic abuse of the working poor, Strummer addresses the investor class with Solomon-like wisdom: “If you’re after getting the honey/Then you don’t go killing all the bees.”
Strummer was not so much catholic in his tastes as open at every aperture: receiving dub, rockabilly, hip-hop, and Spanish folk songs with equivalent ecstasy, and unwilling or unable to decide why they shouldn’t all be played together at once. While tracks like the sonic gumbo of the seven-minute “At the Border, Guy” or the shimmering “Yalla Yalla” don’t exactly cohere, they are fascinating insights into the mind of an artist whose first principle was shared humanity through cultural exchange.
Other highlights include the dyspeptic pop of “Love Kills,” which bares more than a passing resemblance to Mick Jones’ brilliant-post-Clash outfit Big Audio Dynamite, and the down-and-out busker blues of “Long Shadow,” which seems to write Strummer’s own epitaph: “And if you put it all together/You didn’t even once relent/You cast a long shadow/And that is your testament.”
Assembly’s greatest rescue job is the heartbreaking ballad “Sleepwalk,” taken from 1989’s Earthquake Weather. It’s a slow-burning meditation on loneliness that sounds like Los Lobos covering the Kinks’ “Picture Book,” and underscores the boundless melancholy that always lay beneath Strummer’s deep-in-the-red empathy. “What good would it be?” the chorus ponders, “If you could change every heartache that ran through your life and mine?”
It’s a fair point. And to the extent that Assembly is intended to disentangle the final years of Strummer’s life from the echoes of his previous achievements, it largely succeeds. When he died at age 50 of a massive coronary in 2002, it was just a month after he and Mick Jones had shared the same stage for the first time since 1983, blasting through giddy versions of “White Riot” and “London’s Burning.” Talk of a reunion was always taking place. He never once showed signs of flagging, or slowing down. It’s a shame he didn’t have longer.

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On a landmark mix album, the Detroit icon gathers together multiple generations of the city’s dance-music faithful in a celebration of history, community, and possibility.

DJ-Kicks: Theo Parrish

Dance music’s primary function is right there in the name: make the people move. Detroit legend Theo Parrish has been doing this for three decades, both with his superlative productions and ruggedly selected, daringly mixed DJ sets. Although he self-bootlegged his own mixes long ago and is a regular in the NTS booth, where his thematic marathon appearances are avidly tracked, this contribution to the long-running DJ-Kicks series is his first widely released commercial mix album. Let the boogie commence.
And the boogie most certainly does, though what separates Parrish and other Motor City dance-musickers from their contemporaries is an explicit intention to soundtrack how the movement of dance reflects both a community’s memory and its ongoing development. In recent years, historic layers of what’s often aggregated as Detroit Techno™ have been explored with extra diligence—just 2022 has brought an indispensable book (DeForrest Brown Jr.’s thick Assembling a Black Counter Culture) and an excellent film (Kristian Hill’s God Said Give ’Em Drum Machines) that bring its past into concrete context. Detroit’s dance culture is a tributary of the city’s broader musical heritage—always has been, always will be. Yet despite Detroit’s continuing production of innovative club sounds, its adherents remain mostly stuck on past glories. Call it a folk-art mentality if you want, but that critique misses the way that Black music’s improvised and rhythmic progress has operated under a collective “ancient to the future” ethos for over a century, continuously advancing culture. Parrish’s DJ-Kicks, pointedly subtitled Detroit Forward, demands to be judged not only for its ability to move bodies, but also for the sonic possibilities it opens up, and the answers it offers to a crucial question: What is it about Detroit’s linkage of minds, asses, and social potentialities that has played such a key role in American culture?
The artists gathered on Detroit Forward are almost all locals, of different generations and profiles than the originators that Detroit’s global fetishists tend to mythologize. The lone out-of-towner is Andres “Specter” Ordonez, a Chicago house DJ whose productions on Parrish’s Sound Signature label give him honorary 313 status—and whose “The Upper Room,” named after a gospel standard and led by the fluid repetition of an off-kilter piano line, is among the comp’s instant funkafied floor-fillers. The other statesmen are all lesser-known homegrown treasures. There’s RayBone Jones, whose immense DJing skills (he once mentored the budding superstar Kyle Hall) have overshadowed his rare forays into production—though as “Green Funk” attests, he’s inherited the parish craft of mixing bubbly synth basslines, jazzy chords, and understated yet insistent circular rhythms into something both soothing and tense. There’s Howard “H-Fusion” Thomas, a studied experimentalist whose reputation also shrouds a too-short catalog of improvised diversity (from Roland 303 fantasias to R&B stomps that sound like Julius Eastman playing piano house) and whose contribution here, “Experiment 10,” is a rave Koyaanisqatsi. There’s breaks’n’synths wizard Sterling Toles, whose recent ascendancy has been buoyed by old work with the rapper Boldy James, and whose “Janis” shames most lo-fi experimental hip-hop. There’s also saxophonist/flautist De’Sean Jones and keyboardist Jon Dixon, who over the past decade have energized live performances by community stalwarts Underground Resistance, but whose own tracks have remained mostly buried.
Detroit Forward’s other notable feature is that all but one of these contributions are previously unheard (often brand-new) work, picked by Parrish to showcase an artist’s latest direction, as well as the city’s less visible music. This is where the breadth and fluidity of Detroit’s sound is most clear, a snapshot of how a culture’s evolution is informed far from media glare or mainstream platforming. There’s no better example than UR’s Jones, a noted jazz saxophonist, Grammy-nominated arranger of gospel records, and contributor to jazz drummer Makaya McCraven’s band: His three completely different appearances on Forward are a taste of the Detroit tradition operating outside expectation. “Pressure,” the album’s opening track, a collaboration with the vocalist Ideeyah, begins with a delicious looping electric-guitar hook before mutating into a downtempo groover; “Psalm 23” features a small live group playing what could only be described as power gospel; and the horn- and piano-heavy jazz-house of “Flash Spain” is so crisp it’s as though it was just picked off the tree. All of it feels of a piece and very much like Detroit. A similar energy connects drummer/producer Omar Meftah’s pair of contributions: Where his synth-leaning psychedelia accompanying John C’s earnestly biographical raps on “Full” brings late-night dizziness, the layers of percussion that scaffolds the bass synths on the extended “When the Sun Falls” make explicit the jazz bridge between Detroit’s swing and London’s broken beat.
Meftah is among the younger talents in Parrish’s new Detroit, whose approaches seldom fit simple narratives. If the arpeggiated synth and raw drum machine that power producer Terrilyn “Whodat” McQueen and keyboardist Sophiyah Elizabeth’s “Don’t Know” hint at the best of what next-gen Detroit techno could be, and Deon Jamar’s “North End Funk” is a spiraling, minimalist composition that echoes electronic music’s classic experimental wing, other tracks color incoming culture outside prescribed lines. With the help of Nova Zaii, the singer-songwriter Kesiena “KESSWA” Wanogho creates the gorgeous “Chasing Delirium,” a spoken-word “covert blues” deeply informed by noisy, sculpted dissonances; it’s both funk and abstract art. Parrish’s re-edit of Monica “mBtheLight” Blaire’s “aGain” shares that sonic space—a vocal loop and synth lay out a rhythm bed over which Blaire delivers something between a rap, a monologue, and a poem—but when the song turns emotional, it also unleashes simmering hi-tech soul. And at the mix’s center, the pianist/producer Ian Fink, whose credits include Carl Craig’s Synthesizer Ensemble and drummer Kassa Overall’s touring group, lays into his Rhodes during a propulsive, live-band version of Parrish’s 1997 classic “Moonlite,” embodying the hybridity of the main musical intersection that Detroit Forward calls home. It’s familiar, but also musically audacious.
As for the DJ? On this set, the mixmaster defers to his immediate task as selector and advocate. Parrish has never been afraid to speed up or slow down his performances depending on the moment, and this one calls for less mixing-desk aerobics than a 3 a.m. dancefloor might; here, the freewheeling spirit is in the stylistic choices and juxtapositions. Even when picking which of his own tracks to include on Detroit Forward, he parries the notion of club intentions. “Real Deal,” co-credited to Parrish and Duminie DePorres, is a beatless piece of ambient jazz—just piano, Juno, and guitar, an early-in-the-mix Easter egg that hints at what’s going on here. Theo Parrish’s work has long asserted that there’s more to Detroit’s dance music than simply making the people move. It’s a way to celebrate the richness of the community that gave it life, and which continues to be the primary inspiration for the sonic fiction of its beats, techno and otherwise. DJ-Kicks: Detroit Forward proves that few are more trustworthy to sketch that community’s stories and potential futures.


