The Letter M

Category: The Warehouse Continuum

  • One Year of Music – TWC 52

    One Year of Music – TWC 52

    As of last Thursday, it’s been one year of the Warehouse Continuum on Portland Radio Project. It’s actually been a year and three months if we’re being strict, but this week was the 52nd new episode of the show. That’s a year’s worth of weekly shows, a year’s worth of music. Of course I’ve been on ~the radio~ for longer, I’m coming up on five years in fact, but I feel like I’ve grown as a DJ so much in the last year and change that it’s worth making the distinction between the former and current iterations of my show, even beyond the name change.

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  • Spring Flings and Rocks That Sing – TWC 45

    I’m trying out a bit of a different format for the blog post this week. Instead of a song-by-song mini review and breakdown it’ll be more of a free-flowing meditation on the playlist – though I’m still hoping to get more review-like writing on this platform. Part of the intention of the blog in the first place was to experiment more with form and practice to find a style of writing that works for me, so don’t be too surprised if the flux continues over the coming weeks. It also removes some of my anxiety about repeating tracks – I can enjoy them without having to find yet another way to review them! I am going to make up the weeks I missed by the way, that doc continues to fill out as we speak.

    Last week, Thursday the first of May, we debuted a new format on Portland Radio Project. Instead of (must-listen) Thursday nights being three shows back to back, my co-presenters Jonny, Patric and I pooled our timeslots and our playlists to create one huge free-flowing four-hour party. I had a blast – we had a blast – riffing off of each other’s selections and branching out from our usual sound. I played Fievel is Glauque! And Squid! And Lucy Dacus! And the Minutemen! It was, to borrow the parlance of my usual genre lane, an excellent b2b2b.

    I showed up at 5:30 with a nearly three-hour “short”list of songs, but outside of my opening cut (Justice – Genesis, obviously) I didn’t plan for my sets at all. I played off the room, off of Jonny and Patrick’s cuts, off of themes and lyrics and artists from two sets before. It reminded me, in the best way, of sharing a Spotify session on a long road trip. A song reminds you of another song so you add it to the queue, but there are already five songs that will play before it – each of which reminds you and your friends of three other songs, which must then be queued, which extends the queue further, which dissolves the original seed into a spiraling periodic network of in-jokes and throughlines. I’m not much of an instrumentalist, but I think a good back-to-back is the DJ’s version of a good improvised jam session.

    So now, a week later, I sat down to playlist with the memory of improvisation still on my fingertips. I knew I had some new releases to play — that Wisdom Teeth comp really is as good as I was hoping — but beyond that, I had no plan. So I gritted my teeth, said yes and to myself, and improvised. The first three tracks of this playlist were planned in advance, the rest stitched together with enthusiasm and vibes from my library on the studio computer. I hope it was fun for the audience at home to listen to, because I know it was fun to make.

    The unfortunate side effect of this approach is that I played a lot of repeat tracks from earlier episodes this week, something I don’t love to do on my shows. I’m going to keep that in mind when I go to playlist next week’s show, but I want to retain the core of this week’s approach. Some of my best shows, both in the Warehouse Continuum and the previous incarnation Rants and Raves, have now been wholly improvised. I improvise when I mix, why shouldn’t I improvise for radio?

    Some notes on tracks for this week:

    FTP Doctor & Tenzia – Haus

    I don’t have much to say about the possibly legitimate minimal revival, partially because a lot of words have already been written but mostly because the more I read about it the more charged emotions I stumble into. Just look at the comments on the discogs page for Audion’s “Mouth to Mouth.” Regardless, there’s a lot to like about the new Pattern Gardening comp on Wisdom Teeth, a label I enjoy more and more every week.

    It’s a beautiful spring in Portland this year. I’m writing this from my backyard, surrounded by trees, watching lazy clouds drift across a warming sky. We’re too close to summer to listen to chilly, crystalline music. FTP Doctor and Tenzia allay my concerns by peppering their tracks with Metro Area or Patrick Holland-esque electric piano chops, an essentially spring sound in my mind, and let their percussion flit about rather than settle too close to perfect regularity.

