wish you a merry blissmas

jouissance


Migos - Culture II

 "Top Down on Da NAWF" - "Auto Pilot" - "MotorSport" -"Made Men" - "Movin' Too Fast" - "Work Hard" - "Narcos" -  "Emoji A Chain" - "Flooded" - "Notice Me" - "Supastars" - "CC"  

Migos - "Bosses Don't Speak"

Migos - "Cocoon"
Offset - "Red Room"


Hugh Hardie - "Nightingale"
Eartheater - "Inclined"
YG featuring 2 Chainz, Big Sean, Nicki Minaj - "Big Bank"
Rich the Kid - "Plug Walk"
Carns Hill featuring Dimzy, Monkey, R6 - "Waps Remix"
Mr Eazi featuring Giggs - "London Town"
Loski X Russ X Taze - "Olympic Chinging"
Lil Baby featuring Gunna - "Drip Too Hard"
Lil Yachty featuring Playboi Carti - "Get Dripped"
Playboy Carti featuring Gunna – “No Time”
Chief Keef featuring  Playboi Carti - "Uh Uh"
French Montana - "No Stylist"
Flipp Denero - "Leave Me Alone"
Sheck Wes  - "Mo Bambo"
Travis Scott - "Sicko Mode" (first section mainly)

plaisir

Proc Fiskal – Insula
Various - Sick Music 2018
Gazelle Twin - Pastoral
RP Boo - I’ll Tell You What!
Julia Holter - Aviary
Twenty One Pilots - Trench / live at Inglewood Forum
Moon Wiring Club - Psychic Spirit Show
beautify junkyards - The Invisible World of Beautify Junkyards



mouth music

Yoshinori Hayashi  - "Chember"
Taz & Meeks  - "Obviously"
Sophie - "Faceshopping"
ASAP Rocky – "Kids Turned Out Fine
Future in Jay Rock, Kendrick Lamar – “King’s Dead”
Chris Carter, "Inkstain"
Laibach, "The Lonely Goatherd"



this was tomorrow

Various - Electronic Music from York 
Catherine Christer Hennix - "The Well Tuned Marimba"
Jim Brown, Wayne Carr, Ross Barrett, etc -  The First See + Hear, Oh See Can You Say
Bernard Parmegiani – Memoire Magnetique vol 1
Various - Radiophonic Tape Compositions
William S. Fischer - Omen
Francois Bayle – Electrucs !
Luigi Nono -  Non Consumiamo Marx
Various, Groupe de Recherches Musicales

big up all haunty cru

A festive mix from the Man like Ian Hodgson, reminding me I've been remiss in not proclaiming the existence of a new Moon Wiring Club album, Psychedelic Spirit Show, which arrived at its customary time of year a few weeks ago and is ruddy excellent.



PSS ventures further down the marshy path towards total entropy - sunken grooves, gappy beats, wilting tones, voices like flickery lantern-lit faces receding into foggy formlessness.

Even though PSS doesn't sound anything like it, the origins of the album lie in a just-for-fun exercise in making "drum & bass / jungle / raveish / whathaveyou tunes", Ian informs. The resulting 25 or so tracks  - never intended for release, designed merely as a "meditational vibe / head-space cleaner process" - then became the mulch out of which grew a completely other project.  Approaching the source material as if doing a mix, Ian took bits from one track and put them together with bits from different tracks. "I split each track into 3 sections ~ rhythm / melody / effects (voice samples and that) then applied numerous knackering techniques and filters, and began to construct whole new shonky-hybrid tunes overlaying a melody from one track with the rhythm of another.  I called this process (wait for it) ‘unconscious compositioning’ -  a way to distance myself from the predictable choices that you inevitably make when composing music for a number of years, and then being able to surprise myself with choices I wouldn’t wholly ever have made."

Less loftily, Ian also described the manky making of the album as "a bit like getting the dust out of an antique carpet with one of those wicker tennis racquet carpet beaters".

In an analogy that really couldn't be further up my alley,  Ian further describes the final sequenced album as reminding him of  "a car tape I had in the 90s. On one side was Grooverider The Prototype Years and on the other a selection of 60s/70s light entertainment tunes. If you imagine that tape festering in a glove compartment for 20 years until both sides play together simultaneously at the wrong speed..."

The Dream Perception Machine mix is also splendid seasonal stuff with a loose "Psychedelic Telly" thematic. In an apt time-twisty metaphor, Ian describes the contents as "retroactive inspirations" - the kind of stuff that could have informed the making of the album, except they didn't.

Psychedelic Spirit Show, incidentally, is a vinyl-only release, purchasable here (UK), here (Europe), or here (rest of world). 

But - breaking with customary seasonal release rhythms - there looks likely to be a Moon Wiring Club compact disc in the spring. 

things to read

I've often wondered about the half-swallowed askew-vowel / eroded-consonants thing in pop today - most exemplified by Billie Eilish, whose surname almost spells/sounds like one of her own delicious, absurdly self-delectating, smudge-mouth choruses, but there's loads of other exponents, from Selena Gomez on "Good For You" to Let's Eat Grandma.  Where did it start, why did it start, what does it signify... Well, here's a really detailed genealogy and analysis of vowel-breaking (as some call it) by an academic whose blog Ace Linguist is dedicated to the technical and physical intricacies of voice-production. There are, like, diagrams of the vocal tract and shit!

I've noted before that the concept of "world-building" has become a bit of a cliche in musical and music-critical discourse. And elsewhere I've suggested that conceptronica might have reached a point of exhaustion (it's certainly exhausting).  Here's an interesting polemic by Nick James Scavo in the Tiny Mix Tapes end-year round-up: an essay that declares itself to be "Against Worldbuilding."  At the risk of simplifying an involved and world-size argument, Scavo targets the totalizing hubris and over-coding that goes into these grand projects: "the verbosity of sound as it exists in sonic world-building".