A collection of songs the iconic Malian guitarist and his collaborators recorded at jam sessions and concert rehearsals between 1991 and 2004 reflects the timeless vitality of his music.

Voyageur

Ali Farka Touré lived life on his own terms. Hailing from a noble lineage, he overcame his family’s disapproval to become a musician, and as a young boy taught himself to play the njerkle (single-string guitar), njarka (single-string fiddle), and ngoni (four-string lute). He took up the guitar after seeing the Malinké guitarist Fodéba Keita play with the national dance company of Guinea, and his unique playing style quickly made him a star in Mali. Touré would find international fame later in life, but it’s impossible to overstate his impact: He was the first musician to introduce the mesmerizing sounds of desert blues to the world, and his legacy lives on through the music of his son, Vieux Farka Touré, and the long line of Malian musicians who’ve followed.
Despite all this Touré considered himself first and foremost a farmer, and spent the better part of his final decade tending to his farm in his hometown of Niafunké, where he was also elected mayor. But whether touring the world or at home in Mali, Touré was at heart a traveler, someone who went into the world with open arms and invited people into his own. When he died in 2006, Ry Cooder said: “Ali was a seeker. There was powerful psychology there. He was not governed by anything. He was free to move about in his mind.”
Voyageur, produced by his son Vieux and World Circuit’s Nick Gold, reflects this sense of freedom. Recorded between 1991 and 2004 during improvised jam sessions and concert rehearsals, the album’s nine tracks capture Touré’s life on the road, the warmth and naturalness of his collaborations, and his unswerving commitment to preserving the traditions of his homeland. The record flows so naturally it’s easy to forget these tracks were not made to go together.
Album opener “Safari” (which means journey in Swahili) is immediately recognizable as Touré’s classic Sonrhaï style, underscoring his winding guitar refrain with the regular beat of the calabash and the occasional flourish of tambin (flute). The steady rhythms echo the regular pace of a long workday, while Touré’s powerful, unwavering voice seems to offer strength and guidance to the chorus of voices that follow, as his guitar slips out into a focused, whirling solo.
Touré’s guitar always leads the way without overshadowing—he leaves enough space for his fellow musicians to insert themselves and comfortably mold their playing to his. On the acoustic version of “Sambadio,” a Fula song in honor of farmers, the springy, plucked notes of Bassekou Kouyaté and Mama Sissoko’s ngoni chime off Touré’s sharp guitar line, while the regular thump of the calabash anchors the wandering strings. Hama Sankaré and Afel Bocoum’s delicate backing vocals carry through to the song’s electric version, which is transformed by Pee Wee Ellis’ jazzy arrangements and Steve Williamson’s playful sax. But even amid all the extra flourish, Touré’s voice commands attention as he picks up a note and settles into it with astonishing ease, the sax almost shy next to his self-assured delivery.
Perhaps the most significant guest on Voyageur is vocalist and longtime Touré collaborator Oumou Sangaré, whose three appearances represent some of the record’s high points. “Bandolobourou,” with its spiraling guitar and colorful mosaic of percussion, feels warm and intimate, like a late-night conversation between friends. At times during the propulsive “Cherie” the two musicians sound engaged in a playful competition, each trying to impress the other—Touré with his agile guitar trills and Sangaré with her ululations and vocal acrobatics—before rejoining the central refrain in enchanting unison. On “Sadjona,” a traditional Wassoulou song for hunters, Sangaré’s majestic voice rides an insistent kamele ngoni groove as she improvises a paean in honor of Touré, predicting the vast celebrations that would take place upon his passing. It’s half jest, half recognition of Touré’s immeasurable standing.
When Touré eventually did die in 2006, 11 years after this song was recorded, Mali’s public radio stations suspended regular programming to play his music. Today, he is revered as one of Africa’s greatest musicians, and a statue now stands near his house in Bamako. Posthumous releases like Voyageur continue to shed light on his vast, and still partially unheard, catalog. Though decades old, the songs collected here sound as current as ever—a testament to the timeless vitality of Touré’s music.


On her fourth solo album, Eleanor Friedberger embraces ’80s goth pop and explores a newly fragmented internal landscape as a post-election expat in Greece.

