[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] A Nick Cave Retrospective

Text by Adam Lehrer

I recently interviewed an iconic musician who had a personal relationship with Nick Cave in the ‘80s (not going to say who). This artist felt like Nick Cave’s work had grown stale and safe since his time in The Birthday Party in the early ‘80s. I nearly choked on my chicken avocado omelet. I couldn’t help but detect a hint of jealousy. How could a rock musician of a similar era not be jealous? Nick Cave is arguably the last great rock superstar ARTIST. We have “rock n’ roll artists” of course, but most of them operate so deep in the music underground that the most stardom they could hope for is a Pitchfork review and some free beer after a show. And there are superstar artists: your Kanye’s, your Beyoncé’s, your Frank Ocean’s, your Kendrick’s, etc.. But finding any worthwhile rock music amongst mainstream culture is a fool’s errand. It doesn’t exist. Rock music is not the important pop cultural force that it once was and it never will be again. 

And then you have Nick Cave: world famous, constantly written about, high profile indie rock romances with PJ Harvey and Kylie Minogue, and refusing to waver in his commitment to artistic expression and poetry. Not only has Nick Cave’s output not grown stagnant, it’s grown stronger with each release. Some underground music fans would rather their heroes remain the rail thin, anti-fashion chic, drugged out, intense freaks that they were in their youths. And of course, some artists do their best work during their angry and vivacious ‘20s (unless of course you think ‘Chinese Democracy’ was a good album). Nick Cave, on the other hand, has seen his art evolve with him. Coming onto the late ‘70s London post-punk scene from Australia with his first band, the art damaged bluesy noise rock band the Birthday Party, Cave was a goth rock icon upon first glimpse: tattered clothing, skinny, pale, dark eyes, and a messy tussle of thick black hair. But Cave matured, and his music with The Bad Seeds would grow more musical and in some ways, more experimental. Eventually cutting heroin from his diet, Cave’s ideas grew more nuanced and detailed as his life stabilized with fatherhood and marriage. One of the greatest songwriters of the last thirty years, Nick Cave has never remained still. Oddly, Cave is now more Leonard Cohen than Iggy Pop, more Neil Young than John Lydon. For Nick Cave, maturity doesn’t denote an acceptance of the banal. Count in the fact that he’s a published novelist and screenwriter of brutal Western film Proposition and the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, there are very few artists on Earth who have been able to build an aesthetic as definitive as the one Nick Cave that has built.

2016 has been the best year for music that I can remember in my entire life. From the top of the mainstream to the bottom dwellers of the underground, every single day I read about a record on The Quietus or Resident Advisor or Pitchfork that would blow my mind later that day. Now consider that, and consider the fact that Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ recently released Skeleton Tree, the band’s 16th record, is easily in the top five of the best albums released this year and very possibly the best record of Nick’s or the Bad Seeds’ careers. 

We all know the tragic circumstances surrounding the recording of Skeleton Tree. In 2015, Cave’s son Arthur (a twin to brother Earl, both of whom appeared in the Cave documentary 20,000 Days on Earth, watching DePalma’s Scarface contentedly in bed with dad), who was born to Cave and his wife Suzie Pitt in 2000, plummeted to his death in a freak accident whilst hiking near their home in Brighton, England. Death and loss have always floated above Cave’s poetry like inevitable harbingers (Pitt has expressed a belief in her husband’s ability to write prophetic lyrics, on previous masterpiece Push the Sky Away Cave sings on the track ‘Jubilee Street,’ "I'm transforming / I'm vibrating / I'm glowing / I'm flying / Look at me now / I'm flying,” there’s no way to listen to that song now without thinking about the tragedy that would soon follow its creation). A noted agnostic, Cave seems to have doubts about god and religion but welcomes hope that there could be such a creator. His morbid fascination with death, both natural and murderous, have been loaded with pathos and conflict since the beginning of his career. On Skeleton Tree, Cave has to confront the most powerful grief a man can endure from the first person view point. These lyrics have no protective distance. 

Musically, Skeleton Tree plays like a building on the sound that The Bad Seeds developed with Push the Sky Away: sparse, experimental, deeply musical, and washed in ambient sound. To look at the evolution of Cave’s career one has to examine the chronological list of his most important collaborators. The Birthday Party was largely birthed out of Cave and guitarist Rowland S. Howard’s deep love of the blues, Iggy, and The Damned, and the band dissolved when Cave wanted to take his sound further out (to his credit, Howard’s solo career is one of the most irresponsibly underrated collections of blues punk in the history of rock music). The Bad Seeds were born out of Cave’s emerging friendship with Einsturnzende Neubauten founder Blix Bargeld when the two were both living in Berlin. Bargeld, a lover of komische bands like Neu and Can as well as experimental music, defined The Bad Seeds as a band informed by deep musicality and experimental tendencies as much as it was by blues and rock heritage. But after Bargeld left the band in 2003, Warren Ellis was able to come to the fore of the band. Warren Ellis, a virtuoso guitar and violin player, multi-instrumentalist, and founder of Australian instrumental rock band Dirty 3, has proved to be Cave’s artistic soulmate. In 30,000 Days on Earth, we see Cave laying down the lyrics to “Higgs Bolson Blues” while Ellis strums a beautiful guitar pattern. Cave starts swaying and dancing subtly to the music, realizing just how fucking good it is. That scene cuts to the heart of their partnership, a partnership that has produced the beauty of The Bad Seeds, the primitive thud of Grinderman, and the expansiveness of their film scores.

Ellis’ watermarks are all over Skeleton Tree. The electronic swaths of ambience that cloak Cave’s voice in mysticism, on tracks like ‘Magneto’ and ‘Rings of Saturn,’ that’s Warren’s KORG synthesizer. The lush string arrangements on ‘Jesus Alone’ and ‘Skeleton Tree’ are Ellis’ composition at its apex. The duo of Cave and Ellis has become the Bad Seeds’ focal point. Jim Sclavunos, Martyn P Casey, Thomas Wylder, and newer guitarist George Vjestica recognize this notion, and this band has never felt like such a well-oiled machine like it does on this record (with a line-up that has been playing together for some 16 years now, that really is remarkable).

Cave’s poetry has largely been founded upon the grief Cave experienced when his beloved father died when he was only 19. But all those songs have been written with a hindsight view of that loss. Arthur died in the middle of this recording. It’s impossible to not hear pain dripping from the cadences of every uttered syllable on this record. Are we projecting these emotions as listeners and as lovers of Cave the man and the artist? Cave is one of those artists that feels like your friend when you really get attached to his music and his words, and empathetic viewpoints are easy to take when it comes to this kind of tragedy. But no. I think someone who knew nothing of Cave or the accident would listen to Skeleton Tree and know that this man singing was bleeding from the heart. At one point on the song Girl in Pain, Cave sings, “Don’t touch me.” He is inconsolable. He doesn’t want to be consoled. But he still wants to sing. 

[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] The Best Songs About Drug Pushing in Commemoration of the New Season of 'Narcos'

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Text by Adam Lehrer

Just as musicians often “take drugs to make music to take drugs to,” as Spacemen 3 so eloquently described the phenomenon back in the ‘80s, musicians also “sell drugs to afford to make music to talk about selling drugs.” Bill Hicks one told an audience that they should burn their records if they disavow drug use because drugs were the primary inspirations behind those albums. By that reasoning, we should also throw out our records if we disavow drug dealing. As we all know, when we are passionately pursuing a life of art we have to make compromises along the way. The less savvy of us will either work as waiters or marketers or cop money from mommy or daddy. Other artists have the cunning required to make a serious living in the trade of illicit substances. Considering the close proximity to drugs that musicians have, why not make some money out of it? Those artists have often gone on to share their experiences hustling the black market.

Commemorating the second season of Narcos (out today on Netflix), a show that tells the story of the most financially successful drugs trader in history Pablo Escobar, we are sharing the songs by the artists that made some scratch slinging drugs before they went on to stardom (or at least were found themselves inspired by a substance pushing acquaintance). 

Bob Dylan, Mr. Tambourine Man, Bringing it all Back Home (1965)

While Dylan has vehemently denied that Mr. Tambourine Man is certainly not about drugs or any drug dealer, has he ever given a journalist one straight answer about one fucking thing that he’s written? No. With lines like, “Take me on a trip upon your magc swirling ship,” there has never been doubt in my mind that the tambourine man in question is most certainly Dylan’s favorite dealer. While other critics have stated that the tambourine man could be a metaphor for Dylan’s internal muse, I’m opting for the explanation that the tambourine man was selling Dylan his external muse. The song came out in 1965. Dylan was high. Very high.

The Velvet Underground, Waiting for my Man, The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967)

In Waiting for my Man, Lou Reed tells an all-too-familiar story: his dealer is dicking him around. No matter what your poison; pot, pills, MDMA, dope, whatever; we’ve all been there. You call him back, he says, “Five minutes.” You text him so to not scare him off, and he says, “Almost there.” Finally, a couple hours later, he arrives. He is your captor and your savior. For all his troubles, you throw him 100 bucks. Reed’s story is the same as anyone’s, except he didn’t have a cell phone to annoy said dealer with or NYC pot delivery service, for that matter.

Curtis Mayfield, Pusher Man, Superfly OST (1972)

After establishing himself as a gifted music producer and one of New York soul music’s proudest sons on previous album Roots, the former member of The Impressions looked directly at the streets he came from to craft the soundtrack to the 1972 blaxploitation classic Supafly. On the soundtrack’s second track, Mayfield directly confronts the film’s portrayal of the dealer as sympathetic anti-hero by making his pusher a machiavellian sociopath, exploiting humans for his own financial gain. But not with out sex appeal, it is funk after all.

Boogie Down Productions, Love’s Gonna Get-cha, Edutainment (1990)

Ronald Reagan accomplished many things during his presidency: creating the War on Drugs (which has been going great, haven’t you heard?), restoring cranky old white man conservative values, kick-starting the dismantling of FDR’s New Deal, and totally demonizing black urban city males. The fact that KRS-one was able to humanize a drug dealer in the Boogie Down Productions song Love’s Gonna Get-cha during this era speaks to the MC’s poetic reach. While it was easier for White America to view the inner-city dealer as a monster that needs to be locked up (it’s always easier to be reductive, isn’t it), KRS details the harsh economic and sociological realities that lead an otherwise innocent youth down the route of drugs and violence. KRS introduces the listener to his over-worked mom, his pregnant sister, and his bother with whom he shares “three pairs of pants.” In his world, he has one choice. We have to see the criminal as the human being he is.

Geto Boyz, Mind Playing Tricks On Me, We Can’t Be Stopped (1992)

After parents had just moved on from the shock of their kids’ NWA and Guns n’ Roses records, Geto Boyz elevated the shock factor to the umpteenth degree. Over the course of their career, the seminal Houston rap trio went way beyond tales of drug crime: serial murder, necrophillia, and psychosis were all topics touched upon by the group’s rappers Bushwick Bill and Scarface. The group was misunderstood at times and could prove surprisingly thoughtful and reflective, case in point the 1992 track We Can’t Be Stopped. The song finds Bill and Scarface touching upon the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder they are suffering as a result of years spent living within the world of drugs and violence. I'm paranoid, sleeping with my finger on the trigger, My mother's always stressing I ain't living right, But I ain't going out without a fight,” raps Scarface.

The World is Yours, Illmatic (1994)

Few MCs have ever approached drugs, violence and poverty with such depth and emotional clarity as Nas did on his 1994 debut Illmatic. Growing up in the Queensbridge housing projects, Nas witnessed the negative impact the drug trade was having on his own community, and turned his experience into one of Hip-hop’s greatest feats of lyrical storytelling (he was only 19 at the time, and Nas was never able to match the artistic heights of that first record). On The World is Yours, Nas references Brian De Palma’s Scarface and compares that fictional dealer to Howard “Pappy” Mason, a dealer that netted $200,000 a week selling drugs to the residents of Queensbridge in the ‘80s. Unlike Pappy, Nas sees a clear way out of the life in his pen and paper.

Jay-Z, Friend or Foe, Reasonable Doubt (1996) Nas

A friend of mine’s little cousin expressed to me her belief that “Jay-Z was corny.” At first astonished, I had to remind myself that if you had no knowledge of Jay-Z’s career outside the last 10 years, that notion would appear to be true (the flip-flops, the atrocities of Magna Carter Holy Grail, the cheating on America’s favorite woman). But of course, Hip-hop heads remember Jigga’s origins. What made Jay’s debut, Reasonable Doubt, so powerful was that he neither celebrated or condemned drug dealing. Writing in the first person, he presented himself (honestly) as a man that did what he had to do to make it. He is not ashamed of his actions, and he isn’t proud of them either. On album stand out Friend or Foe, Jay tells a dealer associate of his that if the money isn’t right, he’ll have to take violent actions. “You're twitchin, don't do that, you makin me nervous, My crew, well, they do pack, them niggas is murderous,” he raps. Jay-Z’s defining characteristic was unbridled ambition, and that ambition has taken him far.

Raekwon featuring Ghostface Killah and U-God, Knuckleheadz, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx (1995)

While Hip-hop had been telling the stories or the urban drug trade for a long time, Wu Tang Clansmen Raekwon and Ghostface Killah may have been the genre’s first artists to craft a full-length sonic crime film. Only Built 4 Cuban Linx was centered around the story of two men (Ghost and Rae) looking for one last score before leaving the life for good. In the process, the rappers created a new urban slang that was beholden as much to The Supreme Alphabet of the Nation of Islam as it was to the drug slang of the New York streets. Hip-hop heads have been obsessed with decoding the language ever seen. The album’s first track, Knuckleheads, finds Ghost and Rae planning a robbery with a third man, U-God. Once the heist is pulled off, U-God is murdered for ostensibly speaking to the police. The rest of the album finds Ghost and Rae no closer to getting out of the drug trade, instead using the new found wealth to go deeper and deeper and deeper. 

The Notorious BIG, The 10 Crack Commandments, Ready to Die (1997)

Biggie Smalls remains to this day one of music’s most vivid storytellers, and the fact that his 1997 “how to sell crack” guide was released after his death was particularly telling. Biggie’s persona was so steeped in his criminal past that his massive success could never fully lift him out of it. As Biggie tells us to never let them know our next move, to never keep no weight on us, and to never trust no one, a sad truth dawns upon the listener: Biggie’s survival guide kept him alive through his pusher days, but no such guide existed that could explain to Biggie how to survive the perils of fame. 

Ghostface Killah, Shakey Dog, Fishscale (2007)

The most eternally fascinating character in The Wire was the drug dealer robbing stick up kid Omar Little. Unlike the cops, the politicians, and the dealers, Omar existed freely outside the shackles of any institution. Through ferocity and charisma, he took what he needed and answered to no one. That’s the persona that Ghostface takes on in the opening track of his 2007 album Fishscale. On Shakey Dog, Ghostface, in hyper-vivid detail, documents the before and during of a Cuban drug lord stick-up. In a particularly cinematic passage, Ghostface relentlessly barks, “Off came the latch, Frank pushed me into the door, The door flew open, dude had his mouth open, Frozen, stood still with his heat bulgin’,Told him Freeze! lay the fuck down and enjoy the moment, Frank snatched his gat, slapped him, axed him,Where’s the cash, coke and the crack?” For being one of the wordiest rappers in history, Ghostface Kill still does not mince words.