    They also deploy what I’m fairly certain is crinkled cellophane in the background. Those samples, along with the mouth sounds that mix up the back end of the track, harken to things like the Matmos catalog or Iz & Diz’s “Mouth”: genuinely good songs based on borderline gimmicky sampling techniques. There’s echoes of that ethos in recent work from Polygonia and even Virtual Riot – something to keep an eye on.

    Villalobos – Easy Lee

    I recently went back and read Resident Advisor’s top 100 albums of the 2000s, a list topped by Ricardo Villalobos’ Alcachofa (and, confusingly to me at least, Metro Area’s self-titled at #2 ABOVE Discovery and Untrue – but getting annoyed and nitpicking rankings just lets the list win). This is where I decided I didn’t know enough to get opinionated about minimal yet because good god it is ALL over this list, to the point of receiving mentions in non-minimal blurbs as a point of comparison. My familiarity with minimal is entirely retrospective. I’ve listened to and enjoyed the stuff that gets held up as the tentpoles of the genre (particularly this and Luomo’s Vocalcity), but I didn’t realize the saturation that minimal seems to have had at its peak. I can have my song-by-song taste, but I’ll leave the grand historical context arguments to Ben Cardew or Shawn Reynaldo.

    Removed from context, I like “Easy Lee” quite a lot. The vocoder loop the track is built around is geologically dense with texture and variation and the spelunking percussion around it creates sparkling facets of distraction that pull you in every direction just long enough to receive the full wallop when the vocals return.

    A lot of the more recent music that I’ve credited for merging the organic and the electric mask their digital origin with woody sound design or field recorded atmospheres, but “Easy Lee” feels like it cuts to the core of the computer and lets the minerals inside sing, a silicon chorus with an orchestra of copper tracings.

    Fievel is Glauque – Days of Pleasure

    More great spring music! I played this one on the Thursday Night Mixmash, and I snuck it in again here even though it falls well outside the typical scope of the show. There’s something addictive about the outro on this song, but I cannot for the life of me find the origin of the sample. Let me know if you know it, I’d love to watch whatever old adventure movie I assume it’s clipped from.

    Cousin – ~O.V.O~

    There are, frankly, TOO MANY good shows in Portland this Saturday. Cousin is playing an all-nighter at Process, DJ Stingray 313 and Kode9 are playing at Spend The Night’s 10th anniversary party and Bristol weirdo Mun Sing is playing a free show at Barn Radio, all of which I’d likely attend were they on separate weekends. How could I possibly choose? Well, it seems like the universe may have chosen “none of the above” for me, since my knee is currently far too sprained to think about dancing for multiple hours on concrete floors. I might see if I can post up in a corner at Process and chair dance to Cousin’s ambient worlds, but that feels like a disappointing compromise. Alack.

    Full tracklist:

  • TWC 39

    DJ Koze – Pick Up (12″ Extended Disco Version)

    “Pick Up” is a long-time favorite of mine. I was in high school when it came out, and I remember my friend running up to me on the sidewalk to tell me about this new song he’d heard that was just like old Daft Punk. I don’t think “Pick Up” sounds too much like our favorite French robots, but that reminder is part of the trick of it. A Daft Punk version of “Pick Up” would be shorter, tighter, trickier. A version by either solo robot might even be a stomper. Koze is content to tease out the loops to their breaking point, pushing the 12” disco version to a 10-minute runtime that earns every second. “Pick Up” hits an underexplored middle ground in filter house, halfway between the rollicking disco rave-ups of Cassius or Modjo or, yes, Daft Punk, and the moody, minimal deep house loopers of Pepe Bradock or Moodymann. Instead of throwing your hands in the air or putting your head down, the song asks you to float along with it, to soar if you want to. “Pick Up” is music to be listened to outside. “Pick Up” is music to dance to at a picnic on a summer evening with a good breeze going. “Pick Up” is sunset music, blissful or melancholic depending on your angle, to help you drink in the last of the sun’s warmth on a lovely day.