Rebound

Eleanor Friedberger is making steady progress inward. Over the course of three strong solo albums, she has interrogated her emotions and experiences with a focus so sharp that her insistent self-examination has become an act of sociology more than narcissism. In Friedberger’s relentless investigations of her day-to-day existence, listeners can recognize themselves, their friends, and the particulars of their own lives.
Her terrific fourth album, Rebound, set in a post-2016 Greece, provides plenty more of the same. But there are times on the record when Friedberger’s writing turns elliptical and the narrative becomes more difficult than usual to piece together. The Illinois-born artist has been nothing if not consistent since she and her brother Matt stopped making music together as the Fiery Furnaces, and the shift on Rebound isn’t seismic—longtime fans will have no trouble cozying up to many of these songs. There are elements, however, that separate the album from its predecessors and suggest some tentative movement toward a new way of working. It’s as if Friedberger is cautiously extending a leg, searching for a foothold to help her swing to another, more daring, form of songwriting.
Though it’s not the best song of the bunch, opener “My Jesus Phase” may be the best example. As has been written about the novels of Rachel Cusk, it’s a “mosaic of fragments,” a picture formed from broken poetry, backed by rhythm guitar and simmering, ominous synths. The track begins with a plea for amnesia—“Let me forget the words/Let me forget the time”—as Friedberger loses the plot in an Athens hotel bar, figuratively and literally. She has a gift for narrative density: Reading the Iris Murdoch novel The Nice and the Good and struggling to follow the story becomes an analogy for the sudden wild spinning of our collective moral compass after the 2016 election.
Friedberger had always wanted to go to Greece, so after months of touring followed by that bleak November, she escaped to Athens and assembled a band. But she didn’t write many of the songs on Rebound until she visited a club of the same name, which had been described to her as “an ’80s goth disco where everyone does the chicken dance.” The sound she discovered there resembled a Mediterranean knockoff of Joy Division or the Cure, and she imbued the new record with that spooky, dancy vibe, lacing its gentle psychedelia with a dash of foreboding. Like famous artistic pilgrimages to Ionia from Cusk’s novel Outline to Joni Mitchell’s dalliance with the goat-dancing redneck Cary Raditz on Crete, Rebound has the bleached, hazy feel of a sun-damaged Polaroid with a blurred figure in the corner.
After “My Jesus Phase,” though, it takes awhile for Friedberger to return to her more outré exploration. Before that come some of the strongest songs on the record, in a more familiar, sharply drawn and narratively coherent, mode. The chorus of “The Letter” reverberates with regret: “The opposite of what he thought he thought/The opposite of what she wanted.” One of the danciest songs she’s ever recorded, “Everything” is a cathartic anthem of defiance with a subtle current of ennui running underneath.
Even on those songs, though, Friedberger radiates ambivalence, often through double entendre. “When the pain ended I won a prize,” she sings on “The Letter,” after recounting how she took some pills found by the side of the road and was soon lying prone on a wharf. What a lyric! It could be entirely literal, it could refer to some event that goes undescribed in the song, or it could simply be that the release from pain was the prize. The title and refrain of “Are We Good?” uses a similar trick, with the familiar check-in question sharing space with the larger question about the nature of humanity.
Friedberger explicitly acknowledges how difficult it is to determine whether you’re doing the right thing on “It’s Hard”—a song that, like “My Jesus Phase,” laments the impossibility of making life make sense. Set atop a creaky rhythm and shot through with seesaw synths, the track is set at Rebound, where a song within a song that recalls the Cure rings out. Friedberger tries to find its pulse: “Walk back and forth with my head held low,” she sings. “Arms swing in time to the tune that I don’t know. And it's hard.” The haunting closer, “Rule of Action,” finds Friedberger equally lost, calling herself “a writer on the edge” as she endures “days with no structure and nights of bad dreams.”
For so many people, the 2016 election activated a sense of uncertainty or inspired aimless wandering. There’s something closer to home happening to Friedberger on Rebound, though. On “Everything” she sings of a coveted romance, “a man in Greece, a girlfriend in Italy.” “Are We Good?” gives her an approximation of what that relationship might be like: “I proposed to a woman for a man last night.” But the experience is remote and dissatisfying. Friedberger isn’t exactly part of the action. While it continues her project of self-investigation, Rebound does not quite feature the Eleanor Friedberger we’ve come to know from her first three albums. It’s as though part of her has receded from view, as she tries to figure out—as we all do, all the time—what happens next.


Ron Morelli has spent the last three years building his L.I.E.S. label into a paragon of noisy, Made-in-the-U.S.A. club music. Spit, the first music under his own name released on Dominick Fernow's Hospital Productions, defies the type of romantic, back-to-basic engagement L.I.E.S. inspires.

Spit

Ron Morelli has spent the last three years building the L.I.E.S. label into a paragon of noisy, Made-in-the-U.S.A. club music. It's a role that, between managing a prolific release schedule and selecting producers out of what amounts to a little black book of underground dance misfits, requires a bit more creative agency than your average label head. Spit, Morelli's first music under his own name, appears hell-bent on separating the man from the hailstorm of narrative and praise surrounding his label. It arrives via Hospital Productions, 36 minutes of ill-at-ease industrial simmer whose length, construction, and tenor defy the type of romantic, back-to-basic engagement that L.I.E.S. inspires.
There is nothing nice about Spit. The album title was inspired by a neighborhood Morelli lived in, one in which hookers would "smoke cigarettes, read the paper, talk on their cell phones, and spit. They would spit...a lot." So not just spit, but "hooker spit," which should give you a window into the tension, claustrophobia, and foulness that infect Morelli's music. Spit is dark, more so than the glut of industrial-leaning techno and eerie machine music Morelli has dug up for L.I.E.S. Those works often had expanse on their side: they're long, winding tracks that, however noisy, could engender mystery or psychedelic escape. Spit, in comparison, trudges through its eight tracks: fed up, exhausted, grim. When asked why he didn't release his album on his own label, he responded tersely: "Dom[inick Fernow, head of Hospital Productions] simply proposed I make a record for him. If he did not ask, then I would not have done it." Ok, then.
This sense of duty and drudgery comes to life on scraping, hissy tracks such as "Sledgehammer II" and "Slow Down". Ugly, metal-on-metal machine music, Spit is rhythmic in nature, but not as dance-oriented as much of the L.I.E.S. output. I don't think the tired, delayed claps and barely-there acid bassline of "Modern Paranoia" want to make anyone dance; they're exhausted, it was a long day, they need a beer and a shot. They're very much at home with the noir-ish menace of Hospital Productions-affiliated acts like Vatican Shadow and Silent Servant.
If you squint hard enough you can find some playfulness in Spit, in the way pitched toms hop around in the background of "Crack Microbes" or in "Director Of…"'s garbled, beatless trip. The album's centerpiece, in placement if not tone, is "Fake Rush", a nervy, light-on-its-feet stew of rhythmic oscillations. Were it not for its bit-reduced crunch and battery-acid exterior, "Fake Rush" could've come from one of London's many young bass manglers, especially as it clocks a heart-racing 140 bpm when it's not wandering around drunkenly in half-time.
It's hard to truly love an album that seems a constant threat to shiv you, though, and while Spit's economy prevents it from careening into pure aggression, it remains irritated throughout. This feels by design, and it's easy to read Spit as a reaction to all of the love poured on L.I.E.S. of late. More likely, Spit represents another of Morelli's inspirations, after several collaborative projects. (On the process of making the album, he offers, "[Y]ou’re working in a tried and true format and throwing your own shitty take on what has been done by the masters years ago.") There's enough on offer that its tone can be forgiven, perhaps, but there are going to be plenty of nights when Spit just wants to be left alone, and you'll be inclined to grant it as much.