[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] Thank God: Frank Ocean Is Back

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text by Adam Lehrer

After over a year of letdowns, I was really starting to think that Frank Ocean would be the next D'Angelo. That is, an R&B genius that waits a good 15 years to release his next album. After first announcing new LP 'Boys Don't Cry' in July of 2015, nothing new came out. That went on for six months. Frank came back into the public eye with contributions to what will probably go down as the year's biggest Pop releases in Kanye's 'The Life of Pablo' and Beyoncé's 'Lemonade,' and an almost-as-important record in James Blake's 'The Colour in Anything.' We kept hearing whispers of new music: Blake said the new Frank Ocean material was pristine, and one of Frank's producers said it was looser than but better than 'Channel Orange.' Then, last month we get a library card reading 'Boys Don't Cry' on Frank's website, perhaps indicating the missed release dates. Following that, video footage on the same website showing Frank at work assembling some kind of sculpture. Interesting, but fat from satisfying. I'm not going to lie: I gave up, slowly stopping my daily efforts of looking upon Frank's Apple Music page thinking there was no way he'd have new music out anytime soon.

But last night: it happened. Frank Ocean released a 45-minute "visual album" called 'Endless.' It's incredible. Even more: there is another album out this weekend. But, it's still hard to ask ourselves: what took so long? I think it's simple: Frank was feeling the pressure. 'Channel Orange' was a landmark album, and one of the biggest cultural events of 2012. This is the man who moved from New Orleans to write for major recording artists like Justin Bieber, Beyoncé, and Brandy. This is the man who joined Odd Future as their smooth soul singing man. This is the man who departed from a comfortable life as a commercial songwriter for a life of truth, beauty, and unparalleled artistry. This is the man who cultivated a unique and crisp R&B sound with debut mixtape 'Nostalgia, Ultra' only to shatter it to find his inner truth, posting a letter to his Tumblr page (that made us ALL cry) confirming his homosexuality and releasing the year's best and most important album in 'Channel Orange.' He wasn't just hailed as a genius songwriter, he was hailed as one of the most important cultural figures, period. Just by being an artist he broke down some serious barriers. Prior to Frank Ocean, homosexuality was still taboo in both Hip-hop and R&B. But after 'Channel Orange,' no one cared. People loved his music THAT MUCH. This is a bonafide musical genius and undeniable Pop superstar. It feels like not since Stevie Wonder have we had such a unique musical and commercially appealing talent. Frank's music does more than just inspire, it makes you feel! His unique baritone, that he can drop to a soft falsetto in the blink of an eye, his intensely raw lyrics, and his lush production all speaks directly to the listener's humanity in a way that few artists have ever been able to achieve.

How in the hell do you follow that up? You take you time, of course. And now Frank finally has music and art that he is comfortable will satisfy the fevered hype. And even more impressive, Frank did not dumb anything down. In fact, it feels like he used his massive popularity to put more pressure on his audience to try and step outside their boxes and try new kinds of music. On 'Endless,' he has collaborated with P.T. Anderson collaborator and Radiohead multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood, James Blake, experimental R&B performer Sampha, singer-songwriter Jazmine Sullivan, and experimental producer/budding go-to harsh electronics man Arca. Oh, and that German accent you hear at the beginning and end of 'Endless?' That would be none other than one of Autre Magazine's favorite fine art photographers Wolfgang Tillmans, who has been successfully dabbling in music this year having released music under his own name with his 1986 EP and with his band, Fragile (http://pitchfork.com/news/67666-wolfgang-tillmans-explains-how-his-techno-track-bookended-frank-oceans-endless/). On his admiration of Frank O, Tillmans said to Pitchfork, "As a gay man, I needless to say appreciate his openness, how he deals with the initial sensation of his coming out." While most of these performers have operated somewhere within the realm of popular music, they are all capital "A' Artists. Frank doesn't feel the need to dumb his music down, and respects his audience enough to know that art and pop culture make fitting bedfellows. I don't know about you, but I'm very excited to see what else Frank Ocean has up his sleeves this weekend. Let's get that new record. 
 

[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] Alan Vega: His Music, His Influences, His Influence

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Text by Adam Lehrer

This is probably the longest playlist that I’ve ever fashioned for this column, and sometimes, size matters. The influence of Alan Vega in his capacity as the frontman for Suicide and as a solo artist cannot be understated. It has been a very sad year for music, with the deaths of Prince, Bowie, and now, Alan Vega. The influences of Bowie and Prince loom titanic as well, but in a much different way than Vega. Bowie, for instance, holds an influence over the culture of self-presentation. He taught countless artists from countless mediums to be ruthlessly committed to their own actualized selfs. A similar statement could be made about Prince, though pop music would also radically alter in his wake. But Vega stands amongst a very few artists that created a sound so singular that one can audibly hear elements of it in the slew of genres and sub-genres that would follow. From the top of the charts to the scourges of the underground, Suicide’s sonic approach has been obsessed over and employed by musicians for decades. Who else can claim to monumentally influence pop music in such a direct way? The Velvet Underground, to be sure. The Stooges, without question. Hendrix, maybe. But I don’t think any of those artists can claim to be the progenitors of as many sub-cultures as Vega, Martin Rev, and Suicide have proved: Post-Punk, Industrial, Techno, Synth-pop, IDM, Trip-hop, and even contemporary Hip-hop to an extent. Damn. Full disclosure: Suicide and Alan Vega were responsible for much of the music that I hold dear, and there are few artists throughout the history of music that had as profound an effect on my own personal taste.

THE MUSIC:

At the risk of sounding like a hack, I’ve often thought of Alan Vega as the musical equivalent of William S. Burroughs in one fairly important way. Burroughs, the junkie god of Avant-Garde 20th century literature, was actually the corporate heir to a massive fortune, a Missouri blue blood gone wrong. As experimental as his work grew, it never lost a palatable sense of Americana-rooted sentimentality. There’s a real “American tale” around his mythos. Vega, the junkie god of downtown NYC street-punk, was raised in a similarly American archetypical home: the son of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn. His parents weren’t artists, and his early musical exposure was mostly the country western favored by his parents and a little later, the early rock stars. 

But, Vega was also a visual artist first. His infamous light sculptures inspire the same sense of dread-laden awe as artists like Hermann Nitsch. But he grew disillusioned with the art world and started making music after meeting best friend Martin Rev. Together they formed Suicide. Vega wrote poems about and created music for the working class. That sense of real struggle was what interested him. But at the same time, he never really was able to shake off his artistic background. Alan Vega as a frontman for Suicide was almost like a character born of conceptual art. It was like Vega created this rock star persona for himself to deliver his message in a way that could be relatable to his target audience (in both Suicide and later on as a solo artist), but was never able to fully detach from his own artistic self-awareness. Suicide really was one of the first bands that drew a line between the world of avant-garde and pop music and delicate walked that line with the swaggering vocals of Vega and the minimally harsh but thoroughly catchy synth melodies and baselines of Vega. That might be Suicide’s most fascinating trait as a band. They inspired experimental artists to flirt with the mainstream and inspired the mainstream to flirt with experimental art. That is why their influence grew so titanic. They drew attention to the fact that drawing a line between mainstream and underground was pretentious, short-sighted, and stupid. All that really matters is authenticity: are you creating the art that best communicates your ideas and delivering it in the medium best suited to the audience that will best understand your ideas. And nothing was more authentic than Suicide and Alan Vega.

THE INFLUENCES:

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As stated above, Vega’s musical influences started with the building blocks of Rock n’ Roll: Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee. He also declared having been massively in love with the voice of Roy Orbison. When you actually examine those first two Suicide records, it might be surprising to some how much those early rock stars impacted the actual Suicide sound. Vega to be certain looked towards stars like Elvis for his own self-mythologizing as a self-actualized rock star: charisma, mystery, swagger. But also, the Suicide songs often sound like early rock ditties degraded by updates in technology. But the minimal structures and near-singalong quality made the experimental approach all the more thrilling. Vega also is something of a crooner.

But to ignore the experimental music that influenced Vega and Suicide would be grossly negligent. Krautrock, or the experimental rock music that came out of Germany in the ‘70s, is the most obvious precursor to Suicide. The minimal structures of Faust, the delirious funkiness of Can, and the digital mania of Kraftwerk are all massively important to the Suicide sound. Though from New York and not Germany, the band Silver Apples were one of the first experimental rock groups to use synthesizers, and are hard not to think of when thinking about Suicide. Vega was also a noted classical musical enthusiast, having developed an interest in sonics by scratching classical records to make them sound weirder. The German 20th Century avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen had a profound impact on Vega by teaching that within the simple blip of an electronic sound comes a world of possibilities.

And finally: The Stooges. Vega was blown away when he saw The Stooges in 1969, going home to play ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ on repeat. The Stooges were intimately aware of the fact that a direct and academic-less approach to music might be the most profound artistic experience: “once you’re making music for artists, you’re fucked,” Iggy seemed to suggest while shouting until his lungs gave out and rolling around in broken glass on the stage. Suicide took this to heart and sought to provoke audiences through direct violent gesture. Not for art, but for the sake of provocation. And pure provocation is at its essence, the purest form of art.

THE INFLUENCE:

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Deathrock, despite its silly name, brought a new heir of theatricality and art to the Punk Rock attack. Those theatrics and sinister nature were directly inspired by the musings of Alan Vega and the tribal nature of some of Suicide’s heavier music. The sense of atmospherics and theatrics inspired by Suicide are best felt by the Northampton Post-punks Bauhaus. Bauhaus knew the power of menacing stage presence combined with repetitive rhythms working themselves up to primordial states. Nick Cave as a young Heroin shooting poet in Australia also took note of Suicide’s approach. Though his first band The Birthday Party weren’t really “Deathrock,” per se (they were equally important in the development of Noise Rock for instance), Cave certainly shared a taste for theatrics and stripped down rhythms.

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The early Industrial bands took the music of Suicide but applied a heaping dose of abstract theory and avant-garde art to it, taking aggressive electronic-based music down to the bottom of the rabbit hole. The legendary artist Genesis P. Orridge formed his/her first band Throbbing Gristle to explore the most rank aspects of the human condition: obsession, hatred, compulsion. They used confrontational imagery such as pornography and Third Reich propaganda, gaining them a notorious reputation. The desire to provoke outrage to provoke discussion shares characteristics with Vega and Suicide. But Throbbing Gristle’s electronics were unpolished, using samples and synths to provide a degraded backdrop to spoken word poetry or lyrics. They are what Suicide would have sounded like had Suicide freed themselves from the desire to make pop songs. Genesis would continue this crusade with group Psychic T.V., using video art as a backdrop to its industrial soundscapes. Industrial was in many ways the most interesting form of experimental music in the early ‘80s, and it’s hard to imagine it coming into fruition with the influence of Suicide. 

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Just thought I’d throw this in here. But Suicide’s impact was felt even by mainstream artists during their time. It’s been stated that Ric Ocasek loved Suicide so much, that he recorded The Cars’ album Candy-O as an audition to produce Suicide’s second album. Which he eventually did. Perhaps even more famously, Bruce Springsteen LOVED Suicide, and the duo inspired him to strip his sound back to its bare essentials: rhythmic acoustic guitar patterns and his one-of-a-kind rock n’ roll voice. Low and behold, he recorded Nebraska, the best album of his career. Track State Trooper sounds like the acoustic guitar version of Suicide’s first record, and features Bruce doing his best Alan Vega howl.

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1980s goth music, with its tendency to incorporate elements of dance music into its darkly bombastic take on rock, was influenced by Suicide’s approach. While Suicide generally worked in minimalist structures, Goth acts often took the underlying tribalistic patterns of Suicide and then cleaned it up with big stadium sounds. The Sisters of Mercy, for instance, incorporated loud and vivacious elements of Psych Rock and Metal over dance beats indebted to Suicide’s second LP. Though often ignored by the Rock history hierarchies, one need not do more than take one listen to The Sisters of Mercy’s Floodland collection to find a startlingly unique unit deftly capable of incorporating its influences (like Suicide) into a new and exciting Pop Music sound.

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Suicide was so diverse in its approach that it could realistically appease the more adventurous of disco fans while also holding similarities in common with the No Wave bands that played New York directly after punk exploded: Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, James Chance and the Contortions, DNA and Mars, amongst others, differed from Punk in that Punk brought Rock back to its three-chord roots, while No Wave bands were referencing genres as diverse as Jazz and Psych and stripping Rock of melody and tone all together. Suicide certainly had beats and structures, but the duo’s raw primal energy doesn’t feel out of place in the conversation surrounding No Wave. Perhaps that raw dissonance is what attracted a young Steve Albini to Suicide’s music when he decided to eschew a drummer in his first band, Big Black, in favor of a Roland drum machine. Albini learned from Suicide that when there is no human error involved in creating the back beat of a sound, then that sound can become as ferocious and ugly as humanly possible. Big Black seemed to apply the violence of Suicide’s music, amplify it, and strip it dry of any sort of sexuality or funkiness that was unquestionably an aspect of Suicide’s music.

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The earliest Techno music that was blaring out of Detroit club speakers in the 1980s often felt like Suicide beats amped up and made danceable. These producers, including Juan Atkins, Carl Craig, Underground Resistance, and Derrick May, certainly were indebted to Disco and House Music before them, but perhaps due to the outsider spirit of Detroit itself, these guys were experimentalists. Perhaps tired of playing Donna Summers tracks to get their crowds moving, they forged a sound of their own. Due to lack of money and technology, Suicide’s minimal synths and barebones rhythms proved a fitting jumping off point for Detroit Techno artists who instantly recognized that MDMA and amphetamines in combination with simple and repetitive electronic beats make for one hell of a good time. 10 or so years later, Daft Punk would realize that that same formula could be applied to a stadium full of people.

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By the late ‘80s, Brits had had exposure to countless exciting sub-cultures of music: Punk Rock, Hippie Psychedelia, Hardcore, Acid House, Brit-Pop, Goth, and on and on and on. At a point, it was way too difficult to pick one type of music. So some Brits didn’t. Bobby Gillespie was among them when he decided to leave The Jesus And Mary Chain and form his own band Primal Scream. Primal Scream drew upon all of Gillespie’s musical loves: The Rolling Stones, Acid House, Post-punk, and without question, Suicide. Suicide, being one of the first bands to marry Electronic instrumentation with Pop song formats, cannot be excluded from the conversation surrounding Neo-Psychedelia and Primal Scream. Spacemen 3 (one of my top 10 all-time bands, by the way) didn’t use electronics much, but both its members, Sonic Boom and Jason Pierce, were self-avowed Suicide fanatics and used Suicide’s minimal rhythms in their drawn-out, druggy, and pained songs. Spacemen 3 understood that sometimes, the most far out music is the most barebones.

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Suicide, perhaps more than any other band, holds equal influence within underground music scenes AND mainstream Pop music. This was particularly true with the advent of Synth-pop in the ‘80s. Depeche Mode, Soft Cell (Tainted Love is one of the best songs all time, am I right) essentially drew from Dance music but applied vocals. Sound familiar? Though Suicide of course used this approach for darker purposes, the ground was laid for what pop would become and still pretty much is. Dance music that you can singalong to. Rihanna, Gaga, Miley and whoever else, weirdly enough, can thank Suicide.

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Merrill Beth Disker, better known to the world as Peaches, achieved her sound by picking up a Roland MC-505 drum machine in her compositions (later, M.I.A. would pick up the same machine, inspired by Peaches). Her biggest hit, Fuck the Pain Away, she played on a whim live. Its funky but aggro sound is ripped right from the Suicide playbook. In fact, Suicide’s output was highly fetishized by the group of young musicians playing dance-y Post-punk music around downtown Manhattan in the ‘00s. Some of the music (dubbed “Electroclash” by the NME set) wasn’t all that good. But it had its true talents of course, including the then-Brooklyn-based Liars, who would go from dance-punk to one of Indie’s truly experimental bands.
 