    Park Hye-Jin – Like This

    “Like This” is a great example of the woozy, pop-tinged sensibility of lo-fi house, a sound understandably maligned for its soft Drakeish mediocrity that is nonetheless tied to some of the best low-key grooves of the 2010s. I almost wish “Like This” was twice as long, because despite its similar chilled tones it’s much denser than “Pick Up” in a way that feels claustrophobic when the two are so closely juxtaposed. Still, Park’s self-sampled vocals and the fuzzy sound palate evoke the cozy solitude of bedroom pop nicely, and the track brings deep house sonics to pop structures much better than the big room “deep house” sound peddled by Tchami and co. around the same time.

    Cousin – tooth 4 tooth

    I might overuse aqueous imagery on this blog, but maybe I just blog about watery music. “Tooth 4 Tooth” sounds like a rainy day at a lily pond, like synthesized Monet. We’re not fully underwater, but we’re pondering wetness to be sure. I don’t think I’ll ever get enough of Wisdom Teeth’s Club Moss compilation (a perfect name by the way) and its genius stroke of asking ambient-leaning producers to make uptempo music, because the hybrid of the sound palate and the composition makes for an album of very welcoming music. It had been a while since I last listened to Club Moss before I plucked “Tooth 4 Tooth” for this week’s tracklist, but jumping back in felt like I had never stopped rinsing it. I’m at a point of my life where I’m realizing how much time ahead of me I have to listen and read and watch, how much art has yet to exist, and part of that realization is the dawning knowledge that I’ll get to listen to my favorite albums again far off in the future as a different person entirely. I don’t know what I’ll think of Club Moss and “Tooth 4 Tooth” when I’m 60, but I hope it stirs up good memories of putting it on repeat the summer of 2024.

    Jorg Kuning – Mercedes

    Like I said last week, this is a pro-Jorg blog. Most of his releases that I’ve heard thus far tend towards the bloopy, modular end of things, but Mercedes turns to samples to create an experience remarkably reminiscent of There Is Love In You-era Four Tet. Despite the resemblance, the track is covered with Kuning’s fingerprints in the form of squiggly zips and squelches that flutter through the background of the track like lightning bugs. “Mercedes” also leans more towards the organic, building its sound over a base of woody, rounded drums. I hope this track can build up some steam with DJs, because even when I listen to it alone I can already hear layers of other tracks fading in on top and chasing its rhythms around the dancefloor to create something new.

    Four Tet – Unicorn

    “Unicorn” arguably finds its true form as an extended live version but the original is still a thrilling little crescendo of bleeps and bloops. The patterns sound generative to me (in a “randomized sequencer” or “Brian Eno” way, not a ChatGPT way), a reminder of what Four Tet does best – bring live-band looseness to unmistakably electronic music. Even on his most digital-sounding tracks like this one, there’s a sense of performance, a feeling that the music has been played rather than programmed, a suspicion that the next time you listen the beeps might be in a subtly different place. Sometimes that’s literally true – the digital and vinyl masters of some Four Tet tracks were recorded on different passes of midi randomizers, meaning they are genuinely different performances of the same piece. Other times it’s just built-in looseness, the parts not quite fitting together as tightly as they could to great effect. It’s thrilling every time. “Unicorn” also features another signature Four Tet trick, the third act switch-up, teasing a new idea just as the piece fades to a finish. I hope the ideas never run out, but even if he never made another track Four Tet would have one of the best catalogs in dance music, ever.

    Piezo – TB2 (with K-LONE)

    Listening to “TB2” is like sitting in the eye of a very gentle tornado, floating on your armchair listening to the soft synth arpeggio at the center of the track while drums and swooping effects swirl around you. It’s a very pleasant experience, a standout on an EP full of standouts, and a collaboration that feels like an equal distribution of style. I might play a lot of watery music, but this is another classical element entirely, an air track. “TB2” keeps you moving with subtle shifts in atmospheric pressure. It’s circulatory music.