The first installment of the trumpeter’s ecstatic series to be recorded in a studio is its most beautiful, and somehow the most convincing document of the cycle’s in-person grandeur, too.

Seven Storey Mountain VI

On an ordinary Saturday evening, back when ordinary meant large rooms full of strangers, I attended the premiere of Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain VI in Manhattan. It was November 2019, and perhaps appropriately for the latest entry in a song cycle named after the autobiography of a priest, monk, and philosopher, the venue was a church, St. Peter’s Episcopal in Chelsea. Beneath the vaulted ceiling, the crowd hummed with an energy between the echoey hush of a religious space and the anticipatory buzz of a see-and-be-seen cultural event. The Bibles positioned in each pew looked less like texts of an active parish and more like decorations in a hip, aestheticized club. Ira Kaplan from Yo La Tengo sat a few rows in front of me, I was almost certain.
An actual hum began around us, shadowy and doleful. Singers inserted into the audience belted out a choral work from the neighboring benches. “Didn’t they do this when Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt were at The Shed?” I muttered. But the choral music was ideal for the acoustics of a 19th-century cathedral, rising like heat over the Spuyten Duyvil blue stone. Musicians, seated on the pulpit surrounding Wooley’s trumpet like stoics, started to play. Susan Alcorn’s pedal steel accented the vocals. Brushes swirled on a snare drum. The piece that followed was hardly ordinary, and it didn’t aspire to the divine, either. An ecstatic, communal experience in a city seemingly built for them, the debut roused and moved us as our night bled into the wee hours of Sunday.
When my partner and I woke at home the next morning, we could still feel the music, even as its immediate sensory imprint faded. Meanwhile, Wooley and an edited version of his ensemble—which, even in slimmed-down form, consists of 14 musicians, among them contemporary downtown fixtures C. Spencer Yeh, Chris Corsano, and Ava Mendoza—headed to Oktaven Audio in the suburb of Mount Vernon and recorded the previous night’s composition in a single day. The result loses the setting of the sanctuary, but none of the polyphonic fullness that the sacred proportions of a cathedral allow. The proximity of the musicians to the show—the way the church must have continued to ripple through them—makes St. Peter’s Chelsea a player on the incantatory Seven Storey Mountain VI.
On record, Wooley balances the immediacy of his live set with the clarity of a studio session. The keyboard loops that detail the piece’s woozy middle section are audible underneath crash cymbals. Readings from John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs mumble below droning violin. Lyrics from “Reclaim the Night,” a 1979 Peggy Seeger song that censures sexual violence, conclude the 45-minute, one-track album. At last year’s opening, the references to Adam and Eve sounded ecclesiastical, but Wooley writes in the album booklet, “Religious dogma holds little interest for me.” Instead, the aesthetics and fellowship of Christianity become a vessel for condemning patriarchy’s treatment of women, one of the many fascinating knots in his composition’s skein.
Wooley started the Seven Storey Mountain series in 2007, and each chapter takes the same general shape: Beginning with a spare musical line, the works build into a dissonant freak-out before they flatten again into a gentle melody, drone, or percussion pattern, often mirroring the initial motif. Wooley’s alchemic mix of jazz, minimalism, choral music, indeterminacy, and musique concrète depends on the varied, individual creative processes he implements to guide his musicians: Some read written scores, others follow jazz chord changes, others aleatoric prompts. Stems from previous installments of SSM reappear as time markers and cues. To mesh their playing styles in a single work, the players explore their incompatibilities. Making decisions collectively becomes its own brand of spontaneity, and failure is welcome. “Virtuosity,” Wooley tells us, “is the possibility of total collapse.”
He collapses these diverse methodologies into a philosophy that celebrates writing as a kind of artistic cooperative, which he calls “Mutual Aid Music.” If its components aren’t inherently original, Wooley’s blend of sensibilities is. He dashes his Cageian, improvisatory brew with old-school, pre-modern concerns, treating the acoustics of rooms as active participants in a piece’s creation. Previous entries in SSM were recorded live at Manhattan’s Abrons Art Center and Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room—the former a traditional, balconied theater, the latter a marble-floored, cubic hall designed by legendary architectural firm McKim, Mead & White. Each of these albums is powerful, yet they come with all of the sonic diminishment and experiential FOMO that can attenuate a concert recording. VI is the first installment of Seven Storey Mountain to be recorded in a studio. It’s more beautiful than its predecessors, and somehow the most convincing document of the cycle’s in-person grandeur, too.
Today, live shows increasingly feel like relics of an old social order, and religious congregations, including St. Peter’s Chelsea, are assembling for services digitally. Yet Seven Storey Mountain VI never alludes to communality as something that exists in the outside world. It expresses communality, with all of its potential for the profound and the spiritual. What we search for in crowds of people is complicated, but at the album’s end, Wooley’s chorus of women tells us, “You can’t scare me,” the strength of their numbers turning a “me” into a “we.” Gathering once gave us courage. Wooley’s latest shows us that, even in the isolation of our homes, the glowing residue of a past togetherness can make us feel more resolute than afraid.

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The hard-bitten and prolific Sacramento rapper Mozzy shifts slightly to accessibility on his first album of 2017. YG, Jadakiss, and G-Eazy are featured.