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Perhaps this is a reach, but when I first heard Kanye West’s Yeezus back in 2013, well, at first I was blown the fuck away. To this day, I think it’s the most extraordinary work of art that Pop music has offered this millennium. But also, I couldn’t help but think of Suicide. Yeezus was heavily indebted to experimental electronic music. Though it’s maximal all the way through, it often feels like a swirl of various minimal electronic sounds. I can’t not think of Suicide when hearing it. Also, the self-aggrandizing and actualization that ‘Ye employs on the record feels like the self-conscious “rock star as art statement” that Alan Vega was the king of. In fact, a lot of contemporary Hip-hop, or “trap,” and its tendency to bring aggressive electronic textures to Hip-hop beats, reminds me of those first few stunning Suicide records. No longer is Hip-hop solely sample-based, instead, producers are actively engaging with synths, drum machines, and all manner of processed sonic goodies. 

[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] Producer Series: Michael Gira

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Text by Adam Lehrer

The 62-year-old musician, writer, artist, and producer Michael Gira doesn’t need introduction. He is of course the mastermind of Swans, one of the ‘80s post-No Wave NYC Noise Rock scene’s most punishing bands, one of the ‘90s experimental rock world’s most confounding bands, and currently one of the modern day’s most singularly intense, sonically adventurous, and spiritually inward bands. Swans, in their current incarnation, are truly without peers. The band’s last three records are all classics: they are extreme in a way that is incomparable to any other heavy bands. Swans’ music is highly composed, but it almost sounds like the diverse array of instrumental (Swans use everything from 12-string guitars to trombones to keyboards to mandolins and everything in between) sounds and noises are at war with one another, colliding and collapsing and creating a viciously elegant choreographed sonic dance. If you’ve ever seen Swans live, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. If the best gigs are akin to religious experiences, then Swans are the best band in the world. They sometimes play for two hours at full volume, always seeming to veer on the edge of chaos but always managing to sound utterly cohesive. It’s brain blisteringly heavy but also spiritually beautiful, like your soul is being blasted towards the cosmos but something is also pulling it down towards hell. And there’s Gira, clad in a cowboy hat and boots and a loose fitting black shirt, sweating profusely and leading his audience like a preacher would a sermon.

Gira must know that that feeling is at the essence of what we love about music, and that religious element plays a massive role in his record production work in Swans, his work with his band Angels of Lights, his solo records, and with the many bands he’s championed and often released records of via his label Young God Records. Fans that are newer to Swans and Gira probably often don’t know anything about Gira’s production work and promotion of strange and unusual music. But Gira has been producing ever since Swans’ violently heavy debut Noise Rock album, Filth (1983), and has served as primary producer on most of the band’s music ever since, including their last three masterpieces: My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky (2010), The Seer (2012), and To Be Kind (2014). And even though the Swans catalog casts a long shadow over Gira’s production work outside the band, his production jobs can’t be underestimated in their importance towards his legacy. Though known for heavy and experimental Rock music, Gira has lent his distinctive sonic religiosity to a variety of genres, from freaky Folk music to Ambient Drone.

Gira produced most of his own projects outside Swans. His band Angels of Light was almost a straight up Alternative Country band, but with a psychedelic bent more in line Six Organs of Admittance than Uncle Tupelo. Gira used a revolving door of backing musicians in the band, a notion lending credos to Gira’s compositional control. In a completely different direction, Gira’s project The Body Lovers/The Body Haters falls under the genre of Dark Ambient: a drone-filled atmospheric sound art with dark undertones pioneered by artists like the Welsh sound artist Lustmord. Collaborating with the likes of producer and former Khanate member James Plotkin and longtime friend and collaborator Jarboe, the project serves as an example of Gira’s ability to cook up truly transcendental sound using a stripped and minimal approach (even in Swans, Gira always circles the compositions around a single hypnotic rhythm).

Back when music nerds read magazines like Arthur and started growing ironically long beards in the early ‘00s, Gira was already championing the so-called “Freak-Folk” music coming out of the scene. As a producer however, there was never anything gimmicky about his work with these bands, but instead they seemed to all have sounds that made sense within Gira’s musical approach. Gira discovered Venezuelan-American singer-songwriter and artist Devendra Banhart, producing and releasing the young musician’s early records on the Young God label. Though Banhart got pigeonholed into that very brief movement (he has since reinvented himself of course, making beautiful visual art and writing songs, emancipating himself from the caricature-ish Freak Folk scene) with the Hippie Commune vibe of his (then) look and performances. But Banhart’s Gira-produced records are minimal and beautiful: just guitar and voice and near-silent background noise. The more exuberant Freak Folk band Akron-Family, based out of Brooklyn, was given a sonic boost by Gira’s penchant for finding the trance-like qualities in Rock n’ Roll.

Perhaps more expectedly, Gira has produced a number of Experimental Rock bands. New York-based Calla released their best album, produced by Gira, in 1999. Gira noted that the band sounded much better live, letting their music breathe in the mix. Gira also gave European bands a chance to hit American audiences, such as the Italian avant weirdos Larsen and French experimentalists Ulan Bator.

Gira has been in the news recently after Nashille-based singer-songwriter Larkin Grimm (whose music Gira has produced) accused him of a rape from 2008. The veracity of the allegations have been refuted by Gira, Gira’s wife, and even Larkin’s female former bandmate Margaret Morris (Larkin also accused three of their male bandmates of similar crimes). I’m not going to weigh in on these claims, but I’d be incompetent to not mention them, especially considering Gira’s substantial championing of female artists. The most notable of these being Jarboe, who assisted ever since the New York-based singer-wongwriter appeared on Swans’ album, Cop. Gira has a fascination with the female voice, and Jarboe’s vocals are used to haunting effect on Swans albums and take center stage on the singer’s Gira-produced solo albums.

With Swans about to release what is to be their final record on June 17th entitled The Glowing Man, the only comfort I have is that Gira will still be applying his grand sonic vision to other bands and projects. Gira strives to make music that alters the listener’s awareness of their body, mind and soul. It can be brutal and it can be beautiful, but Gira always manages to guide his listeners up a rope to the sky. 

[Friday Playlist] Honoring Producer Randall Dunn

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Text by Adam Lehrer

The month of June on Autre’s Friday Playlists column celebrates the most important record producers working in music today.

Of the bands that Seattle-based producer and engineer Randall Dunn has worked with, the musical styles of those bands read highly diverse: Drone, Doom Metal, experimental Folk, Free Improv, etc. And yet, Dunn manages to be able to add a touch of his own sonic vision to every band he records. He seems to be able to find the cinematic flourishes inherent in strange music. After all, he helped Drone Metal titans Earth re-imagine its sound as a Cormac McCarthy-referencing Western blood letting ritual soundscape on 2005’a Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method. Not surprisingly, film was his entry way to music:  “I originally moved to Seattle to study sound design for film, then ended up getting sidetracked with music,” he said in a 2014 article with BOMB Magazine http://bombmagazine.org/article/1000148/randal-dunn.  “But the thing that got me interested in the first place, when I was younger, was the sound in David Lynch's films. And I still kind of approach things in that way, based on that influence, and more generally on my studies.”

Dunn appears to have the ability to find bliss and beauty within extreme music and the extremity in softer and more angelic music. He can take a Black Metal band like Wolves in the Throne Room and assist the band in dropping lyrics and mutating their violent cacophonies into drowned out ambient washes of feedback, as in the band’s 2014 release Celestite. But he has also assisted Avant-Folkster Marissa Nadler find a sinister undercurrent in an ethereal and quiet sound that has allowed her a fan base that stretches to Metal and Drone circles. It’s stunning that all of the artists that Dunn works alongside; however varied in styles and musical approaches they are; seem to occupy a similar sphere in the musical underground. Even Pop-based artists like Bjork have enlisted Dunn to work on more experimental releases, as in the Icelandic icon’s collaboration with Syrian Folk-Pop singer Omar Souleyman.

Dunn is highly sought after for his unique approach to recording, blending together analog and digital technologies for a sound that sounds pure rather than purposefully vintage and modern as opposed to trendy. “It's the process of working with analogue gear that I find fascinating. I don't avoid digital gear, I actually try to straddle both worlds; a healthy embrace of both mediums, I think, is great,” he said.

Avant-garde weirdo icons Sun City Girls, Metallic Drone progenitors Sunn O ))), Experimental Metal vets Asva, Japanese Metal multi-hyphenates Boris,  Post-Rock band Grails, Free-Improv god Oren Ambarchi, Indie-Psych Canadians Black Mountain, Psych-Folk outfit Akron Family, and a slew of Psych-Rock bands are just a small number of artists that have benefitted from the cinematic and orchestral approach to Experimental Rock of Randall Dunn, He is such a formidable collaborator that it’s hard not to think he’d make excellent music of his own as well. And, he does.

Master Musicians of Bukkake, (name inspired by a lurid sexual practice and Moroccan experimentalists Master Musicians of Jajouka), formed by Dunn in 2003 along with rumored members such as the guys from Earth and Sun City Girls members Alan Bishop and the late Charles Gocher, is the purest expression of Dunn’s musical sensibilities and tastes. It juxtaposes the feedback heavy psychedelia native to Dunn’s Pacific Northwest home alongside influences from all over the world. The result is a confounding and hypnotic swirl of drones, North African desert blues, horror film-referencing synths, and guitar ragas. The band’s discography is diverse, but inventive and cyclical. For example, the band purposefully recorded its 2015 LP Further West Quad Cult to be played simultaneously with its 2013 release Far West. Dunn doesn’t she away from studio trickery, giving the middle finger to critics who cry gimmick and making music that excites him.

In addition to Master Musicians, Dunn has showed up as a player on the soundtrack to Belgian filmmaker Alexis Destoop’s short film Kairos alongside Oren Ambarchi and Sunn O )))’s Stephen O’Malley and as a touring musician and as a touring musician with artists like Chelsea Wolfe. Much like Rick Rubin’s reputation in Pop music, artists don’t just go to Randall Dunn for able recording skills; they go to him for a sound and a feeling that he cultivates. 

[Friday Playlist] The Best of May

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Text by Adam Lehrer

More amazing music across all categories in May 2015: Hip-Hop, Electronic, Noise Rock, Metal, Experimental Folk, and on and so forth. Like Beyoncé’s Lemonade last month, my personal pick for the month’s best new album isn’t available on Spotify. If you haven’t been able to hear Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book mixtape, download the Apple Music app onto your phone now (even if you don’t care for Chance the app itself is incredible, any album you want downloaded into your iTunes for $10 a month, bye Tidal). While not as joyously adventurous as that other high profile album that Chance worked on this year, The Life of Pablo, Chance’s Coloring Book is in that wheelhouse. Chance, a recent father and generally sweet seeming guy, approaches Hip-Hop as conceptual art drawing upon his spirituality, life experiences, and dexterous flow. He is the logical successor to Kanye’s throne: a south side rapper who shuns gangster posturing for unbridled joy in making art. As the leader of SAVEMONEY crew with friends Vic Mensa, Joey Purp, and others, Chance shows that Hip-Hop doesn’t have to necessarily be a grim portrayal of life in South Side, but that it can be a gateway to an emotional connection to the attachment. With Coloring Book, Chance has put himself alongside Kanye, Kendrick, and Drake as the most important artists working in Hip-Hop.

Mark Pritchard, Under the Sun, Track: Beautiful People

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Considering Mark Pritchard records for Warp Records, and that new record Under the Sun counts American Psych-Folk legend Linda Perhacs and motherfucking Thom Yorke amongst its vocal features, this new Pritchard record went slightly under the radar. I would like to establish here that this is a gorgeous record. Pritchard’s music is a muted, subdued, and highly stylized mish-mashed history of UK electronic music; Under the Sun takes on Techno, Hip-Hop, Ambient, Jungle, Grime, and god knows what else into a massive double album of hypnotic sounds. This is less a dance album than past Pritchard releases, almost like his version of Aphex Twin’s ambient albums. Take Xanax, put on headphones, and let Richard’s sounds lull you to sleep.

Marissa Nadler, Strangers, Track: Janie in Love

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Marissa Nadler’s mezzo-soprano voice is her greatest tool. She welds it like a paint brush: on her new LP Strangers, she allows her voice enough clarity so you can examine the voice for meaning and messages, much like you would a painting (not surprising that Nadler studied fine art at RISD). Though Nadler is sober for the first time on record, she is not all peace and love: “The record is dealing with friendships dissolving and inner strife,” she said in an interview with The Quietus this week. The album’s sound, produced by genius Randall Dunn, feels more filled in than previous Nadler records allowing her more support to balance her voice, possibly due to Nadler wanting to record more with a band after feeling the loneliness of being a solo act for many years.
 

Death Grips, Bottomless Pit, Track: Eh

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Welcome back, Death Grips, how we missed you. When drummer Zach Kill and MC Ride announced that Death Grips was over in 2014, I almost signed relief. Death Grips was easily the most exciting band of the early 2010s, but after a series of digital pranks and overly experimental and under-produced releases they started to become a bit of a caricature. The fact of the matter is that not giving a fuck is only interesting for so long. Fans want artists that care. On Bottomless Pit, Death Grips sound like they care. The album is both the band’s most accessible release since 2012’s The Money Store and also the best record of their career. Death Grips are at their best when they flirt with more accessible production and songwriting. Structure is what allows their sounds to really blare and gives Ride room to violently sermonize on drug addiction, poverty, the military industrial complex, and corrupted political landscapes. Bottomless Pit is the sound of two undeniable musical talents realizing they have a good thing; you can almost see Ride and Hill sharing an American Spirit and looking at each other to say, “Maybe we shouldn’t fuck this up.”

Radiohead, A Moon Shaped Pool, Track: Burn the Witch

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A Moon Shaped Pool is a much different Radiohead record than OK Computer or Kid A. Unlike those records, it is not immediately transfixing. You can listen to it, rather quickly, all the way through and not take much notice of its sparse and lush arrangements. But it sneaks up on you, eventually revealing a Radiohead record, with all the pretentious beauty and unbridled grandeur that that entails.
 

Yak, Alas Salvation, Track: Harbour the Feeling

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Yak is one of the last few exciting regular ol’ Rock n’ Roll bands around. And that is most likely because they don’t just give us garage rock rehashes of The Stones or Led Zeppelin. While those influences are there, the band’s feedback-fueled cacophonies are just as much in debt to some of the UK and US’s noisiest and most psychedelic rock bands: the hypnotic swirl of Spacemen 3, the drugged out swagger of Pussy Galore, and the acid house indebtedness of early Primal Scream. Finally: a Rock band trying to rock without the car commercial-readiness of The Black Keys.

 

Skepta, Konnichiwa, Track: Ladies Hit Squad (featuring D Double E)

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As written about in a previous column, Skepta’s Konnichiwa is good enough to finally establish a strong Grime fan base in the United States.
 

Pantha du Prince, The Triad, Track: Frau im Mond, Sterne laufen

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German conceptual electronic producer Pantha du Prince has been much missed since his last long player Black Noise was released six years ago. Arguably, Pantha du Prince was one of the first producers (along with Dubstep producer Burial) to shine a light back on the experimental possibilities inherent within digital music. While Black Noise could be described as chilly and subdued, new album The Triad is maximalist. Pantha du Prince pairs his minimalist production along with powerful live instrumentation on the record. The duality in sonics makes The Triad his most emotionally resonant body of music of his career.
 

ANOHNI, HOPELESSNESS, Track: Drone Bomb Me

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You know, when ANOHNI was still Antony, I could never really get into her music. The voice was of course always incredible, but there was something kitsch about the approach to me. But ANOHNI has won me over with HOPELESSNESS. Never has her music felt this ALIVE. Aided by the bombastic beats of Hudson Mohawke and the bizarre production of Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), ANOHNI protests, agonizes, and ultimately promises joyful reconciliation. This is the sound of one of the most compelling musicians alive finally free of the last shackle.
 

