First Impressions 009: Community expectations, mosaic pop pulses, mutant techno, hedonistic Balearic and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello!

Music is an outlet, a nurturer, and a means of connection: no revelation there. Reading two fine pieces this week on two of the most individual and eccentric bands to come out of the United States—the Butthole Surfers, a Tone Glow Q&A with band mainstay Paul Leary, and Pitchfork’s Sunday Review for the Meat Puppets album II—made me wonder: what part does isolation play in music works that are truly out on a limb of ther own? Butthole Surfers came from San Antonio, Texas, the Meat Puppets’ hometown was Phoenix, Arizona. Both were far from any epicentre of underground American music - San Francisco, Washington, New York, Seattle. You could argue that it was an absolute lack of community, the very thing supposedly underpinning music scenes, that allowed these bands to thrive on creative terms they invented alone. Leary cites how the Buttholes operated as a unit:

“I’m not talented, and none of us in the Butthole Surfers were talented—there was just this complete lack of talent—but we understood what we had and what we could do and then did it anyway. We burned our bridges and toughed it out until we made it.”

In Stephan Kunze’s recent piece on Mark Hollis and Talk Talk, it was clear their removal from the circles where they made their name and synth-pop hits led to the creation of two albums now universally declared as utterly unique creations, their making the stuff of myth. I say myth because their actions seem less common now, confined to history as an instance of rare alchemy. Is it rare because we are now simply all too connected? As connection became commodified, what did that mean for music, along with our interest, even tolerance of something out of the box? 

Nancy Baym’s 2018 book, Playing to the Crowd Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection exemplifies “how bands provide grounds for participatory communal experiences that transcend them and how inseparable those communal experiences are from commercial markets”. This is both resource-heavy and strategic - while Talk Talk did have big budgets, both the Buttholes and Meat Puppets were devoid of either.

So, what do community expectations mean for music making? I’m not sure and I’m still thinking about it, but I’m also not sure I have heard anything quite like Butthole Surfers, Meat Puppets or Talk Talk for some time.
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OK, let’s go:

Transcorporeal Portal - Slowfoam: The first words that came to mind listening to Berlin-based Madelyn Bird’s fascinating project were ‘The Hissing of Digital Summer Lawns’. Is she a techno-optimist who also believes in the healing power of nature? Joni Mitchell may not be an influence on Bird’s music, but my modern-day tweak on her classic album’s title fits. Bird’s lush creations are wild and fertile. In her soundworld, the hissing transforms into vaporous streams of virtual mist, draping over these diffuse but interconnected pieces like a canopy. Below lies a space for roaming, offering a choose-your-own-adventure journey, though this dreamweaving is undercut with the pulse of our present tense. Intense sonic details — washes of field recordings, synths set variously to trickle, rumble, or soar, and often at once, guitars on delay, and spoken word, to name a few strands — give rise to a hallucinatory, humid air summoning ecological breakdown. These pieces reverberate like echoes that volley back and forth between synthesised and real states, seeking common ground. Transcorporeal Portal suggests we’re in urgent need to get there.

Quantum Web – Discovery Zone: Berlin-based JJ Weihl’s accomplished new album rides the line between perky and airy, full of gleaming, mechanised pop pulses with the same future dreaming pioneered by Yellow Magic Orchestra. Weihl’s layered vocals are set to caramelise, gliding atop kaleidoscopic synth melodies that move with the soothing energy found on any classic 80s New Age cassette.  I’m not sure Weihl makes music for its healing properties, but I’m feeling cleansed.     

Cinnte Le Dia - Hanno Leichtmann & Valerio Tricoli: This fearsome duo returns, mulching tape, percussion and electronics into mutant minimal techno that devolves towards chaotic art damage. The pair rummage around their brutal sense of syncopation with bristling flashes of cracked textures, drone sweeps and bugged-out micro-loops. In their expert vision, this relentless outpouring is more energising than palpitating – a work that doubles down on the depths of the dark and emerges with vital signs.    

Live at Can Rudayla, Ibiza – Greg Foat: Happily marooned in a 1970s vortex of jazz fusion, library music and crime movie soundtracks, this steaming live set propels the British keyboardist and composer’s cinematic expanse and cosmic outreach with just an analogue synth and drum machine. Wandering freely with his keyboard constellations and a none-too-subtle oceanic theme in taking this Ibiza poolside jam widescreen, Foat settles into hedonistic Balearic mode that may have any dusk cocktail set doing a doublethink on what it means to fly high.    

Slug Beat – Sug: Cued this one immediately after the estimable Philip Sherburne tipped it as a stunner in his essential Futurism Restated. There’s an exhilarating savagery to these shuddering beat excursions. They punch their way out with lysergic abandon, saturated with choppy percussion ticks and grinding guitars that stretch out with Afro-rock and highlife feels. While whole thing riffs and rips on a techno template, in some instances it’s tempting to cast it as some kind of industrial-weight trip-hop. Then again, it’s as elastic as it is hefty, both bendy and bent.

Super-Cassette - Dabrye: A creamy and elegant beat tape from this  expert mood-setter, where he lays it down real slow. Low-lit organ funk licks usher the cool shuffle of these tracks along, keeping a deceptively easy pace save for a little 80s arcade-game electro towards the end. Within its classy and slick way, Dabrye’s quiet invention makes this hum on another level.

CALIsthenics – CALIsthenics: One for the old-school heads: CALIsthenics teams up Chicago rappers MC Juice and All Natural with California’s Georgia Anne Muldrow on production for a meeting of socially conscious and higher-consciousness hip-hop. Muldrow’s beats swap her trademark paisley patterning for punch, tight with upfront funk moves to match the direct wordplay. No shade on this being a straight-up throwback – hearing Del The Funky Homosapien pop up seals that status - as they make it count.

Thanks for reading.
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Andrew Khedoori is the curator of Longform Editions.
First Impressions visual by Mark Gowing.