Fake Famous

The title of Mozzy’s latest album, Fake Famous, is ambiguous. The Sacramento rapper’s star has certainly risen. He followed his prolific 2015 with an even more active 2016. YouTube hits for his music videos traffic in the millions. He’s recently appeared on releases from E-40 and Rihanna favorite Boogie. And his first album of 2017, Fake Famous, features YG, Jadakiss, and actual pop star G-Eazy. So is Mozzy fake famous or just famous? Better yet, does he want to be? The album’s compactness and consistency speak to Mozzy’s pop sensibilities, but its heavy tones and themes suggest that he has more on his mind than stardom; maybe he just hopes to earn greater renown on his own terms.
Mozzy’s greatest attribute is on full display throughout the record: He has one of the richest, most unique and elaborate vocabularies in all of hip-hop. His phrasing focuses details and brings out the poignancy in his words. A line like “I could get your flowers watered for a bronze Rollie” brilliantly emphasizes the outcomes of killing for gain, not the act. Later, on “Get Em,” Mozzy straightforwardly states that he could easily commit murder—no help needed. His attitude in both cases is the same, but it shows the measured perspective of someone who has weighed the serious consequences of a brutal situation.
Gang activity and violence are consistent throughout Mozzy’s work. Fake Famous is no exception, yet it still feels vital, which speaks to his ability as a storyteller and lyricist. Instead of providing an account with a beginning, middle, and end (à la “Meet the Flockers” or “The Art of Peer Pressure”), Mozzy tends to create micro-narratives within each song. He sometimes veers into generalities, but for the most part, he plucks out the right specifics to immerse the listener in any given moment. “Borrowed Time,” for example, stitches together admissions of a drug-addicted family with tales of driving away from cops. On “The People Plan,” he ranges from the perils of the courtroom to the church days of his youth and back to the destructive system that breeds inequality.
Mozzy’s lyrics are brought to life by his exceptional delivery and flow. His lines don’t layer double entendres like Pusha T’s or explode with vivid similes like Danny Brown’s. They’re remarkably colorful and elastic, though, full of sharp phrasing: “Throwing handles when I steer/Couple piglets in the rear/Watch the diamonds do they Dougie/I had to adjust the mirror.” He has a dexterity that works greatly to his benefit, but also his detriment: When nearly every line is high quality, and they connect seamlessly, few pop out.
Fake Famous does not aim to have a breakout single, but it is a relative shift toward accessibility for Mozzy. Ironically, the G-Eazy and YG-featuring “Hold on Me” is lackluster compared to more effortless pop swings like “Scorin.” Still, G-Eazy’s slower, easier-to-follow verse highlights what Mozzy is unwilling (or unable) to do to cater to more casual fans: Let his foot off the gas. Of course, Mozzy is not trying to land on a song with Britney Spears. But particularly when he hands off hook duties (to Iamsu!, Lex Aura, and Bobby Luv), crossover potential is evident. Fake Famous is the best he’s done in translating his talents to a more conventional format. But Mozzy’s mindset remains the same as ever: He’s mired in a troubled past and present that define him. He may never be a superstar, but he is very close to what others could consider real fame. It seems to be his choice not to reach that so-called pinnacle.


The Manchester producer’s latest songs take us deep into the catacombs to explore a vision of club music at its most damaged.

It Should Be Us

The vanguard club sounds of the past decade have tended to favor gleaming surfaces and vivid shapes rendered in crisp high definition, affording dazzling visions of the technological sublime. Andy Stott’s It Should Be Us is a report from the opposite extreme. No spotless chrome expanses, rippling LED arrays, or algorithmic pulses here: The Manchester producer takes us deep into the catacombs to explore a vision of club music at its most damaged—of busted samplers, waterlogged wax, cracked cement, and lumpy sandbags. None of this is new for Stott; he’s been mining the vein for nearly a decade now. But It Should Be Us might be his most provocative attempt yet to throw a shovel of dirt on the idea of techno-futurist utopia.
It has been three years since Stott’s last LP, Too Many Voices, and eight since he put out a pair of consecutive double-packs that radically redefined the sound that, until then, he had shared with many of his Modern Love labelmates—a nuanced, warehouse-ready strain of techno that balanced Detroit’s expressive release with Berlin’s dub atmospheres. Passed Me By and We Stayed Together pulled the rug out from beneath dance-music convention, slowing the tempo to a rickety crawl and wrapping his synths in a layer of grit. It was less deconstruction than exhumation, with zombie beats trudging dully forward, dead-eyed and caked in earth.
Stott reached his peak with Luxury Problems and Faith in Strangers, infusing slow-motion techno with hints of goth and bass music; at its best—particularly on songs featuring the vocalist Alison Skidmore—the results suggested the lo-fi trap remix of This Mortal Coil you never knew you needed. On the slightly scattered Too Many Voices, it sometimes felt like Stott couldn’t decide where to go from there—to choose light or shadow, movement or stasis—but with It Should Be Us, he plunges straight into the wreckage and never looks back.
If the new record is billed as an EP, despite its length (eight tracks on the 2x12", nine on the digital release), it might be because these feel less like songs than experiments in pushing Stott’s habitual techniques to the breaking point. Agonizingly slow machine beats shuffle like a shackled convict, their syncopated accents turned painfully halting. It’s not just the pace: The sound design also contributes to the mood of mortal exhaustion. Stott’s basslines are hardly recognizable as such—less a progression of notes than a mournful shrug. A synth lead might be a broken foghorn or a swarm of bees; pads droop listlessly, like vines after the first frost.
Stott’s sound palette has always veered toward distressed textures, but on It Should Be Us, the quality of his drums—a kind of powdery crinkle, diffuse and ill-formed—sounds almost like he’s been sampling 32-kbps stream rips. Hi-hats rustle like a sticky wad of cellophane; bass drums don’t so much kick as cough, heaving like diseased lungs. We tend to associate lo-fi techniques with analog tools: things like tube distortion and vinyl hiss that, for whatever reason, contemporary listeners tend to find satisfying on a gut level. Not many artists have waded into the waters of digital lo-fi yet. Stott’s wheezing, phased shakers don’t always sound pleasing to the ear, but that might be part of the point.
He’s clearly out to disorient us. Again and again, his beats challenge your ability to parse them: Snares, claps, and cymbals thrash and jerk according to a logic that seemingly only they understand. Then the kick drum drops and all the stray elements seem to snap into place around it. Sometimes his beats can be truly devious: “Ballroom” drags itself out of the gate like a wounded animal until a wordless vocal loop sets the true tempo somewhere way up in footwork territory. Even then, the collision of arrhythmic woodblocks and rapid-fire hiccups resists any attempts to make sense of it, suggesting a caffeine high gone dangerously wrong.
What’s missing from It Should Be Us are the moments of beauty that defined Luxury Problems and Faith in Strangers. Stott has backed away from the airy vocals and the muscular post-punk that, combined, made songs like the latter album’s title track so compelling, and he hasn’t quite figured out how to replace them. Here, the pitched-down vocals often sound like placeholders for a fresher, more distinctive idea; Burial and his imitators have already wrung that trope pretty dry. But at the level of rhythm, texture, and atmosphere, It Should Be Us marks a step into the unknown. Most promisingly, it takes post-punk’s bleak worldview and reformats it for the 21st century, mimicking corrupt files to create a new music of technological failure. Stott’s enervated club music, a fitting way to cap a decade of increasing fatigue, doubles as a timely reminder that our apps won’t save us.


Swedish "sad boy" rap curiosity Yung Lean's new album scrubs away the most amateurish (and most likable) parts of his sound. Instead of bringing something new to rap, he’s making cheap copies of his role models.