Julianna Barwick, Will, Track: Heading Home

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It seems like there are a lot of artists recording music similar to that of Barwick. Everything from the more obvious peers like Grouper and Julia Holter to Daniel Lopatin and the first couple How to Dress Well records. These are artists who seemed to have grown up with fine art and have learnt from it how to create stories and concepts without the aid of concrete lyrics. Barwick’s new album, Will, is actually a rougher listen than her previous record Nepenthe. And that isn’t a bad thing, as Barwick doesn’t use her voice to be the centerfold of her music. On Will, she weaves her voice through cackling atmospherics and ambience as if to connect her body into something unknown. The record is truer to her approach and also highlights her contrasts with her contemporaries, in which the voice is just another layer in the production and not the star of the show.
 

Drake, Views, Track: Controlla

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Views has taken some criticism and it’s not all unwarranted. The record is indulgently long and sometimes feels like Drake and producer Noah ‘40’ Shebib couldn’t find an exact direction to go into. But in the end, the record still highlights one of the most fascinating voices of popular music and his desire to make music that feels true to who he is. There are some beautiful songs on this record, and even some of the sloppy rapping doesn’t distract from those. Drake’s Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde thing, the confident lothario versus the sensitive crooner, feels very modern to me. It really sums up what it is to be a man in the modern world, where you can feel on top of it with one success one moment and utterly beaten down the next. I feel like Views might be better appreciated a couple years from now.
 

Ghold, Pyr, Track: Collusion with Traitors

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There are few sub-genres more played out than Doom and Sludge Metal. The genre has already been perfected for some 20 years now by the likes of Eyehategod (Sludge), Electric Wizard (Doom), Earth (Drone Doom), Burning Witch (Blackened Sludge) and so on. But Ghold approaches slow beats and down-tuned feedback blistered riffs in a refreshingly new way. Traditionally a duo (Alex Wilson and Paul Antony), the band writes music for a four piece. On new record Pyr, the record has added a third member, multi-instrumentalist Oliver Martin. But by limiting their members, the band sounds rather bizarre. Though the influence of The Melvins’ Gluey Porch Treatments looms as large as it does on any other Sludge album, the record makes use of experimental instrumentation: a Free Jazz saxophone skree, a guitar noise breakdown. They are not an “Experimental Metal band,” they are a Metal band that experiments to make up for limited personnel. Thrilling stuff, really.
 

Arbor Labor Union, I Hear You, Track: Mr. Birdsong

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Georgia-based Arbor Labor Union seem to draw upon both post-punk and Southern-twanged Psych Rock resulting in something akin to, I don’t know, let’s call it Southern Gothic Rock. The lyrics can be silly at times, with their hymns of joyous paganism. Another Randall Dunn production, this album packs an unusually strong and bombastic punch.
 

James Blake, The Colour in Anything, Track: Points

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I’ve never been much a fan of James Blake. In a review for Bandwagon, Sean Francis Han wrote of Blake being “experimental electronic music’s answer to the late-00s indie folk sad boy phenomena,” and maybe that explains my distaste. I hated all of that shit. But, The Colour in Anything has won me over. Perhaps because it’s more of a pop record, with Blake’s voice front and center and his lyrics more direct. He also opened up his process, collaborating with Justin Vernon (I hate Bon Iver, but his voice is nice usually), Frank Ocean (new album coming soon y’all!), and Rick Rubin. Blake is becoming one of those artists who can flirt with the mainstream while still retaining his core ideas, no surprise that Kanye has shown interest in him and Beyoncé worked with him on her most adventurous album.
 

Ocean Wisdom, Chaos ‘93, Track: High Street

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Brighton-based rapper Ocean Wisdom is like Grime’s answer to Earl Sweatshirt: a lyrical wunderkind who knows the history of his game enough to not be afraid to push and subvert it. He does not let up ever. His manically precise flow documents nonsensical near dream imagery along with social commentary and personal insight. I hope that Wisdom can ride the Skepta wave of renewed interest in Grime bringing a more experimental sensibility to the form. Every genre needs its weirdo iconoclasts.
 

Kaytrandaa, 99.9%, Track: GOT IT GOOD (featuring Craig David)

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Montreal-raised producer Kaytrandaa veers between J Dilla worship and delirious house. His new record, 99.9%, is stacked with guest vocalists: Craig David, Vic Mensa, Phonte, Anderson Paak, and more. The album is a formidable display of the producer’s ability to find a beat that a rapper can jump onto and dancer can bust moves to. But it feels rather natural. It’s not like Trap where a slow hip-hop head banger devolves into a House breakdown. Instead, Kaytrandaa effortlessly finds a beat that can serve two very different purposes. It’s one of the most seamless combinations of dance and rap music I’ve ever heard.

Otoboke Beaver, Okoshiyasu!! Otoboke Beaver, track: Okoshiyasu!! Otobok

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For those that like the kitsch-y manic Prog-Noise Rock blast of Japanese band Melt Banana in theory but can’t get behind the heaviness of it, Otoboke Beaver might prove a worthy alternative. The all-female quarter fashions itself in the lineage of bizarre Japanese Garage Rock (Guitar Wolf, Shonen Knife, DMBQ, etc..) and often recalls the jazzy riotous punk of God is my Co-pilot,  but there is a hyper-active day-glo quality to them that reminds you of the arcade culture of Tokyo warped into two-minute guitar anthems. The band also embraces performance and fashion, which is always refreshing in a world full of bands looking at the floor while wearing Chuck Taylor’s.
 

Heimat, Heimat, Track: Wieder Ja !

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This French experimental act, Heimat, made up of members of warped Punk band Cheveu and experimentalists The Dreams, draws up a mixed bag of oddball sounds to create something succinct and slightly off-putting, but in a good way: horror movie soundtracks (particularly John Carpenter), crackling Hip-Hop beats (particularly those used by The Rza on the first few Gravediggaz albums), minimalist post-punk (Young Marble Giants, The Slits), and Afro-beat all seem to make up small fractions of Heimat’s overall sound. There is a menacing feeling luring beneath the tape his of this debut.

Machine Woman, Genau House, Track: I Can Mend Your Broken Heart

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Russian sound artist Anastasia Vtorova records under the name Machine Woman. She produces tracks that take on minimal electronics while referencing European cinema. On new EP Genau House, she offers two tracks and a remix that offer a fine entry point into her sound.
 

Mirrors For Psychic Warfare, Mirrors for Psychic Warfare, Track: Oracles Hex

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Though it’s been a long time since Neurosis have punished anyone’s ear drums as a band, its members are constantly making music outside the band. Leaders Scott Kelly and Steve Von Till have their own respective solo acts, there is the side band Tribes of Neurot, and Kelly’s band with producer Sanford Parker, Yakuza’s Bruce Lamont, and Eyehategod Mike IX, Corrections House. But Mirrors for Psychic Warfare, Kelly’s new project with Parker, might be the most difficult music ever to come out of this camp. The self-titled debut lurches at crawl speeds, taking aspects from blackened doom bands like Burning Witch as well as the smoky folk of Kelly’s solo material. It’s very hard to get into, especially if you are used to the orchestral onslaught of Neurosis. But the sound grows on you, and it’s refreshing to hear musicians of this stature move this far outside of their comfort zones.

Car Seat Headrest, Teens of Denial, Track: Fill in the Blank

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Just when you thought the world didn’t need any Power Pop-leaning Indie Rock bands a songwriter comes along that has you totally reconsidering the form and its place in contemporary music. In this case, the songwriter is Virginia-born Will Toledo, AKA Car Seat Headrest. On paper, Toledo’s music shouldn’t be as good as it is. His influences read like a Pitchfork best of list: Animal Collective, Modest Mouse, Radiohead. But listening to this kid grapple with his own depression in sharp and acerbic lyrics reveals a depth unbeknownst to most or all Indie Rock acts of his age. His music also off-sets the lyrics. It’s surprising in places, and you don’t always know when the chorus is about to take effect. But when it does, it’s rather joyous. As DIY as this kid seems to be, he is not above the sing-along verse or the fist pumping breakdown. 

[Friday Playlist] Tracking Radiohead's Influences, Album by Album

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text by Adam Lehrer

Sometimes it’s hard what to make of Radiohead. I’ve been a fan of them since my 10th birthday in October of 1997 when my parents gifted me with OK Computer (along with records by The Smashing Pumpkins and Wu Tang Clan, I was a hip little kid!). At the time, they were the most far out band I had ever heard. Kid A blew my mind equally. But later on, when I started getting acquainted with Free Jazz, Krautrock, electronic music, and 20th Century composers that inspire Radiohead, it was sometimes hard to maintain headspace for the band. For a long time I would think, “What’s the point of listening to Radiohead when I can get the real thing?”

But eventually I had to realize that I was just posturing. What makes Radiohead outstanding is the band’s ability to draw upon the most difficult and experimental forms of music while still maintaining their status as, more or less, a pop group. Radiohead’s new record, A Moon Shaped Pool, reveals itself after a few listens. In contrast with previous records, the songs can feel quick and not fully fleshed out (considering some of these tracks were written 10-years-ago, that’s not a ringing endorsement). But then it all makes sense, and A Moon Shaped Pools has an addictive quality that is essential Radiohead. There is a lot going on in these songs, and sometimes there is very little going on in these songs, but the varied textures echoed by Thom Yorke’s legendary haunting falsetto reveal an album strange and beautiful.

Radiohead’s greatest strength is its channeling of the avant-garde through the form of a pop song, something they do better than any contemporary musical act. They are champions of music, first and foremost. I’d wager that hundreds of thousands of people heard Aphex Twin for the first time due to Thom Yorke singing the producer’s praises around the time of Kid A’s release. I’d wager that less people might have even heard Penderecki on the advice of Johnny Greenwood. The following is an estimated but thoroughly researched overview of the musical influences that have inspired Radiohead throughout their career, album by album.
 

Pablo Honey

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Pablo Honey doesn’t even seem like a Radiohead album at this point. Far from the grandeur of the records that follows, it is the culmination of a bunch of Indie Rock-obsessed Brits working out their obsessions before they could go on to make something new and modern. It’s a rock album disguised as a Brit Pop album. You can hear the band’s early rock influences; Thom Yorke has cited Pink Floyd and Queen as some of his favorites as a youngster. But it primarily acts as a watered down take on numerous ‘80s College and Indie Rock bands: R.E.M., the underrated Connecticut-based Rock band Miracle Legion, goth-y hints of Joy Division and Siouxsie and The Banshees, and the acerbic worldview of Elvis Costello.

The Bends

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The Bends is Radiohead’s most powerful guitar-driven album, and also the band’s first example of being an album-centered musical act. To create such a powerful rock album statement, they looked to some of the progenitors of Rock n’ Roll’s mutation into a genre primarily focused on the full-length record, particularly The Beatles. Radiohead’s production also grew more expansive on The Bends with the band building instrumental parts on top of one another much in the way of Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” But it was also, like I said, a guitar album. The album does seem to fashion itself after the groundbreaking guitar bands of the ‘80s and ‘90s. From the very beginning with track ‘Planet Telax,’ the swirling guitars recall those orchestrated by Kevin Shields on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and the lovelier parts of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation. And like The Pixies, The Bends has some seriously catchy choruses.

OK Computer

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OK Computer was Radiohead’s first bonafide masterpiece, and is often cited along with Nevermind, Loveless, and Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted as one of the best records of the ‘90s. While the previous influences mentioned in this article run strong, OK Computer was the first Radiohead record that embraced the avant-garde by mutating the sounds and stretching the parameters of what is possible within a rock n’ roll song. The album’s themes of alienation in the face of rampant consumerism needed a sonic undercurrent of dread to fester in the mind of the listener. Yorke cited ‘Bitches Brew,’ Miles Davis’ 1970 experimental fusion album, as an important influence on Radiohead’s songwriting process for OK Computer. It makes sense in that on Bitches Brew, Miles channeled terrifyingly beautiful sounds to weave a narrative of New York street life in the ‘70s, and OK Computer relies on its sound for its dark thematic content similarly, accentuated by Yorke’s obtuse lyrics. This was also the record when Johnny Greenwood, Radiohead’s lead guitar player and keyboardist who has gone on to compose music for the last three PT Anderson films, would raise his artistic voice to an equal decibel in the songwriting process as Yorke. Greenwood often cites Polish 20th Century composer Krzystof Penderecki as an influence, and no doubt OK Computer has a lush an orchestral flow to its sound. The band also started adding effects to Yorke’s voice, much in the way of Krautrock icons Can. There are samples on OK Computer as well, perhaps influenced by Yorke and his interest in DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing.
 

Kid A and Amnesiac

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Kid A was released in 2000, with its companion piece Amnesiac coming out shortly thereafter. To me, those two records are the most inspired and important of Radiohead’s career inalterably shifting what types of Indie Rock bands would get famous. No more frumpy guys doing lite Nirvana, Radiohead ushered in an era in which the labtop was often just as important as the guitars with Kid A. But really, has there ever been a platinum band that has ever released an album this ambitiously strange? No surprise then that new influences were all over these two records.

These two records are Radiohead’s most open flirtation with electronic music; at the time Yorke was bored of rock music but deeply obsessed by the IDM acts on Warp records such as Aphex Twin and Autechre as well as Bjork’s Homogenic. The electronica on the album is moody and contemplative, but there are some sounds on the record that one could even dance to. But less we forget the screechy horn interludes on tracks like The National Anthem, a result of the band weaving in the free jazz sounds of Charles Mingus, Alice Coltrane, and Miles Davis’ farther out records such as Sketches of Spain and On the Corner. Motorik rhythms drive the more rock-driven tracks, reminiscent of Krautrock acts Neu!, Can, and Faust.  Has there ever been a successful rock band to make an experimental record at the peak of its career? Yes, Talk Talk did with Laughing Stock, another record that seems to have made an impact on Radiohead. You could fill a book with all the music, literary, political, and art influences of Kid A and Amnesiac, but in short, these records absolutely mystified fans and critics alike by utterly doing away with conventional pop song formats. But they are pop songs, all the same. That’s what Radiohead does at its best.

Hail to the Thief

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Hail to the Thief has always felt like a bit of a misstep in Radiohead’s discography, but nonetheless carries some interesting tracks. The album feels like a bit of a survey of contemporary music (of the year it was released, 2004) and how Radiohead falls into it. Yorke expressed admiration for the band Liars who had just recorded their swan song, Drum’s Not Dead, in Berlin. Maybe due to this, Hail to the Thief expresses a renewed interest in rock music for Radiohead and an acknowledgement that rock music can be strange and outré. The album didn’t completely rebel against its forebears however, and the electronic influence of Modeslektor proves formative on the album. Yorke has cited the basslines of New Order as an influence, as well.

In Rainbows

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In Rainbows was a marketing game changer, with Radiohead allowing fans to pay at their own discretion to hear the record. The buzz around the promotion decision often saw the actual music overlooked. And the music was rather majestic. It’s ultimately more accessible, even when embracing the avant-garde sounds of composers like Olivier Messiaen. But In Rainbows in many ways feels like a distillation of the abstract sounds of Kid and OK Computer into a more palatable, arena-ready sound. In some parts, such as the beautiful Reckoner, there is even a hippy-dippy anthemic sing-along quality. Free of the constraints of the record industry, In Rainbows sounds like Radiohead indulging its every whim.
 