    Djrum – Three Foxes Chasing Each Other

    Between Skee Mask and Djrum, we’re in a boom period for savantish IDM-adjacent producers. Resident Advisor has already taken the first steps towards canonization with their Gabriel Szatan-penned profile of Mr. Mask from last November, and conversation around both artists tends towards the reverent hushed tones usually reserved for people like Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Jeff Mills. The two are mirror images in a way. Skee makes a little bit of everything, from trip hop to jungle to dub to uncut techno stompers, and his mixes cede priority to his productions. Even when his tracks are undeniable club-ready bangers they feel like they’re for someone else to play, so that he can go back to the studio and make more music. Unlike the reclusive German, Djrum has largely made his name as a DJ (he’s playing in Portland next month – look forward to that set report here) who also releases bafflingly complex IDM tracks clearly informed by his classical training. Even with mixing skills that spin heads almost as much as records, tracks like “Three Foxes Chasing Each Other” feel an ocean away from mixability, the skittering, footwork-inspired drums over kalimbas and shakuhachi flutes(!) evoking Jlin more than DJ Manny. Add in the oil painted cover and galleristic titles and the overall effect is of a musician aspiring to fine art. I’m not opposed to the elevation of club music to museum levels, in fact that’s half the point of this blog, but I hope that we’ve learned our lesson from the first wave of IDM – don’t call a genre “Intelligent Dance Music.” Djrum and Skee are undeniably talented and deserve to be celebrated, but it feels dangerous to prioritize the elevation of the individual at a time when the economics of the music industry already threaten the continued existence of communities, the most basic building blocks of dance music.

    Tristan Arp – Life After Humans

    I described “Life After Humans” on air as “glitchy ambient,” which may sound like an oxymoron but I challenge you to deny it once you hear the song. “Life After Humans” is ambient via cocoon, weaving microsamples and textures together to form an organic sonic fiber that blankets your ears in grass and vines. It’s similarly dense to “Three Foxes Chasing Each Other” but the two cuts use their complexity to distinctly different ends, one chasing and unsettling, the other soothing and supportive. The fourth(!) Wisdom Teeth release on this week’s list is also the second 10 minute song, and it’s a capable bookend to Koze’s opener. “Life After Humans” is similarly sunny, but its warmth is that of a morning rather than an evening. The light in this song is not fading but nourishing, a source of sonic photosynthesis for the soul.

  • TWC 38

    Breaka – Dream Sequence 19

    “Dream Sequence 19” is the highlight of Breaka’s new album Aeoui for me (at least until I listen to “Yolo Bass Rewind” a few more times). I don’t love the record as a whole, excellent cover notwithstanding. It feels caught in the middle of Surgeon-y UK Techno, East Coast club, and something altogether spacier. “Dream Sequence 19” excepts itself by leaning further than any other track into the dreamy soundscape mode the name suggests, without losing sight of dancefloor ambitions. The synths sound like they were put through a thunder tube, the drums are well-mixed and well-programmed, and the whole track has just enough off-kilter echoing shuffle to put you off your balance. It’s not that it’s undanceable, but it’s just far off enough from the peak danceability of UKG or broken beat that I would have to take a second and recalibrate when the tune drops in all the way – and I love that. “Dream Sequence 19” wants you to dance, but you must first answer its questions three.

    Call Super – Naive Step One

    If Pioneer made DJ decks that needed to be cared for like Tamagotchi, this song would come pre-loaded. “Naive Step One” is a quirky little stepper that’s happy to meander. There is something anthropomorphic about the leads to this one, and combined with the ‘90s jungle-esque seascape chords the whole effect is something like an animalian slice of life. This is the cut that the bugs are getting down to at the watering hole, the soundtrack to a mystical woodland rave-up without a human in sight. I’m excited about the idea of creating small utopian spaces as artistic expression, and this song just about does that all on its own.