Unknown Memory

Born Jonatan Leandoer Håstad, Yung Lean is an 18-year-old Swede who speaks, raps, and sings over beats mostly created by members of his Sad Boys clique. His general shtick is an approximation of contemporary swag-rap that comes across as a mixture of tribute and parody; he initially attracted notice as a kind of musical meme. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Lean gaining an audience without visuals, and the video for "Ginseng Strip 2002" exemplifies his approach: the baby-faced rapper dons his now-trademark bucket hat and a bad Southern accent, shouting out Makaveli within the clip's opening seconds. His verses are stilted, his movements awkward; he resembles a rap-obsessed misfit from a summer camp who freestyles poorly and doesn’t worry about distinguishing between the positive and negative attention he's receiving. And Lean receives plenty of both: the video has over 2.6 million views, and fans and haters still lob pejoratives at each other in the comments section to this day.
On last year’s Unknown Death 2002 mixtape, Lean’s rapping was wooden but relatively easy to ignore, and those who found themselves responding in earnest to his music may have been attracted to the cloudy instrumentals provided by producers such as Yung Gud and Yung Sherman. On the trance-like “Gatorade”, Lean’s voice was screwed up and down the register so often that he simply became part of an appealingly chaotic mix; “Lemonade” was a blatant Clams Casino rip-off, but the imitation was accurate enough to capture that producer’s appeal.
As a whole, Yung Lean wields the appeal of a charming reality star: he's ridiculous without knowing it. His new album, Unknown Memory, is reminiscent of the second season of "Jersey Shore", where it slowly became clear that the cast was in on the joke. The record finds Yung Lean doubling down on every part of his personality that hit home with those initially drawn to his music, while simultaneously scrubbing away the most amateurish (and most likable) parts of his sound.
He’s added two notable tricks to his arsenal: a bastardized form of dub, and a heightened tendency to eschew rapping altogether in favor of Auto-Tuned wailing. This latter development flatters the fidelity of his music—one can easily imagine a track from Unknown Memory passing by anonymously in a public space—but it also makes many of these songs indistinguishable from one another. Consequently, it's harder to ignore Yung Lean's vocals to focus on his more palatable beats; “Sunrise Angel” and “Yoshi City” are relatively interesting production-wise, but Lean’s voice is too high in the mix. His revamped flow, which cements him as a terrible rapper rather than someone who doesn't know how to rap, comes across as more grating than his older, more fruitless attempts at piecing verses together. The most engaging song here, the Travis Scott-featuring “Ghosttown”, might have been more potent if Yung Lean didn't appear on it at all.
One of Lean’s noteworthy qualities has always been his expression of sad feelings, and on Unknown Memory that tendency is kicked into overdrive. On the hook of “Yoshi City”, he refers to himself as a “lonely cloud”; on “Monster”, over the same brassy synths and a TNGHT-like build, he laments “nothing matters anymore.” “Leanworld” finds the rapper reaching the nadir of this expression—it’s a swampy, soupy production, almost unimaginably irritating in the club-land fantasy it conjures up. These sentiments feel like the performative sadness that’s been explored with much more sophistication by artists like Lana Del Rey; in comparison, Yung Lean’s expression sounds empty.
Yung Lean's tendencies to randomly emote and stunt come in part from approximating the real emotions of the music he takes his cues from—mostly, Southern and West Coast rap ranging from the sad robotics of Future to the anything-goes ethos of Lil B. But he never shows any real emotional investment in the style he’s chosen, and his lyrics and tone don’t reveal much personality beyond “rap fan.” Yung Lean isn’t bringing anything new to rap; instead, he’s making cheap copies of his actual role models, and in doing so he removes the humanity of the rappers he’s imitating, creating unwitting caricatures of those artists and not much more.


Chicago rapper Dreezy is a drill-adjacent upstart from the South Side, and her major-label debut is a fully-formed offering that seamlessly balances rugged raps with pristine pop songs.

No Hard Feelings

Chicago rapper Dreezy, a drill-adjacent upstart from the South Side, put competitors on notice when she ripped through a remix of Nicki Minaj’s “Chi-Raq,” proving herself a capable stand-in. Since seizing her moment, she’s grown into quite a well-rounded artist, appearing alongside veteran conscious rap guru Common, drill holdouts Lil Durk, Lil Bibby, King Louie, Sasha Go Hard, and Katie Got Bandz, and electronic duo AlunaGeorge, earning a record deal with Interscope in the process. Poised for a breakthrough, late last year she tested the waters with From Now On, a superbly-rapped EP that made use of her dexterity with nimble verses that swiftly navigated sounds from the producers of the moment—Metro Boomin and Southside. It was to-the-point, trap-centric, and a bit one-note, but it had just enough legs to build buzz for a proper entrance. A few weeks later, Dreezy released her lead single, the surprisingly smooth, Jeremih-featuring crossover jam “Body,” which seemed to suggest a more versatile effort was in store.
No Hard Feelings is Dreezy’s major-label debut, and it makes good on that promise. It’s a fully-formed offering that seamlessly balances her more rugged raps with pristine pop songs (sculpted in “Body”’s image) and tender slow jams. There are just enough drill bits to pacify Schizo era fans, but the album moves and turns on more subdued songs delivered in singsong and a few straight-up R&B joints. Dreezy is as accomplished a vocalist as she is a lyricist, with a glossy tone that rises as painlessly into falsetto as it does a playful squeal, and she slots in songs that sound like they could be a fit on a Sevyn Streeter album, like the infectious “Wasted” and the slow-burner “Break the News,” with more traditional bangers and deep cuts.
Skits help pull together a loose narrative that finds Dreezy at the center of a love triangle with a philandering boyfriend and a new would-be beau. The album drops the listener into a changeover—she’s put off by her boyfriend’s latest escapade and open to a replacement just as another suitor comes along—and the sequencing shuttles listeners through this story-in-progress with snapshots and vignettes of the trio’s interactions. But No Hard Feelings never goes out of its way to force-feed us these romantic entanglements. It isn’t a concept album—the songs don’t exist as building blocks for a relational drama—but they are carefully assembled to unspool the plot while making individual statements about love, sex, and compatibility, and they provide insights into Dreezy’s own life. The transitions are purposeful and well thought out.
The intro is a phone call from Dreezy’s friend alerting her that her man is with another woman and it segues into “We Gon Ride,” a song about Day Ones that functions as a vehicle for explaining that bond and transporting them to the cheater’s house. When they get there, he claims the girl is his cousin on a skit before “Spazz” drops in, and its central message—“On any nigga, I spazz/ On any bitch, I spazz”—lends itself well to the scene. The whole album is arranged this way. Details in songs interlock even when the songs themselves differ. It’s ambitious and well-executed, especially in the run from “Body” to “Afford My Love.” This is a byproduct of talent, work ethic, and circumstance aligning; Dreezy couldn’t have made this album a year ago, and the scope of the project shows just how much she’s grown and how far she’s expanded her repertoire.
Dreezy got here unleashing her flows, hunkering down into backloaded rhyme schemes and pressing her weight into them. It’s easy to hear Minaj’s influence on songs like From Now On’s “Money Printer,” where she flexes into pronunciations, and G Herbo’s on any number of older songs, barreling downhill and muscling through verse on sheer intensity. But stylistically she’s becoming independent of those sounds, adding more variety to her game and finding a voice that is distinctly her own. Her punches are direct and effective and still beholden to her forebears, but now she’s opting for a style that suits her even better: a chronicling approach that makes use of her sharply pivoting flows. She eases longtime listeners into the transition with drill-indebted tunes like “Spazz” and “Bad Bitch,” which rely heavily on her punchline acumen (on the latter: “Mean-muggin’ in the Ghost, they yelling Beetlejuice” and “Second time getting top from the same nigga, call that shit a recap”). But that’s merely one sliver of her identity, and she opens up when trapped in love’s throes (On “Ready,” she raps, “I’m really everything you think I am boy, it ain’t no hype/Young, independent, with a bankroll, I can change your life”). She’s expressing more now than she ever has.
Dreezy credits Interscope with broadening her palette, expanding her sound and testing her range, and No Hard Feelings makes a strong case for the nearly extinct A&R position. The album maximizes Dreezy’s talents, sets her up to hone her songcraft, and brings out her personality. Guests are all hand-selected for their roles: T-Pain plays the perfect partner for the duet “Close to You,” Wale is the ideal candidate to play the adversarial male voice opposite Dreezy on “Afford My Love,” and Gucci rides shotgun with ease on “We Gon Ride” (“MAC 11, I ride, keep shooters at every session/I’m ahead of my time, a blessing to the present”). Contributions from Bloodpop (Grimes and Justin Bieber), Terrace Martin, Cardo, and TM88 all find ways to push Dreezy’s limits. The slow strut of “Ready” provides an opportunity for more careful penmanship. She slips from a tottering singsong into a even slipperier cadence on “See What You On,” inspired by the swaying, sax-led tempo. On “Don’t Know Me,” Dreezy asks, “You don’t really know me, do you?” But on No Hard Feelings, she finally gives listeners a chance to.