The King of Limbs

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“Rhythm is the king of limbs,” said Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien in an interview on 2011 record The King of Limbs. People seemed to hate this record when it came out, but I appreciated it as soon as I saw Thom doing his Ayahuascua convulsion dance in the music video for ‘Lotus Flower.’ It is certainly Radiohead’s weirdest album, making strong use of samples, loops, and ambient sounds. Some have cited the band’s interest in dubstep acts such as Burial on the witch-y beats that haunt the album. But really, this album is a showcase for drummer Phil Selway and bassist Colin Greenwood’s rhythm section; the members of the band that anchored Radiohead’s entire sound but in many ways lived in the shadow of Yorke and Greenwood. To me, it’s a Dub album, with the band citing influences such as Jamaican dub acts like Scientist, King Tubby, and Augustus Pablo. It is, without question, the best Radiohead album to get stoned and dance in your room along to. And it sounds better live than on record.
 

A Moon Shaped Pool

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Much of a Moon Shaped Pool consists of songs written a decade ago, so just refer to this list for its various infliuences. But in this article the band cited Marvin Gaye as a sound forebear. So that’s in there too. 

[Friday Playlist] In Celebration of Skepta

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Text by Adam Lehrer

Skepta’s ‘Konnichiwa’ has finally seen release not less than five years after his previous full-length ‘Blacklisted.’ I’ll just say here: it’s a scorcher. But even more important is that after over a decade of the industry trying to break grime acts into the US pop and hip-hop market, Skepta looks to finally be the Grime artist who might make international cultural dent. Even more important is the fact that he is doing so by being a true Grime artist. Unlike past contenders to the throne of cross-continental Grime superstardom, Skepta will not collaborate with Robbie Williams (like Dizzee Rascal did) or give into Hip-hop’s obsession with luxury (like Wiley did with track “Wearing my Rolex”). Writer Josh Gray described the album well in his review for The Quietus: “To critically appraise [Konnichiwa] is to take the pulse of an entire genre; a genre that’s tentative but unstoppable ascent has provided a Ranieri-worthy spectacle of underdog triumph for both diehard fans and casual observers alike.”

With co-signs by the A$AP Mob and Drake, Skepta looks poised to take over the universe. And he will do so making Grime music and Grime along, perhaps finally getting American fans to consider British hip-hop music alongside its American counterpart. With this, I thought it wise to look back on the tracks that brought Skepta here. He’s been doing this since 2004, and a genre-defining breakout swan song like ‘Konnichiwa’ doesn’t come over night. 

[Friday Playlist] Best Music of April 2016

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By Adam Lehrer

As of today, Autre will be rounding up our favorite new music at the end of every month. This isn’t only because coming up with obscure scenes and sub-genres on a weekly basis is getting difficult (it is), but also because Autre strives to be contemporary. Daily, we try and inform our readers of the creative ideas festering inside the brains of artists, designers, photographers, writers, and filmmakers. Music, being the most joyous of mediums, deserves to have its story told at the moment the story is unfolding. These are the sounds driving us wild, today.

Note: The only reason Beyoncé’s Lemonade is not at the top of this list is that Tidal has the rights to her tunes, hence: not available on Spotify. But I’ll add that that record is every bit worth its praise capturing the world’s most talented and adventurous pop singer at the top of her career. So few artists have their souls ripped out every time they sing, opting for Instagram posts for direct communication to their fans. What Beyonce gives us she gives us in songs, and Lemonade is the best album of her career. The most staunch experimental music nerds would all be defeated by the record’s breathtaking scope and cohesion.

1. PJ Harvey, The Hope Six Demolition Project, Track: The Orange Monkey

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The always-progressing PJ Harvey released The Hope Six Demolition Project this month, her first since her Mercury Prize-earning 2011 LP Let England Shake. The LP’s title refers to the HOPE VI projects in the US, where down run neighborhoods were revitalized and wiped of crime, leading of course to gentrification and social cleansing. PJ is extremely political here, leading to some of her most vivacious lyrics of her career, with a few missteps. But with PJ, even the lyrics that don’t hit add to her mystique. Her fearlessness makes her compelling, allowing to move through styles ranging from subdued folky tracks to alt-rock ragers.

2. Ihsahn, Arktis, Track: Disassembled

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I was quite the metalhead in my youth, but I listened to a lot of the cheesy stuff (Korn, Spineshank). Luckily, that all led me to Terrorizers magazine where I read a glowing review of black metal band Emperor’s Prometheus. An extraordinary concept album matched in its brutality by its progressive textures and rhythms, I became an obsessive. Emperor leader Ihsahn has recorded solo for years now, but new record Arktis feels like the career statement he’s been working towards. Ihsahn’s music is unwavering its brutality, but peppers the thuds with shimmering acoustic guitar lines, moody synths, and here, even a saxophone. There are weaker tracks, but on the strongest ones, Ihsahn proves himself an artist unbound to the stylistic traits that define the genre he has chosen for himself. It’s music, before it’s metal, if you catch my drift.

3. Parquet Courts, Human Performance, Track: Two Dead Cops

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New York’s best rock band of now, as anointed by new album Human Performance. No band captures the anxiety of living in the 5 Boroughs better than Parquet Courts, even at the band’s catchiest there is an undercurrent of fear and paranoia lurking beneath the melodies. The band captures a world when even its greatest city is still a shrine to monotony: the daily grind is a grind no matter the locale. Andrew Savage has become one of indie rock’s most literary of songwriters and scathing of cultural critics. But the best part of Parquet Courts, even at their most bummed out “I don’t get out, I don’t have fun” sings Savage} they still sound like their having a blast, like rock is the only thing keeping them through. I went to the album release party in Gowanus earlier this month, and very few indie rock bands are putting on shows as raucous as Parquet Courts.

4. Deftones, Gore, Track: Prayers/Triangles

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Back in the early ‘00s, Deftones got unfairly lumped in with the nu-metal craze. After all, the band’s label marketed them as such to cash in on their association with Korn and the like. And while it made Deftones rich, it also made it impossible for them to get the artistic cred they deserve. Really, nothing sounds like Deftones. No band is able to capture the intensity of thrash and the dreamy haze of Cocteau Twins without sounding , well, dumb. All the better, Deftones makes their experimentation accessible, as best evidenced on the now rightly referred to as masterpiece White Pony. Recently released Gore is the band’s best since White Pony. The band’s leader, Chino Moreno, once against juxtaposes his ethereal whispery howl with murder and sex fantasizing lyrics. Stephen Carpenter’s riffs are meaty but muted, letting the atmospheric production dance around them. Now that the critics who have grown up with Deftones are of age, the band finally is getting their place in the culture they deserve.
 

5. LA timpa, Animals, Track: Animal

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OVO is great and everything, but we can’t ignore all the other amazing music coming out of Toronto. LA timpa, an experimental producer straddling the lines of Portishead-esque dream-pop and the aural hijinx of Onehontronix Point Never with a culturally aware satirical voice, released an exciting set of five songs, Animals. This kid names Junya Watanabe and Harmony Korine amongst his influences, and I can already hear this music soundtracking the lives of cool kids everywhere.
 

6. Youth Code, Commitment to Complications, Track: Anagnorisis

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Ryan George and Sara Taylor are Youth Code, the latest band to straddle the line between dance music and all out warfare heavy metal and hardcore. In an article for self-titledmag.com, George discusses his wish that Ministry were able to make a record that was as heavy as The Land of Rape and Honey without ever having to pick up guitars. The guitars that Youth Code does use on Commitment to Complications sound like call to arms sirens, weaving in and out of breakneck paced beats and glorious hate screams.
 

7. Kweku Collins, Nat Love, Track: Stupid Roses

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19-year-old, Chicago-based rapper, singer, and producer Kweku Collins released his debut full-length this month, Nat Love. Though in-line with his more introspective hometown contemporaries like Vic Mensa and Chance the Rapper, Collins is far more of a sonic outlier. His father was an African and Latin percussionist, and that fluid rhythm sense manifests in Collins’ music, along with influences like D’angelo and Tame Impala. There is a remarkable sense of musicality on this record, especially considering Collins’ age. His more obvious forebear is Andre 3000; he constantly seems to be questioning the ideals of what it means to be a hip-hop star. He can find two hip-hop clichés, as with weed and woman like on ‘Stupid Roses,’ and use both clichés to subvert his lyrics into new meaning.

8. Beak, Couple in a Hole OST, Track: Battery Point

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The world is better when Geoff Barrow is making music. Though Portishead is long gone, Barrow has been making Krautrock-recalling experimental music under the Beak> moniker for about a decade. Beak>’s newest record is a soundtrack to Tom Greens’ new film Couple in a Hole that depicts a couple living in the remains of their burned home that took the life of their child. Beak> beautifully captures the isolation-induced psychosis of the film. The record is ambient but suffocating. It reminds me of Popul Vuh’s work with Werner Herzog, in that the record provides Barrow with motifs to work with and expand on, letting the music stand on its own.
 

9. A$AP Ferg, ALWAYS STRIVE AND PROSPER, Track: Strive (featuring Missy Elliot)

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Ferg is back and he is obliterating any sense of genre. ALWAYS STRIVE AND PROSPER, while not all together perfect, is an exhilarating listen. With vivacious production from Clams Casino, Skrillex, DJ Khalil, and more, Ferg proves himself the Mob’s most extraterrestrial weirdo. While Rocky in some ways has brought mad mid’90s Bones Thugs N’ Harmony rap-sing, Ferg is a pure futurist. His lyrics have also greatly improved.

10. Wire, Noctural Koreans, Track: Dead Weight

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Jesus Christ. Wire literally invented post-punk with Pink Flag in 1977, and here they are 39 years later still making relevant and experimental rock music. That makes them the longest-running actually good band in history. While last year’s self-titled album seemed like an ode to the band’s history in rock music, Noctural Koreans is emblematic of the band’s fondness for experimental electronic music and Krautrock swirl. While last year’s LP was mostly recorded live, these eight leftover (but certainly not inferior) songs allowed for greater studio trickery.

11. Dalek, Asphalt for Eden, Track: Shattered

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Experimental hip-hop group Dalek have been on hiatus since 2010, and lord knows there has been much to be disgusted over in the six years since. Dalek comes back on Asphalt for Eden with a revolutionary plomp, joining the ranks of Killer Mike and Kendrick Lamar as the rappers that really care. But of course, they do that while utilizing shoegaze feedback and noise-drenched beats, making their politicizing sharper and more jarring to the apathetic amongst us.
 

12. Elzhi, Lead Poison, Track: Alienated (featuring Smitty)

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Detroit-based rapper Elzhi, formerly of Slum Village, released Elmatic in 2011 as a remake and a tribute to Nas’ Illmatic. It was a breathtakingly lyrical record, and yet outside of hip-hop circles it sort of fell under the radar. I hope that doesn’t happen with Lead Poison, Elzhi’s new album. The album almost didn’t happen, and a Kickstarter fund started in 2013 almost resulted in Elzhi being sued in January when he failed to deliver. Perhaps that angst brought out the best in Elzhi, as he viscerally details the woes of betrayal and loss with one of the fiercest flows on the planet.
 

13. Primitive Weapons, The Future of Death, Track: Ashes of Paradise

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There is something comforting I find in Brooklyn quartet Primitive Weapons, a band that seems to recall the best of every band I loved at age 14; from the mathematic chaos of Converge to the abrasive melodiousness of Glassjaw. Members of the band actually own Brooklyn’s legendary metal bar Saint Vitus, and it seems the influence of the vast array of bands they see regularly has had its positive effects.
 

14. Bleached, Welcome the Worms, Track: Keep On Keepin On

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This band is impossible to not like. From the ashes of all-girl noise punk band Mika Miko, Bleached was formed by sisters Jessica and Jennifer Clavin in Los Angeles. There is no noise here and only a little bit of punk. It’s straight ahead and melodic rock n’ roll, emblematic of the joyous creativity defining the city the band lives in.

15. Susanna, Triangle, Track: Texture Within

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Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanna’s music has had many vehicles: as lead singer for art-pop band The Magical Orchestra, Cat Power covers, and in collaborations with Scandinavian artist Jenny Hval. But her one most consistent draw is her voice. It’s a fascinatingly beautiful voice, one that can evoke a span of emotions in the same note. Her first solo album, Triangle, is 70 minutes long, but the voice holds it together. Meditating on religion and morality, Susanna brings in numerous musical styles. It is hard to listen to in one go, but it’s a record with much room to explore. 

[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] A Celebration Of PJ Harvey On The Occasion of The Release Of Her New Album

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photograph by Jurgen Teller

text by Adam Lehrer

Today, PJ Harvey releases her ninth full-length record The Hope Six Demolition Project. At the time of writing this article, I haven’t been able to fully listen to the record. But if the album’s first three singles are any indication, she is still one of the most important artists working in rock n’ roll: The Orange Monkey, The Community of Hope, and The Wheel juxtapose the dark but sublime beauty and evocative imagery that PJ Harvey has used to influence two generations of rock fans.  PJ Harvey is the best kind of rock star: she’s an amazing songwriter, her sound is malleable and singular, she understands the power of image and aesthetic, and she’s absolutely fascinating as a human being.

And if you look at the very beginning of Harvey’s career, it’s almost hard to fathom the fact that she’s still here and still relevant. After her debut record (still recording under the moniker The PJ Harvey Trio) Dry was released in 1992, Harvey had a bit of a breakdown crushed under the weight of new found fame, a stressful move to London, and her first awful breakup. In interviews, she evaded questions about the meanings of her lyrics and refused to discuss her conceptual processes. But it worked for her. In many ways, Harvey is a callback to the rock star as an artist. You certainly don’t hear a lot of, “I just do this for the fans, bro” type statements from her. Like Dylan, Hendrix, Patti, and Lennon, it seems like Harvey doesn’t always know the reasons that her music comes out the way it does. It just comes out: pure creation. That being said, she sometimes seems to be as aware of the importance of visuals, almost as much as even Bowie was. When Dry came out, a dark but bluesy punk record, she was all black tights and Doc Maarten’s, almost like an Ann Demeulemeester ad come to life. When her music was amplified in production and grandiosity on the record To Bring You My Love, so was Harvey’s look: ball gowns and smeared makeup defined her new stage presence. For the recording of the new record, Harvey and her band recorded behind a glass wall and allowed paying spectators to watch, ever aware of the fact that people don’t just love listening to their favorite musicians; they want to see them and know them. Harvey is at once enigmatic and welcoming, like she is giving you your own personal access to her.

Where she differs from her classic rock predecessors however, is her gleeful abandon of genre trappings. When Harvey says that comparing her to Patti Smith is “lazy journalism,” she’s absolutely right. While Smith has always remain rooted in classic rock, Harvey has elevated her sound eons beyond the blues, Hendrix, and Captain Beefheart influences that she initially rooted them in. By the time Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea came out in 2000, Harvey had no problem incorporating synthesizers and computer into her sound. Her sound can be aggressive and bombastic, and minimalist and chillingly vulnerable. Sometimes her sound can be so varied on one record that the only sound that can tie tracks together is her preternaturally gorgeous contralto voice. That voice is the anchor that the entire spectacle is built around.

There is nothing else like PJ Harvey on Earth. She is one of the last artists in music to accrue wealth by subverting expectations, and that alone is something to celebrate. 

[Friday Playlist] Proto Metal Oddities

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Photograph by Terry Richardson

Text by Adam Lehrer

It’s funny how in music, maybe more so than other mediums, if not all out complete musical ineptitude then a general lack of self-awareness is what pushes the art form into new and interesting realms. Lou Reed inspired legions of harsh noise acts by releasing five tracks of atonal skree on Metal Machine Music. Why? Though Reed argued that it was because he liked it, many have said the record was a ruse to get released by his label.