    Jorg Kuning – Skudde

    Jorg Kuning might be my new favorite producer. Skudde is the second single off his new EP Mercedes, coming soon on Wisdom Teeth, and it sounds like someone ran Royksopp’s “Eple” through a hair crimper. Kuning is apparently a modular synth wizard (the proper term for anyone who can wrangle a full song out of those beasts), which makes his music even more pleasing because this sounds like music that should come out of a mess of tangled patch cables placed by a cackling madman. Kuning also plays live sets, or at the very least hybrid dj sets. I hope one day to see him pop up from behind the decks a la the taken-down Gesaffelstein Boiler Room moment with a mad grin as a shower of cables announces his presence like pyrotechnics.

    Giorgio Maulini – Freeyeyo

    FM wobble might be the acid 303 bassline of the 21st century: addictively tweakable, extremely listenable, and starting to run out of new ideas. Still, the 303 is as immortal as it is because the thing is fun as hell for producers and for listeners, and “Freeyeyo” certainly taps into that joy. I stumbled into this one at the wonderful Passenger Seat Records a few weeks ago, and picked it up again when my open decks set was unexpectedly extended and I ran out of records to play. Turns out it’s also fun as hell to mix with, and at that point I just couldn’t say no. The wobble in “Freeyeyo” is actually nestled fairly low in the mix, which helps it avoid many of the cliches of tweak-synth music. Structurally, the whole thing is more like a deep house collage song than a pure one-liner tweak song, with good swingy drums and a nice funky bass to hold the track together while the tweaks skitter around on the top. There are 303-esque bloops in here too, which make the track more of a historical document than it was probably intended to be – past and present, coexisting.

    Björk and Rosalia – Oral (Olof Dreijer Remix)

    I am, unfortunately, a Björk neophyte. I’m working on it, taking my time, album by album. I don’t want to blow through her whole discography at top speed without giving myself time to sit with the music; I don’t want to miss the trees for the forest. A friend recently gave me a guided tour through some of her music videos and I was absolutely blown away, to the point where I may have to start from the beginning with a wider net to not miss a thing — some, like “Triumph of a Heart” are pure fun, others, like “All is Full of Love” and “Mutual Core” feel essential to the songs themselves. Björk has been ahead of her time for most of her career, and dance music might just now be catching up. She dominates the artificial-natural sound around which this whole episode is built.

    Going back to some of her earliest works she confidently embodies a strain of futurism that requires the natural world rather than rejecting it. Even in the “All is Full of Love” video, which depicts a purely machine scene, the core emotion is a physical, human love. The video for the original version of “Oral” stars deepfakes of Björk and Rosalia, who donated all of their income from the recording to environmentalist efforts in Iceland. You can find that interplay of humanism and environmentalism with wary futurism in the visual design of the Portland party Osmosis, in Montreal’s Naff Recordings, in the work of Davis Galvin and Doctor Jeep and Djrum and so many others at the forefront of dance music.

    That intersection is in the sound, too. Olof Dreijer flips the relatively slow original into a shuffling, danceable track that sounds like it was grown rather than made. The woody, clomping drums make a fertile soil for squiggly pea-shoot synth lines to explode from and swirl around Björk and Rosalia’s vocals, chopped from their balladic structure into hooky snippets that reverberate around the space and push the song forward. Björk’s music at its best feels like it taps into some primordial sonic ooze, long forgotten but remembered in our DNA. Like Björk herself says in “The Modern Things,” I think this remix has always existed, it’s just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment.

    Nicolas Vallée – New New York

    “New New York” is the A side to a legendary B side, to the point that I’m not sure I’d ever heard the track when I bought the record in 2017. I am of course referring to DJ Falcon and Thomas Bangalter’s edit of Valerie by Steve Winwood, the original in a cascade of versions eventually resulting in Eric Prydz’ chart-topper “Call On Me” – or at least it would be if that version had ever seen a release. As far as I can tell the version on my copy is a reconstruction of that original edit by a Swedish duo called (unfortunately) Retarded Funk, who are not credited on the release at all — and neither is Vallée. “Call On Me” is fun but “New New York” is just as good and frankly more interesting. It trades the bombastic arena chorus for a more understated sample loop cut from Rafael Cameron’s 1981 electro song “Funtown U.S.A.,” but the defining features are the micro-samples of funk keyboards that Vallée uses as punctuation between bars. I love a well-done pause, and the cheeky retro synth wiggle intensifies the impact. Imagine if Eric Prydz had lifted the A side rather than the B, and we had the “Pryda Wiggle” instead of the Pryda Snare…