Continuing a remarkable run of post-comeback releases, the secretive Japanese producer trades chilly dub techno for warm, almost chipper house music.

Yes

In dance music, anonymity used to be a currency as stable as gold. To be a “mysterious techno artist” was to present an alpha confidence about the only thing that mattered: the music. For some, it was an anti-commercial gesture. Detroit’s Mike Banks held that concealing his face emphasized the durability of his talent, “because as a man you’re frail, but your work can stay in humanity forever, like the Egyptians,” the Underground Resistance member told The Wire in 2007. But somewhere along the way, self-effacement among techno artists became an increasingly silly cliché, a Shutterstock image for a Berlin DJ starter pack. The pursuit of facelessness has occasionally cannibalized dance music’s Black heritage; some white producers have adopted racially ambiguous pseudonyms in the name of cultivating mystique. At a moment where Black techno artists are spotlighting their identity to re-center their position in dance music, a stronger desire for attribution is, to borrow a good line from Twitter, probably the energy we need right now.
If secrecy’s stock is plummeting in electronic music, it’s been interesting to see Shinichi Atobe, a famously mysterious techno artist, beginning to open up. His new album, Yes, arrives with the same sunny disposition of its housey predecessor, 2018’s Heat, and a rare headshot of the Saitama-based producer—included, possibly, as a response to rumors he is actually his sometime Chain Reaction labelmate Vainqueur. Sloughing off the dub techno of Atobe’s first two records, Ship-Scope and Butterfly Effect—between which lay a 13-year gap and not a single word from the artist—his latest LP is closer in style to house aesthetes like DJ Sprinkles or the late Boston producer Callisto. Where Yes stands apart is in its inherent optimism—in a couple cases, the mood comes close to a deep contentment. On “Lake 2,” piano and organ keys skate with the ease of Moon Safari-era Air or Italo house producer Don Carlos. In the hands of an extrovert, “Yes” might have been called “Yay!”—its descending, major-key piano chords evoke an everyman joy, while a whistling harmony seems ready to swing open a studio door and say, “Honey, I’m home!”
However much Atobe’s music has changed, it’s still recognizably his in at least one way: those sharp, throat-tickling trebles that could make a stone cough. They’re an acquired taste. Matt Colton, the mastering engineer for most of Atobe’s records, admitted treating Butterfly Effect’s “bright,” “cold-sounding” pre-masters with warmer mids and fatter lows. Even if we accept that Atobe’s nettling claps and rimshots are a feature rather than a bug, Yes’s hi-fi polish intuitively seems like a less forgiving environment. Somehow, though, it comes together, thanks to some nice contrasts of space and texture. “Lake 2”’s shaker has a satisfying safety-match scrape, and works as a gentle brake on Atobe’s cruising keys. And the mallets on “Rain 3,” which might remind you of a cartoon spider scrambling out of a bathtub, are set amid floaty, holographic synth figures. You may notice that the trebles are slightly softer than usual. With a couple of comparable tracks on Heat—especially “Heat 4”—the effect could be like having your skull scratched from the inside.
Where Heat introduced warmth to Atobe’s music, Yes has made it smooth. (Only “Ocean 7,” a Drexciyan étude of questing chords, and “Loop 1”’s echo of Scion’s early Chain Reaction classic really break from the theme.) Nothing makes the case as emphatically as “Ocean 1.” As it opens with an irresistible g-funk bassline, the scene quickly assembles itself: palm trees, Venice Beach, lowriders on an endless boulevard. “Ocean 1” fills out nicely with honeyed wafts of synth and Atobe’s typically elegant piano accents. But the trilling guitar that suddenly struts through, a third of the way in? A real chef’s-kiss moment, best enjoyed on a dancefloor—although the point at which we can safely share little moments like these is, for now, dance music’s most pressing mystery. As for Atobe, it’s funny to wonder whether he’s taken cues from Burial about seclusion and productivity. Reasonably secure in the knowledge that he isn’t the figment of a German man’s imagination, we can probably abide the not-knowing of his life story. But there are still so many questions, the most immediate of which might be this: After all those years of inactivity, how is it that Atobe came to be this reliable, this prolific, or this good?

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The label that defined Cologne techno may have uncoupled from dance music’s zeitgeist, but on its 18th annual compilation, Kompakt finds freedom in its ability to keep on Kompakting on.