And then you have Black Sabbath, a band that sets the precedent for every doom, stoner, and sludge band that ever followed. But Black Sabbath (initially called Earth, which I’m sure was what Dylan Carlson was thinking of when he named his doom drone project Earth the same name) was a blues band with a Pink Floyd-inspired penchant for gobbling oodles of psychedelic drugs when they started. It was Tony Iommi’s loss of his middle and index finger on his fretting hand that resulted in his simplistic, rumbling, down-tuned, and low E chord-favoring guitar style that resulted in the pervasive feeling of evil that lurked in the band’s sound. The band’s viewing of Boris Karloff’s 1963 occult film Black Sabbath inspired the name change, and they had found a magnificent synergy in their sound and aesthetic. Would they know that they’d become one of the 5 or 6 most influential rock n’ roll bands ever Doubtful, they just played the way that they could.

And yet Black Sabbath didn’t emerge onto the scene without a precedent already being set by forebears and contemporaries. As long as the hippie scene was in motion there were bands that negated the ideas of free love and psychedelic visions of bliss. One out of every two trips is, let’s face it, fucking awful. So perhaps it was this, or just a lesser control over their instruments, that resulted in all these awesome proto-metal oddball records that came out in the late ‘60s and the late ‘70s. These bands, like their more famous psych contemporaries, were essentially blues bands, but freewheeling hippie-dom was replaced by growled and screamed vocals, feedback, and volume. These bands, most of which were shunned by rock press when they were around, have influenced hoards of music both good (doom metal, grunge, noise rock) and (depending on your taste of course) bad (hair metal, hair metal, and hair metal).

San Francisco-based late ‘60s Blue Cheer are often credited as the original heavy metal band and whether you think that’s true or not they really prove that heavy metal, unlike punk which stripped rock n’ roll of its basic form, is really just playing blues licks and amplifying them until your ears hurt. The band’s first two LPs, Vincebus Eruptum and Outsideinside, really hold up. They are the perfect band to play at a summer barbecue at like 6 pm, when everyone starts realizing they are really wasted and things are on the edge of getting out of control. There’s a recklessness to their sound. Aesthetically, the band was really conscious of their look, and their graphics are sort of a grittier version of the San Francisco psychedelia popular at the time (I had a Blue Cheer t-shirt at one point that I was wearing daily for a good while in college).

London-based The Groundhogs were attempting blues, but failing. But that failure is generally what made them interesting. The band sounded like they were falling apart much of the time, but making some interesting use of volume. Though most would align them with proto-metal, the band’s chaotic structure is more akin to the thrills of noise rock. I would listen to Groundhogs in a similar mood to when I want to listen to something like Sightings (a weird mood, to say the least).

Before you were able to throw a rock down some block in Bushwick and hit a black metal guitarist in the head, there was but one “heavy metal” band. They were Sir Lord Baltimore. Though the band had a drumming lead singer (I hate that, personally) their down-tuned but up-tempo feedback-heavy approach to psychedelic music is very audibly the precursor to stoner rock. The bands that are very clearly high and listened to Black Sabbath but don’t want to play as slow as your Electric Wizard’s and your Boris’s. There is a party vibe to Sir Lord Baltimore that I find attractive, a quality I also find attractive in the stoner rock bands of the ‘90s like Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age, Monster Magnet, and the massively misunderstood Clutch. Sir Lord Baltimore is the godfather.

I am also going to include Mott the Hoople here; because I believe Ian Hunter and his band were misbranded as “glam rock.” I feel like Mott is often thought of as the lesser version of T. Rex. But unlike T. Rex who were a band that filtered rock through funk and dance music, you can’t really dance to Mott the Hoople at all. But you can certainly thrash to it. Need proof? Watch Leo Romero’s skateboarding part in the Emerica Made in Emerica video. He is absolutely ripping in that video, skating scary fast and defying death in every sequence. He is doing it to scorcher Mott the Hoople track ‘Thunderbuck Ram.’ To me, Mott the Hoople was less Bowie and more Guns n’ Roses, but recording in the wrong era. 

[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] Primal Scream Alternative Dance

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Text by Adam Lehrer

Primal Scream just released its 10th album, Chaosmosis, this week. The band has always flirted with mainstream pop and dance rhythms, but on this record the band is fully embracing indie pop, collaborating with Sky Ferreira on the excellent Where the Light Gets In and Haim on the less good Trippin' On Your Love. The band has evolved past the alternative dance sound they helped define. I won't comment on the quality of the album, but let's ust say Bobby Gillepsie has not let the past define him.

Alternative dance more or less set the pace for what pop music would become in the decades to follow. It was the first time when indie rock kids would dance at raves and DJs would open for rock bands. In the Information Age, peoples' tastes have grown even further outward, and no one blinks twice when you see the lead singer of your favorite rock band dancing on Molly at Output.

Alternative pop was basically broken down into three eras. The first came out of England in the early and mid-80s, starting with the Madchester (but that's for another playlist) scene based around Factory Records honcho Tony Wilson (immortalized by Steeve Coogan in 24 Hour Party People) and his club The Hacienda. New Order, formed in the ashes of Joy Division after Ian Curtis' suicide, was arguably the first band to approach dance music from a traditional rock attack. Later,The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays would own the club with their own riffs and dance rhythms. Primal Scream, formed by Gillepsie after his tenure in The Jesus and Mary Chain, was an amalgam of a love for LSD-worshipping psych rock, amphetamine-driven punk, and MDMA-laced acid house. Scream's debut Screamdelica is the landmark album of alternative dance music.

The second wave, in the mid-'90s, had more in line with techno and dance music that it did rock music. Groups like The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, and to a lesser extent The Crystal Method, had the anthemic bombast of punk and rock but used all electronic sounds. These groups did however predate mainstream EDM with their ability to take the sounds of the acid house and make it work within a stadium context.

In the early '00s, the rock sound came back into the onslaught of Alt-Dance bands. For a while, it was the sound of New York, with The Rapture's House of Jealous Lovers blaring out of every speakersystem south of 14th street. Kathleen Hanna followed up her legendary riot grrl punk band Bikini Kill with a decidedly dance-leaning trio, Le Tigre. And perhaps the most successful of all of these bands proved to be James Murphy and LCD Soundsystem, who used Alternative Dance as a conceptual art project and had massive effect on popular music at large.

[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] A Siltbreeze Records Retrospective

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text by Adam Lehrer

“I can’t say why I’ve always been drawn more to the lo-fi stuff,” said Philadelphia-based avant-rock record label head Tom Lax in an interview with VICE from 2008. “You could blame it on The Fall and Pere Ubu. As much as I dug The Buzzcocks and The Ramones, those bands helped set a course of no return for my head.”

Such is the philosophy of Siltbreeze, that since its inception in 1992 (started by Lax so that he could release the first 7” by Minneapolis noise rock band Halo of Flies) has released music from a plethora of bottom-dwelling underground rock bands from a spectrum of little-heard genres: the guitar and drums blistering punk noise of Miami-based Harry Pussy, the abstract guitar rumblings of Alan Licht, the lo-fi sound art of Graham Lambkin and his ‘90s project The Shadow Ring, the feedback-drenched ‘00s garage rock of Times New Viking and Psychedelic Horseshit, and a whole lot of music from New Zealand that Americans would have never heard without Mr. Lax’s extra-developed ear for sound.

Siltbreeze was at first a zine published from 1987 (my birth year!) to 1992 and featured as many photos of ‘70s porn (particularly black women) as it did reviews of avant psych, noise, punk, and rock bands, according to Magnet Magazine. The Halo of Flies release came with a copy of the magazine, but Siltbreeze really started taking off when Lax started learning about the music that was coming out of New Zealand, which was amazing but utterly obscure in the United States.

Much of these bands were being released in New Zealand on seminal Christchurch-based label that gained fame for pioneering the “Dunedin sound.” Bands like The Clean, The Renderers, The Verlaines, and The Chills started playing in shimmery power pop with a twist of avant sound experimentation. Lax started releasing much of this music in the U.S. on Siltbreeze, most notably with musician Alastair Galbraith who balanced his sound between jangly melodies and atonal skree.

Perhaps the most notable New Zealand discovery of Lax was experimental rock trio The Dead C (Bruce Russell, Michael Morley, and Robbie Yeats). The Dead C used a rock approach to free improvisation and noise, proving massively influential on U.S. bands like Harry Pussy, Mouthus, and even Sonic Youth. The band’s 1992 Siltbreeze double album, Harsh 70s Reality, is a noise rock landmark and one of the best albums of the ‘90s.

Siltbreeze went through its most prosperous years in the mid-‘90s, when they were able to attract the attention of popular indie rock bands drawn to Lax’s unique taste and approach to releasing music: Lou Barlow’s Sebadoh project, Guided by Voices, and psych rock band Bardo Pond among them. At the same time, the label was releasing super obscure avant punk and rock bands like Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, The Strapping Fieldhands, and Charalambides.

Around 2000, a Siltbreeze partnership with indie titan Matadaoe didn’t work to plan, and the release schedule slowed. But, Lax took the opportunity to reissue bands from the fringes of punk rock of yesteryears and introducing them to whole new audiences. Due to Lax’s taste, ‘80s Aussie avant punks Venom P. Stinger (due yourself a favor and stream the band’s amazing Tearbucketer album now), late ‘70s British DIY art unit Desperate Bicycles, and ‘70s Aussie proto-punks Slugfuckers all have music out in the United States.

But a renewed interest in weird rock music (maybe due to The Strokes, probably not) brought attention back to the underground rock (and noise) scenes in the mid ‘00s. In 2005, producer and musician Mike Rep (of The Quotas) introduced Lax to an Ohio-based lo-fi garage rock trio called Times New Viking (Jared Phillips, Beth Murphy, and Adam Elliot). Times New Viking had a serious energy, but also potential for Pitchfork-approved popularity, Lax released the band’s debut Dig Yourself in 2005 to acclaim and popularity.

Though Times New Viking quickly blew up and moved onto Matador, the media took note of this lo-fi noisy pop punk sound and quickly dubbed it “shitgaze.” Though the name left much to be desired, Siltbreeze experienced a resurgence as the premier home of this movement. Lax released music by psych pop unit Psychedelic Horseshit, garage punk band Sic Alps, no-wave revivalists Naked on the Vague, and so much more.

In my opinion, the one record that best exemplified Lax’s uncanny knack for hearing something special is the 2007 release by Aussie one-man-band Pink Reason entitled Cleaning the Mirror. Using guitars, banjos, feedback, droning, and a deep gravelly baritone, Kevin Debroux took the post-punk of Bauhaus and the slowest songs of Joy Division and stripped them down to a beautiful skronk of despair. Pink Reason used the medium of punk rock to express the deepest of feeling and create capital A Art, as Lax seems to admire in most of his bands. But Cleaning the Mirror was the most important record to me that I owned when I was a softmore in college (when I was discovering this whole dearth of underground rock) and struggling with some substance abuse issues and homesickness. It was one of those records that seemed to sound how I felt. Sadly, Debroux has never followed Cleaning the Mirror with another full-length. I should know. I’ve been longing for one ever since.

The influence of Siltbreeze is still felt throughout the indie rock world. It’s hard to imagine the success of garage rock superstars like Ty Segall and The Oh Sees had Lax not been able to prove that this type of music could be popular in the first place. Record labels like Burger, Goner, and SS all recall the spirit of artistic freedom and sonic palette that Lax set forth.  But garage rock was never his sole vocation. The only common theme that runs through the Siltbreeze catalog is that all of its releases have a 100 percent commitment to never compromising their sounds. These bands make music because no one else is making the music they want to hear. 

Friday Playlist: When Visual Artists Make Tunes

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People are justifiably skeptical about artists that decide to step outside their known mediums and experiment with something else. Musicians painting, or painters making records, or Kanye West designing fashion, are all often written off as "vanity projects." The reason for this is simple. The idea that someone can be exceptional at more than one discipline seems to strike at the heart of one's inferiority complex: how can one person be blessed with so much talent, and I be left with nothing? It's a near impossible pill to swallow. If you can look outside yourself, however, you should be able to see that true artists get bored working in the same discipline for the entirety of their careers. By their very natures, they feel compelled to experiment, even if that means failure. The refusal to be frightened of failure is the essence of an artist, and by that notion we should celebrate those willing to take a step outside their comfort zones. I forget who said it, but some famous artist of one discipline or another said that all forms of art wish they could be music. Music has the power to physically connects its listeners, which makes it an attractive form to any artist. That is most likely why so many visual artists have decided to make records in one capacity or another, to varying degrees of success.

In many cases, artists that worked in visuals to begin with actually gained notoriety with music before their art. Kim Gordon, now a rock n' roll icon, was actually an aspiring artist and working in the art world when she joined Sonic Youth. Though she is enjoying a newfound interest in her fine art, she is also still making punishing noise rock as one part of duo Body/Head. Performance artist Lydia Lunch found the first avenue for her extreme expression as a member of the no wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Robin Crutchfield, who has showed his art at MoMA and other venues, was first a musician as a member of no wave band DNA and also as the leader of synth punk act Dark Day. Perhaps most notable is Destroy all Monsters, a Detroit noise rock band from the 1970s that took the garage fury of The Stooges and melted the sound down to its noise essence. The leaders of that band were art icons Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw.

Filmmakers, in particular, seem to have a modern day fascination with making music. Perhaps that is because sound is such an essential part of the cinematic experience, that these artists just want to explore this aspect of their processes further. Sometimes it works wonders, especially when the records are made by filmmakers who already have a deep connection to music. David Lynch for instance is extremely involved in the music composition in his films and in Twin Peaks and his collaboration with composer Angelo Badalamenti is legendary. Perhaps that is why his first solo record, Crazy Clown Time was such an unexpected delight. Jim Jarmusch also has a well-documented fascination with music, and his soundtracks for films like Dead Man, recorded by Neil Young at his most sparsely experimental, and Ghost Dog, recorded by RZA at his headiest, are as iconic as the films they were made for. Jarmusch's musical collaboations with Josef Van Wissem sound like great avant rock, not like a filmmaker just mucking about (Jarmusch also played in no wave band Del-Byzanteens and in Crutchfield's Dark Day as a young man).

There are of course a million other examples of this, but Spotify is coming up short on quite a bit of the tracks I'd like to include. The point is, we shouldn't immediately write off a project because it is made by an artist that is known for making different things, because the most talented artists can express their ideas in myriad ways. That we should celebrate. 

[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] Remembering Fort Thunder, Providence's '90s Radical Art and Music Space

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For some reason, people fail to acknowledge the importance of the city of Providence, Rhode Island on music, art, design, and culture at large. Less we forget that Rhode Island School of Design has the most impressive creative alumni in the country: Artists Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, and Ryan Trecartin, designers Mary Katranzou and Eckhaus Latta, director Gus Van Zandt, animator Seth McFarland, and so many more all studied their vocations here. But nevertheless, much of the city’s creatives leave for other cities once they get their degrees: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, wherever. But there was a time that Providence was the most important city in the country for avant-garde music and radical art. That time was Fort Thunder.

Fort Thunder was a radical art and music space established in the late 1997 by artists and musicians Brian Chippendale (Lightning Bolt, Black Pus, Mindflayer, etc.) and Mat Brinkman (Mindflayer, Forcefield, etc.) in a former textile factory in the Olneyville district of the city. Though the venue closed in 2001, it was legendary in its short life span for shining light on a diverse array of fiercely individualistic and radical artists and musicians.