Total 18

Kompakt’s 18th annual label showcase opens with an inside joke: a track from the veteran Cologne producer Jürgen Paape called “Well, It’s Paape.” A little background: Paape is one of the Cologne label’s co-founders and a stone-faced fixture in its eponymous record shop; he’s also among the least prolific producers on the roster. Despite occupying the compilation’s pole position, he resurfaces in the least flashy way possible, with a rustling, shuffling techno groover that could just as well have appeared on 1999’s Total 1. That’s not a knock on the track, which nails the Kompakt sweet spot, that rare fusion of tough and supple, stern and pliant. Rather, it’s a way of saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Whole empires have risen and fallen in the dance-music world during the 20 years since Kompakt began documenting and codifying the sound of Cologne techno, where bristly minimalism met swooning synth pop and arthouse experiments went off on saucer-eyed rave benders. And as other sounds have come to seem more current and perhaps more urgent—first the uneven throb of dubstep and bass music, more recently the livewire sonics of a range of club styles that look primarily to Africa and the Caribbean, rather than the U.S., UK, and EU, for inspiration—Kompakt has come to seem less like a standard bearer and more like a niche concern.
But there’s freedom in uncoupling from the zeitgeist, and Total 18 proves that one of the label’s strengths is its ability to keep on Kompakting on. It’s not just “Well, It’s Paape”; many of the most satisfying tracks here could have come from any of the previous 17 installments in the series. Many of them are the work of the label’s inner circle. Tobias Thomas and Michael Mayer’s “So Mad” is a slyly spooky haunted-house ride complete with carnivalesque chords and a wraithlike vocal hook. Jörg Burger’s “Petra Kelly” harnesses the luxurious synths of Violator-era Depeche Mode for a moody, slow-burning cut with a barely concealed snarl. The irrepressible Rex the Dog fuses electro-house chug with bleep-techno flashbacks. T.Raumschmiere’s spiky, vocoder-infused fist-pumper parties like it’s 1999. At the heavy end of the spectrum, Wolfgang Voigt—Kompakt’s paterfamilias, best known for his ambient project GAS—teams up with his younger brother Reinhard for an enjoyably DGAF techno brooder that sounds a little like a duet for kick drum and dentist drill. All of these tracks demonstrate a time-tested understanding of the way dance music often boils down to fitting the right sounds to the right groove. It’s not rocket science.
Happily, quite a few of the comp’s best tracks come from relatively new players. Sonns’ “Tame” sounds a little like a Scandinavian disco rework of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” trilogy. Tom Demac and Real Lies evoke both the Streets and Pet Shop Boys in a note-perfect take on the sort of melancholy deep techno that Superpitcher pioneered for the label in the early 2000s. Aaron Ahrends strikes the quintessentially Kompakt balance of quirky, seductive, and hard hitting. And ANNA delivers a big-room floor-filler that’s effortless in its execution. Why is her track demonstrably better than hundreds of songs traversing exactly the same acid-streaked ground? It’s impossible to say, but that’s why dance music is a dark art—and why the peak of Kompakt’s wizard hat is often just a little bit sharper than that of other labels.
Unfortunately, Kompakt can’t quite sustain that hit rate across the compilation’s 25 tracks. Many of the best selections are sequenced toward the beginning for a reason, and the album tends to sag as it progresses. There are no real duds—though Vermont’s “Dschuna (Dixon Mix),” a leaden cut pairing African chant with chamber strings, comes close—but more than a few songs either feel like filler or fall back on cliché. Animal Print’s “The Last Night of Laura Palmer” indulges in a gravelly recitation of the Lord’s Prayer; Enzo Elia & Musumeci’s “Gothic Safari” goes whole hog on—you guessed it—growling lions. Still, for every slightly generic cut like Anii’s “Korzenie” (Afro-Latin percussion, one-note bassline, predictable builds and drops), there’s another like La Marine’s “Flash,” which joins a killer vocal hook and a sleek rhythm with just the right amount of funny business. At moments like this, you can sum up the spirit of the label in only one way: Well, it’s Kompakt.


Pairing multilingual processed vocals with shape-shifting electroacoustic arrangements, the Italo-Congolese singer and composer explores the limits of the unconscious.

Contezza

Laryssa Kim—an Italo-Congolese singer, composer, dancer, performance artist, and student of acousmatics—melds musique concrète and processed vocals into otherworldly, polymorphous compositions that abandon typical song structures. The title of Oneironauts, a 2020 performance, speaks to the Brussels-based musician’s wandering ethos: she traverses dream states to draw out the strange beauty lurking beneath our everyday consciousness. On her debut album, Contezza (which in Italian means “awareness”), she casts a trance-inducing spell with atmospheric electroacoustic arrangements and vocals in English, Italian, and French. It’s her most accomplished work yet, a mesmerizing odyssey guided by sharp intention.
Kim takes her time across Contezza, slowly unfurling field recordings, stretches of eerie ambient tones, and her own tender vocalizations. The continuous mix, threaded together with rushing waves and rolling thunder, deepens the contemplative intensity, as though Kim were moving through nature and transforming what she sees into sweeping, fragmented sounds of her own. The opening “Les Amants d’Osmium - 76 OS” and “Tum Tum - Cuori in Tumulto” stitch together drones, birdsong, and an insistent digital patter that resembles a thumping heartbeat, welcoming listeners into Kim’s unsettlingly beautiful world. Synth tones pierce “Scegli Me - Contesa,” where a haunting chorus of Kim’s looped humming levitates like an encroaching fog. “Scegli me/Portami con te/Portami nel sogno,” (“Choose me/Bring me with you/Take me into the dream”) she sings, establishing the album’s hypnagogic tone with her lullaby-like intonation.
Contezza dovetails with Kim’s inspirations in intriguing ways. Her early work drew on reggae riddims, informed by a childhood love of Bob Marley; on the French-language track “L’attente - Auspicio,” a throbbing bassline forms a taut beat behind her echoing vocals, yielding a seductive, bare-bones trip-hop track. On “Obsession - Indomita Mente,” another standout, a metronomic click and dramatic synth sweeps set the stage for Kim’s lovelorn lyrics: “Can’t take the thought of you anymore/It’s like a chain,” she sings softly, tempering the bittersweet kiss-off: “Keep on fighting it… But now I know/I know/I’ll let you go.” She warps the final line into a contorted, held note that slips into a clattering beat, painting a surprisingly broad emotional arc in under five minutes.
The abstract interludes that punctuate Contezza lend to its hypnotic qualities. The synths that crinkle in on themselves on “Intimacy - Reserbo” lead into a gorgeous chorus and spoken-word outro flecked with birdsong, while “Voeu - Canto Votivo” dabbles with even more extreme vocal manipulation, distorting Kim’s voice into an oscillating, vibrantly reedy instrument. Like much of Contezza, it’s cerebral but never insular—throughout, Kim balances her esoteric impulses with a radiant warmth. On “Ma Chi Sei - Ascoso,” a tenderhearted ballad toward the end of the album, Kim reaches for answers to existential questions posed both to herself and listeners: “Cosa senti?/Cosa pensi?/Cosa vuoi?/Chi sei?” she asks, the melody dancing along a tightrope (“What do you hear?/What do you think?/What do you want?/Who are you?”). Then the song dissolves into a percussive, uplifting beat; a sense of optimism emerges from the uncertainty, driving home Contezza’s belief in liberation from limitation.