The music could largely be classified as noise rock, but all the bands were still measurably different. They were noisy, to be certain, and tended to work in a rock format, but all had unique approaches to the aural assault. Lightning Bolt, perhaps the most known of all the bands to emerge from the scene, used the fury of Chippendale’s drums and a heavily effected and distorted bass from Brian Gibson to punish the listener. Perhaps most impressive about the duo is that as brutal as they could be, there is a defined pattern to their sound, almost having as much to do with the spasms of early Boredoms as the mathematical approach of early King Crimson. Playing in the middle of a crowd, there are still few things on earth as thrilling as a Lightning Bolt concert. Perhaps that is why the band is still playing and enjoying an immense cult following today (their last record Fantasy Empire came out last year from Thrill Jockey Records).

The other band to get pseudo-famous was Black Dice. Originally formed by Hisham Bharoocha, Sebastian Blanck, Eric Copeland, and Bjorn Copeland in 1997, Black Dice was actually something of a screamo-reminding noise punk unit, vastly different from the band that they eventually come. The band was eventually signed by DFA and they released Beaches and Canyons. The record is made up of swirling and kaleidoscopic psychedelic electro-pop, and quite beautiful really. Blanck and Bharoocha eventually left and were replaced by Aaron Warren. The band still records today, and Eric enjoys quite a successful solo career as well.

Forcefield, led by Brinkman, were arguably the Fort Thunder house band cum art collective cum spiritual guides. Brinkman, along with Jim Drain, Ara Peterson, and Leif Goldberg, applied a conceptual approach to psychedelic stereotypes. They self-designed their own multi-colored seizure-inducing outfits, while using various light structures and set props to create a total experience. Sometimes the band used pure drawn out noise. Other times they used a degraded acid house beat and just looped it forever. The point was total agitation, making the viewer as uncomfortable as possible. This approach garnered the band an appearance at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, believe it or not.

And there was of course lots more music and much of it was released by Ben McOsker’s excellent Providence label Load Records. John Dwyer, who is now Pitchfork famous for his band The Oh Sees, originally played in a noise rock duo called Pink and Brown as well as noise garage band The Coachwhips at his Providence hometown venue (yes, Fort Thunder). Dissonant post-punk bands Six Finger Satellite and Arab on Radar made the warehouse their home. And less we forget, Fort Thunder became a base for American noise, hosting early shows by Prurient, Wolf Eyes, and so many more.

The musicians who played Fort Thunder were almost unanimously artists that played music and not musicians who painted, but don’t quote me on that. Despite his being preposterously good at drums, for instance, Chippendale has had an illustrious career in illustration, and his graphic novel Ninja has become a cult favorite. His partner in ear-splitting, Brian Gibson, works on video games in his time away from the band. Brinkman works in illustration and fine art. Hisham Bharoocha, who played in Black Dice and Lightning Bolt and has a solo music project called Soft Circle, is massively successful as a photographer and a painter. He has exhibited at Deitch Projects and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and his maximalist style is nothing less than delight for the eyeballs.

When is someone going to do a documentary on this space? Should I start a Kickstarter? Do it myself? That’s what the Fort Thunder crew would have done. 

[Friday Playlist] A Celebration of Tri Angle Records

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Text by Adam Lehrer

The best new record I heard this week, aside from The Life of Pablo obviously, is the newest release by London-based producer Brood Ma, Daze. A volatile collision of funk, noise, house, and techno, the album sounds viciously contemporary, indicative of the evolution of London and New York-based label Tri Angle.

Never in my life have I seen a label that has almost as much influence on the underground as it does on the mainstream. Label boss Robin Carolan has proven himself a gifted curator and arguably, an artist in his own right. Though the label has broadened its scope in its six years of existence, Carolan has a keen eye for fitting the acts he signs into his own world. A world where goth is funky and noise is fashion and anti-fashion is art. I sound pretentious here, maybe as per usual, but it is undeniable that the label has been profound in unleashing what are quite possibly the most excitingly contemporary forms of music: "alternative" R&B and abstract dance music.

It all started with 808z and Heartbreak, but before Frank Ocean, Drake, Kelela, and others all started breaking new ground in an R&B form, a Chicago philosophy student with a taste for the avant-garde and an angelic voice named Tom Krell found himself floored by Yeezy's baroque musings of self-loathe. Krell, re-named How to Dress Well, took the goth pop stylings of Kanye and Janet Jackson's The Velvet Rope and incorporated it with his love of Aphex Twin and avant-garde 20th century composition to define the possibilities that can be explored within the context of rhythm, beat, and voice. Krell never gets as much recognition as other geniuses like Ocean or the Weeknd, but his first album released on Tri Angle, Love Remains, was an era-defining record. Not only did it set up Tri Angle as a label that would be beautifully balanced the realms of pop and avant-garde, but it also made people think, "Holy shit, why haven't people realized how fucking cool R&B can be with crackling electronics, tape hiss, and gut wrenching philosophical lyrics?" Hello 2010s.

On the flip side, Carolan's taste for noise and weirdo techno paved the path for artists like Arca, who is in his own way blurring boundaries between popular and niche taste. The Haxan Cloak's record Excavation, released in 2011, approached dance music as sound design. Within it, beats weave through landscapes of thick pulsating drones. You can dance to it, but you can also just get really high and get lost in it. The best electronic music of today, from Surgeon to Jlin, all try and find a beat to dance to within a warped sonic scape of weirdo sounds.

It isn't surprising that artists like Bjork and Kanye, the more willfully experimentally of our most famous musicians, have something of a reciprocal relationship with the artists that record for Tri Angle records. Bjork especially, rumored to be dating Carolan, has been particularly vocal in her fondness for the label. On Vulnicura, The Haxan Cloak was co-producer and Carolan provided creative support. Tri Angle is good for the music industry, period. The success of the label helps scared executives see the value in stars that skew more experimental, like FKA Twigz or even Sky Ferreira. Not to diminish the success of those two gifted artists, but Tri Angle is opening eyes while in no way dumbing down their roster: Brood Ma is as atonal and all out strange as anything the label has released.

[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] Protest Songs

Text by Adam Lehrer

The widest margin of income inequality in the history of the United States. Rampant police brutality. The most overcrowded prisons in the western hemisphere. No guarantees of education or health care. Corporate greed. The mainstream media wants to tell me that I'm a sexist for not voting for Hilary Clinton. They say Bernie Sanders is too radical to be president, that people can't accept all that change at once? Fuck that. That is the military industrial complex keeping us complacent, telling us to make the sensible choice so that they can maintain the "natural order of things." If the sensible economic policies of Sen. Sanders are radical, then let's revolt away. President Obama was great for liberals and this country, but now is the time to take those epic policy changes and institute a full blown system overhaul. Protest away, my fellow Americans. It is our motherfucking right!

Music has always been a powerful tool of protest, bringing together disparate groups of people behind one message and one sound. The statement of protest can be clear, whether it be Rage Against the Machine encouraging us to bring down the system, or Ice Cube detailing the horrors of police brutality, or Killer Mike telling us that he's "Glad Reagan dead," or Beyoncé using her immortality to ally herself with feminism. Or it can be subtle, as in Miles Davis soundtracking the cold life of 1970s New York, Peaches celebrating her body and sexuality, or the very existence of Anarchist musical collectives like Test Dept, Can, or Crass (not available on Spotify, sadly).

Music brings us together, and together they will fall. The conservative right still seems to believe they hold all the power, but 86 percent of this country is made up of young people, minorities, and women. The rich white man is a dead monkey in the United States. It's time they realize it, and either stand with us or move out of the way. We all have the right to flourish in this beautiful country of ours. We all have the right to be healthy and to improve our minds. We all have the right to feel protected by law enforcement, and not vilified by it. We all have the right to see the corruption, and to declare it so. We have the right. And if that right is continuously denied to us, we will fight for it. 

[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] The Best Rock N' Roll Records of 2015

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Rock music isn’t dead. It’s just diversified. While so many complain about pop music (which also turned out a slew of good to fantastic records this year) being the only sellable music there is, take a moment to consider the wider impact that the Internet has actually had. Yes, record sales are basically nil, but the Internet has also given exposure to bands that would have never had it otherwise. Bands like Kurt Vile and Deerhunter woud have surely been relegated to cult status at best had they not been able to use the platform of the Internet to become the stadium filling juggernauts they have become. If we had the web in the ‘80s, can you imagine what the impact would have been on Hardcore Punk or bands like Sonic Youth? Rock is a very loose descriptor to bands that primarily make use of guitars. But aside from that, there isn’t much commonalites between any of the bands on this list. I decided to run the gamut from folksy type stuff all the way to extreme metal. So much easier to just classify things as rock music, I don’t have the time to do a Best Metal of 2015, Best Punk of 2015, best neo noir wave of 2015. No no. Also should note that this playlist is composed of bands that had new music available of Spotify, keeping with the theme of this column. That leaves out all music on labels like S-S Records and Drag City. So let me just name these other records right quick: The Silence’s Hark the Silence, Joanna Newsom’s ‘Divers,’ and Purling Hiss’s ‘Weirdon.’ Reviews of the records below...

1. The Membranes, Dark Matter/Dark Energy track: In the Graveyard

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Out of all the noise and dub rhythm aping post-punk bands of the 1980s that came out of the United Kingdom, The Membranes were arguably the harshest. Consider where most of those bands are now: Gang of Four re-united to make a terrible record, PiL re-united to make terrible records, Mark Stewart of the Pop Group makes funk music, and the Fall is not what it used to be. The Membranes on the other hand released this viscerally explosive collection of new tunes, their first album since 1989; not sounding aged in the least bit. The violence of Dark Matter/Dark Energy is more physical than anything else going on in rock music. The Membranes were born out of Thatcher and the Cold War, and they are re-born out of the War on Terror. In The Graveyard finds the band building a funky collision of dub rhythm to an epic cacophonic crescendo. We need explosive and politically charged punk rock now more than ever.

2. Kurt Vile, b’lieve I’m goin down… track: I’m an Outlaw

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Kurt Vile has far outgrown his grungy folk Neil Young comparisons. Though Young will always be a touchstone for the Philadelphia-based artist, Kurt Vile’s interest in free jazz and improvisational music becomes more evident than ever on this record, despite the fact that it’s also his most accessible and beautiful set of songs. He has an ability to stretch hooks out into unknown realms, where it sounds pleasantly familiar while still taking the listener into new sonic arenas. He is one of our most important musicians.

3. Torres, Sprinter, track: New Skin

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Second times a charm for Torres, as the Brooklyn by way of Nashville artist propels her alarmingly beautiful lyrics in dense layers of feedback and white noise. She is easily one of the best writers in music right now, paying clear homage to scene forebears like PJ Harvey. But she still comes off as darker somehow, unafraid to let demons escape from her voice.

4. Bad Guys, Bad Guynaecology, track: World Murderer

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Have you ever wondered what the lush desert rock of the first Queens of the Stone Age record would sound like replacing Josh Homme’s dreamy lullaby singing voice with a death metal fart growl? Well here you go. And while that may read as a bad review for some, it’s not. Bad Guys make some of the easiest to love traditional rock music around, despite it really not being traditional at all. The band pays homage to all the great stoner rock of yore: from Clutch and Kyuss all the way back to Hawkwind. But the darkness that envelopes their sound makes for something quite contemporary.

5. Deerhunter, Fading Frontier, track: Snakeskin

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Bradford Cox was kind enough to map his influences on Fading Frontier for an article with Vulture this year. He has truly one of the most endearing network of tastes in the contemporary music world, a unique mix of high and low cultural references: R.E.M. to Pharoah Sanders, Laurie Spiegel to Japanese ceramics. But with Cox, you get the sense that his influences only form small pastiches of what must be a massive mind. Despite his great love of music and art, he hardly ever references them. Deerhunter is something all on its own, and Fading Frontier finds Deerhunter less gloomy but still quite strange, with melodies so rich they buzz in your head for eons.

6. Lightning Bolt, The Metal East, track: The Metal East

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Providence noise rock band Lightning Bolt has been doing its thing since 1994. In that time, their music has never waned in its brutality. It has gotten tighter however, and the drums and bass-using duo made use of the state of the art recording gear of their new label at Thrill Jockey on 2015 release The Metal East. The prog rock influences of the band have never been more apparent, using complex time signatures referencing Ruins and King Crimson to dizzy and captivate the listener. And they are still very, very fucking loud.

7. Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Multi-Love, track: Multi-Love

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Multi-Love, Ruban Nielsen’s confessional record detailing a failed stab at poly-amorous love, was the most heartbreaking personal piece of music released in 2015. From its opening keyboard line and falsetto cooing, you know this won’t end well. You feel Nielsen’s highs and lows in love and life, and few male songwriters in this era are as comfortable baring their ugly flaws.

8. Wolf Eyes, I am a Problem: Mind in Pieces, track: Asbestos Youth

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Around 2008 and 2009, I was into noise in a big way. Life was an endless quest for harsh noise and the extreme music that seemed to go with it: black metal, industrial, hardcore punk, etc.. Wolf Eyes was definitely my favorite, as they seemed to be relatably hard partying punk rock guys and their music veered towards guitar based rock music at times. They also looked really cool. But on I am a Problem, the Detroit legends have finally become the psychedelic caveman rock band they always were. Aligning themselves with Jack White’s Third Man records, we are entering a whole new phase to the Wolf Bros’ already storied career.

9. Protomartyr, The Agent Intellect, track: Dope Cloud

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Another Detroit band keeping the city’s monumental rock history alive, Protomartyr took its post-punk leaning sound to its next logical extension on the band’s second record, the Agent Intellect. Though the sound is arguably more accessible (for the better) on the album, its content is harsher. The first track finds the band’s gifted frontman and songwriter Joe Casey literally talking to the devil, and fear of mortality is stamped all over the record. Casey lost both of his parents during the making of this record, and the album tries to find a way to live with that knowledge without thinking about having to prepare for that big inevitable.

10. Algiers, Black Eunuch, track: Black Eunuch

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In a recent interview with the Wire, Jack Latham who records electronic music under the name Jam City (whose excellent record Dream a Garden was released this year, but that is for a different list) talks about the connection between goth post-punk music of the 1980s (from Bauhaus to the Cure) and the protest driven funk and soul music of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s (from Sly Stone to Curtis Mayfield). It’s all about the grooves, he says. He’s got a point, and Atlanta-based band Algiers directly explores that connection. Lead singer Franklin James Fisher is in the lineage of soul singers, and much of the rhythms can be traced towards Fela Kuti and afro-beat. But there is an industrial swarm underneath the funk. The resulting aggression makes for the most appropriate protest record of the year on Black Eunuch. Of all the experimental rock bands out there, Algiers feels very topical, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them get some mainstream attention.

11. Sleater-Kinney, No Cities to Love, track: No Cities to Love

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Corin, Carrie, and Janet came back this year, indeed. And No Cities to Love, the trio’s first record in 10 years, is on-par with anything in the band’s catalog. More in line with the 2005 release The Woods, the record references big time stadium rock n’ roll and catchy as fuck melodies, with all the politics and radical thinking we’ve come to love and know from them. St. Vincent said it is her favorite Sleater record of all time. Always listen to Annie.

12. Hey Colossus, Radio Static High, track: Radio Static High

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I have nothing against a band like say, Tame Impala, but I do object to the over-use of the term “psychedelic.” Psychedelic needs to confuse the senses and rattle the brain cells. Hence, I love the London-based band Hey Colossus. Piledriver riffis and piles of noise drown out what remain otherwise pretty formal song structures. Hey Colossus cites surprising influences like Cypress Hill and Fleetwood Mac, but they deliver the best transcendental metal you are likely to hear in 2015.

13. Leviathan, Scar Sighted, track: Breathless

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Yes, this is going to be one of those Woody Allen/Roman Polanski/R. Kelly situations. You can’t really write about musician and tattoo artist Jef Whitehead sans the violent crime that he was convicted of. I did agonize about whether or not I should include this on the list, but the fact is, there isn’t a whole lot of metal that I get excited over these days. Scar Sighted caught my attention early in 2015 and held it throughout the year. You listen to this thing and it’s absolutely mind-boggling that you are listening to the work of one guy. There are a fuckload of one man black metal bands out there, but almost none hit the orchestral heights that Scar Sighted floats at for the majority of its duration. This is a musical maturation for Whitehead, with the music hitting the dense and complex arrangements known for second wave black metal bands like Emperor. It’s not a lo-fi record, by any stretch of the imagination.

14. Waxahatchee, Ivy Tripp, track: Breathless

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Katie Crutchfield is becoming one of indie rock’s most revered songwriters, and Ivy Tripp is another massive leap forward for the Alabama-born artist. Ivy Tripp is an album grander in scope than its predecessor, partly due to Crutchfield bringing in a phenomenal crew of collaborative musicians. Despite the expansiveness of sound, Crutchfield still harnesses an intimacy rarely felt in contemporary music. She invites you to her world, and it’s beautiful.

15. Petite Noir, La Vie Est Belle/Life, track: Best

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Some performers just have it. Lou Reed had it. Patti Smith had it. Jimi Hendrix had it. Bowie had it. Bjork has it. Kanye has it. Petite Noir has it, in spades. That indefinable thing that elevates a performer beyond the scope of a talented musician and into the scope of being a symbol for all that is righteous in popular art. I saw Petite Noir perform at Afropunk Festival over the summer. Dressed stylishly in a black t-shirt and Chelsea boots, dancing and flailing around the stage, belting his uniquely soulful baritone voice. In five songs he won me over. This record was released to not much fan fare, possibly even getting less press than his EP from earlier in the year. That’s a shame because there is truly nothing that sounds like this. Petite Noir will unite fans of the Smiths and Fela Kuti and serve as the new favorite artist to people who love both. A singular artistic vision.

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Text and playlist by Adam Lehrer

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[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] The Best Hip Hop Tracks Of 2015

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I was speaking with Lily Mercer, Editor-in-Chief of the excellent UK-based Hip-Hop lifestyle magazine VIPER, about the idea of the “Golden Age of Hip-Hop.” This period, often referred to as the years between the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, has only been referred to as such in retrospect. When Wu Tang dropped 36 chambers and Biggie dropped Ready to Die and Nas dropped Illmatic and Public Enemy dropped ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ and Ice Cube dropped Amerikkkaz Most Wanted and 2pac dropped 2pacalypse Now, no critic said, “Fuck, I think we are living in the Golden Age of this Rap shit.”

That makes it even the more ironic now that people are so nostalgic for the last Golden Age that they are not realizing that we are living in our OWN GOLDEN AGE. I 100 percent believe that 2015 has been a landmark year for Hip-Hop. We have gotten massive releases from the world’s biggest stars: Drake, Future, Rocky, etc..; to experimental records from some of the game’s most genre-bending weirdos: Le1f, Milo, Oddisee, etc.

Vince Staples said in an interview this year that hip-hop is the most important contemporary art form. I tend to agree with him. Aside from the fact that spoken word poetry over music genre-bending beats is one of the most winning music formulas the world has ever seen, no other “artist” can really match the reach that rap stars have. Now that Hip-hop is starting to represent more than one type of background and perspective (Women, gays) it’s entering a new phase of sonic and thematic maturity.

Read up on the tracks below...

1. Earl Sweatshirt, I Don’t Like Shit I Don’t Go Outside, Track: "DNA"

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The Odd Future collective has outgrown each other. Frank Ocean has become a generational icon. Tyler has diversified into a human brand. And Earl Sweatshirt has become the best rapper on Earth. Sony really fucked Earl on this one, releasing I Don’t Like Shit I Don’t Go Outside on iTunes with no prior promotion. That meant that heads had a new Earl record they didn’t know about for a couple of days, and the record didn’t have near the cultural impact that it should have had. The record is sparser than his previous release Doris, but even more polished in the wordplay. He is most certainly a millennial rapper, heeding influence to everything from early Eminem and MF Doom. In a year fat with great rap records, this one I consistently went back to.

2. Drake, If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, Track: "Legend"

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Drake owned 2015 from February onward: Hotline Bling, Meek Mill destruction, OVO X Jordan. And it all started with this record. It seems like Drake lost some of his fan boys with this disc that found him spit a bit more aggressive and lacking some of the Cure-ish melancholy “sad king” sounds from his earlier records. But that got me thinking. I once had a journalism professor who worked for EW and he said the coolest celebs were always the most famous ones: your Robert Downey, Jr’s, Brad Pitt’s, Clooney’s. Guys that are so fucking famous they are just used to people freaking out on them and no how to be cool about it. If You’re Reading This… has Drake acknowledging that he’s untouchable. If he died, he’d be a legend. And fuck if that isn’t the hottest opening hook I’ve ever heard.

3. Dr. Yen Lo, Days with Dr. Yen Lo, Track: "Day 1125"

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Ka keeps the spirit of Brooklyn alive. With Night’s Gambit, he established himself as the logical successor to GZA as an MC that was equally meditative and streetwise. His whispered rhymes sometimes come at you more as a lullaby than street poetry. His Dr. Yen Lo project is collaboration with producer Preservation, perhaps previously best known for his work with Mos Def. The album finds them playing with the themes of the Manchurian Candidate. As with all Ka releases, it’s extremely minimal, pulling just the right bass line to keep a weed clouded head bopping ever so slowly. Day 11215 is a bit of an outlier on the album, with a beautiful guitar melody shimmering under Ka’s observations. It’s a shame that hip-hop like this will never be bigger.

4. Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly, Track: "The Blacker the Berry"

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Kendrick’s importance to contemporary culture has been discussed at length, and there’s not much for me to add to it. So I’ll talk about the music. When I first heard the new record, I respected that he pushing his sound outward to the land of free jazz and Parliament, but it wasn’t nearly as immediately addictive as m.A.A.d. city. That was probably a good thing. Not many artists get to international superstar status and get MORE experimental. Kendrick is bold. And this record grows on you until the point that you’ve realized that you listened to the damn thing over 20 times. The Blacker the Berry is still the best track, channeling the aggressive spirit of Kendrick’s hero Tupac Shakur and turning it inward. Kendrick is the protagonist and the antagonist.

5. Vince Staples, Summertime ’06, Track: "Jump off the Roof"

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I saw Vince Staples twice this year: once opening for Run the Jewels on the Williamsburg waterfront, and once at the Rocky/Tyler extravaganza. He was incendiary both times. No other artist, except for Run the Jewels most likely, right now is packing such a club banging intensity while espousing revolutionary thought. Staples is a wickedly smart kid and his interviews are as enjoyable to read, as his music is to listen to. He can also get personal with the best of them, as in ‘Jump of the Roof’ where he ponders whether or not his vices are taking over his life.

6. Future, DS2, Track: "The Percocet and Stripper Joint"

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I always have liked Future, without taking him overtly serious. That changed in 2014, with the Monster mixtape. He really has developed a singular style. After his split from fiancé Ciara he has started to question his inflated bravado. Celebratory songs of drugs and sex have turned into self-chastising tails of addiction and heartbreak. This was undoubtedly the biggest year of his career, between DS2 and What a Time to be Alive with Drake. I feel like a lot of heads dismiss Auto-Tuners. They shouldn’t. It’s an instrument, a tool. And Future has reached a new level of artistry with it at his arsenal.

7. A$AP Rocky, AT.LONG.LAST.A$AP, Track: "Electric Body (ft. Schoolboy Q)"

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Though Rocky is massively popular, he seems to get overlooked critically. On Long.Live.A$AP; perhaps deservedly so. But Rocky both went back to what we fell in love with him in the first place for, anthemic fashion gangsta club tracks, AND expanded his sound, with psychedelic guitar drenched beats and splashes of color. He’s still not the best rapper out there, but he’s gotten a fuckload better, and his music is just so fun to listen to. This was the best driving record of the year. Schoolboy Q and Rocky bring out the best of each other on Electric Body, if you can handle the unabashed misogyny.

8. Bodega Bamz, Sidewalk Exec, Track: "Bring em Out (featuring Flatbush Zombies)"

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The Flatbush Zombies and A$AP-affiliated Bodega Bamz, of Spanish Harlem, is an integral piece of the New York Hip-Hop puzzle, but everybody sleeps. ‘Sidewalk Exec’ pays homage to the horrorcore of yesteryear: Geto Boys, early Three 6 Mafia. Produced by V-Don, Sidewalk Exec plays out as both foreboding and at times terrifying.

9. Le1f, Riot Boi, Track: "Koi"

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People had been waiting for this one for a while, and Le1f did not disappoint. As openly gay man in hip-hop, there was bound to be automatic interest in Le1f from the art crowds, but he has won over hip-hop crowds almost just as easily. His flow is truly one of a kind, like a more flamboyant Skeptic. He also takes the trap genre to its logical conclusion, incorporating near-cheesy happy hardcore beats into his record that are banged so recklessly joyous that the sound is undeniable.

10. Milo, So the Flies Don’t Come, Track: "An Encyclopedia"

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Born of the Los Angeles alt-rap club, Hellfyre Club (is the Nick Tosches reference purposeful?), Milo released his most interested record yet with So the Flies Don’t Come. His beats are barely beats. His rhymes are nearly spoken word. But everything is so oft-kilter and chalk full of pop cultural references that everything comes together full circle. He delivers lines like, “People of Color coloring,” in an onslaught of repetition. His music gets under your skin.

11. Young Thug, Barter 6, Track: "Numbers"

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As he appears naked in a Sandy Kim photograph on the cover of his record, it’s clear that Young Thug is a pop star for the millennial art generation. It doesn’t matter that his lyrics don’t make sense. He oozes soul and conviction. He is hyper-conscious of image errs towards performance art. When he edits himself, he also has songs. The Barter 6 is Thug’s most realized effort yet. Kanye needs to get with this kid and teach him how to hone that zaniness.

12. Oddisee, The Good Fight, First Choice

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Like Rakim and A Tribe Called Quest before him, Oddisee is interested in the entirety of black American music history. His beats reference soul, jazz, and his hip-hop forebears. What I find most fascinating about him is his ability to weave his rhymes into complex melodies. His music sounds undeniably tight, much like a jazz collective. It’s a total interplay between voice and music.

13. Freddie Gibbs, Shadow of a Doubt, Track: "Narcos"

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Gangsta Gibbs’ 2014 collaboration with Madlib, Pinata, was my favorite hip-hop record of 2014. Then last week he dropped another late-year instant classic with Shadow of a Doubt. Gibbs is one of the only MCs in the world that could accurately be labeled as both a coke rapper and socially conscious. His tales of gangbanging aren’t exploitative. They are journalistic. He offers a window into a world in hopes that we can gain a better understanding of it. On Narcos, he tells us that his woman can no longer stand his lifestyle, but he is addicted to it. He loves it. The sentiment is shocking and sad. He also has the best voice in rap. Period. Gibbs forever.

14. Rich Homie Quan, If You Ever Think I Will Stop Going in Ask Rr, Track: "Stupid Me"

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How is Quan faring in the battle for Atlanta? Pretty good, I would say. His record If You Ever Think… revealed a new clarity in Quan’s vision. He is introducing a slew of new vocal techniques to pop music. He stays on beat more than Thug. He’s less experimental (if that’s the right word?). Not a perfect record, but promising nonetheless.

15. Meek Mill, Dreams Worth More than Money, Track: "Lord Knows (featuring Tory Lanez)"

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Meek fucking Mill. This should have been your year! From its first track Lord Knows, it was clear that Mill was out for blood. No opener this year set the pace for such a bone-shattering album. He just went out for the wrong blood. Drake proved untouchable when Mill challenged him earlier this year, stomping on Meek with two perfect diss tracks. That will be Mill’s 2015 story. But, if you just focus on this record, then Meek won. Plus he gets to have sex with Nicki Minaj. Life can’t be that bad, right? (better than mine anyways)

16. White Boiz, Neighborhood Wonderful, Track: "Main St. (featuring Earl Leon’ne)"

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White Boiz aren’t white boys. It’s actually a collaboration between MC Strong Arm Steady producer Star-Ra who came together for this Stones Throw-released Neighborhood Wonderful. The result is a record that channels the galactic spirit of Sun Ra as filtered through Flying Lotus and the meditative qualities of early Mos Def. Though experimental, the record is also quite accessible. It plays like a conversation between the two artists. A conversation that is important to listen to.

17. Quelle Chris, Innocent Country, Track: "Well Running Deep"

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Quelle Chris is 13 fucking records into his career, and people still have no clue who he is. He really doesn’t care though, “As artists and musicians, we lost a lot of shit,” he said in an interview with Hip-hopDX, “We sacrifice everything to barely make anything while giving our whole life to people.” Chris makes real hip-hop at the expense of financial security. Generally, he’s pretty funny. On Innocent Country, he gets contemplative. He contemplates why he does what he does and why he is who he is. He never fully realizes his own ideas, and that makes him more interesting to listen to. While we try and figure out what he’s talking about, Quelle is still trying to figure out what he’s trying to talk about. Humanity runs deep in his rhymes.

18. Future Brown, Future Brown, Track: "Talkin Bandz"

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I almost forgot about this one. I wasn’t that excited about this record when it came out, but Fatima Al Qadiri and crew grow on you. Warp Records artists, from OG gods Aphex Twin to modern abstract club cultists like Arca, have always paid heed to hip-hop music. Future Brown outwardly explores that connection. In the Internet culture, the kids who are out frying their skulls on Molly in packed clubs to dance music are often the same kids smoking weed in front of their computers all day listening to ‘90s hip-hop. Future Brown comes off as a conceptual project exploring that very mindset.

19. Travi$ Scott, Rodeo, Track: "Piss on ya’ Grave (featuring Kanye West)"

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I have so many friends that hate Travi$. In some ways, I see their points. He isn’t the strongest lyricist and he seems more ready-made for fame than he seems willing to develop as an artist. But I found myself seduced Rodeo. It’s interesting to finally hear the Yeezus effect loud and clear. Kanye West once accurately told Zayn Lowe that rappers are the new rock stars, from the sounds to the fame to the fashions. Scott is an immediate rock star. Piss on ya’ Grave, the Kanye collab that serves as the album’s strongest track, takes a Hendrix riff and reappropriates it for a rap star generation.

20. Big Sean, Dark Sky Paradise, Track: "All Your Fault (featuring Kanye West)"

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Sean is always going to be over-shadowed by his contemporaries. He lacks Kendrick's lyrical skill, Drake’s emotional resonance, and Kanye’s dominating personality. But when working with the right producers, he does pop-rap as good as anyone. Any other year Dark Sky Paradise would have been one of the biggest releases around. It’s undeniably listenable and a gigantic step up in quality from anything Sean has done previously. He’s also a million times better than J. Cole, but heads seem to hero worship J. Cole until no tomorrow while Sean is left in the G.O.O.D. Music shadow.

Bonus: Vic Mensa featuring Kanye West ‘U Mad Ha’

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Though neither artists had full-lengths in 2015, both had strong years. Mensa is the heir apparent to Kanye’s legacy: he channels the grit of the South Side of Chicago while reaching for higher art aspirations. In a recent video, he revealed himself as political, fighting for the justice of Laquan McDonald. And while Kanye had no new record, 2015 still was one of the biggest years of his life. It was the year that the fashion industry finally had to take him seriously, as he released his deconstructed Helmut Lang-channeling military garb with Adidas, and three of the best sneakers ever made. On top of that, he got an honorary doctorate and gave the best VMAs speech ever. On ‘U Mad Ha,’ both artists come together for what will surely prove to be an interesting 2016.

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Text and Playlist by Adam Lehrer

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