    Harry Romero – Nice to Meet You

    …ok, this one is just straight up goofy. Roman Flugel was kind enough to ID this for me after I haplessly described it to him as “built around saxophone one shots on the same note with different tonalities.” Well, that saxophone was actually a kazoo, which only raises the goof factor. Good song structure and a genuinely well-deployed bassline save this one from falling straight into the novelty pit, and it sounded legitimately good on the club speakers at Process. I can’t say this is one I’ll play frequently, but it did make me crack a huge grin on the dancefloor which is a success in its own way.

    Danny Daze & Jonny From Space – Sweet Spot Radio

    Sweet Spot Radio is a track with international bona fides: label Craigie Knows is from Scotland, Danny Daze is from Miami, and Jonny From Space is from space. The combination of UK dubstep and woody drums is potent and well executed here, though I can’t help but feel that the names involved with this release could have turned out something more interesting. As is, it’s a fun track that I’d be happy to play in a set but I’m not chomping at the bit to hear.

    Doctor Jeep – Pula Perereka

    This inclusion was a literal angle on my part. Artificial and organic? Why not a gleaming metallic Doctor Jeep track that samples a frog? As the synthesis in dance music gets more and more complex it almost horseshoes back around to sampling, so why not close that loop all the way and come back to nature? This is a hard hitting track with no nonsense drums and top shelf sound design, but it’s not afraid to dip a toe into a goofy sample and let it breathe without dominating.

  • TWC 37

    CFCF – Life is Perfecto

    There’s an air of fellow French Canadians M83 on CFCF’s album Memoryland even though CFCF never hits their arena rock highs, a smeared nostalgia that fizzles out of view if you try to pin it down. This song is like jungle-flavored La Croix. It’s a lovely ambient-ish indie rock-ish bubbler with juuuuust enough chopped breaks to remind you of full-fledged jungle programming. Jungle is only a few years older than the sound Simon Reynolds termed hauntology (“jungle” pre-drum and bass peaks around 1994-95, Boards of Canada came out with Music has the Right to Children in ‘98), but CFCF takes the full hauntological lens to jungle drums and indie rock guitars to great effect. It works so well because it isn’t jungle as we know it, it’s not a young producer making tracks to fit seamlessly into youtube rip of a Peshay set. It’s jungle’s ghost smoothied down with all of CFCF’s myriad touchpoints into something new.

    LCD Soundsystem – North American Scum

    I’ve been kind of taken with LCD Soundsystem recently. The band has an absurd amount of legit hits, from every phase of their career no less. Still, there’s a not-quite settled feeling listening to them, like a relationship you’re worried might be more on the rocks than you realize. I think I’m drawn to them because they feel like a band to whom there is no analog in 2025. Despite James Murphy sometimes seeming like the only member their music is unavoidably band music. Despite structuring like a rock band and releasing what are effectively punky pop songs they are undeniably a dance act. Despite a fine layer of smarm they are essentially sincere in their lyrics. The closest contemporary band I can think of is Squid, who are most definitely a rock band with little dancefloor aspiration beyond a good thrash. I don’t know if conditions exist to spawn a new LCD Soundsystem, nor do I think identifying as “a new LCD Soundsystem” would be an artistically successful choice (hello, the Dare), but a new act who learns their lessons could be a breath of fresh air.

    Fontaines DC – A Hero’s Death (Soulwax Remix)

    Life ain’t always empty! I can’t tell if Fontaines DC are sincere with their silver linings positivity on this track, but I appreciate it nonetheless. I’ve yet to figure out the hype around Fontaines DC, but I can’t deny that “A Hero’s Death” is good in both versions. Fontaines’ original hits higher highs, Soulwax slows it down to find a smoother and more mixable groove. “Buy yourself a flower every hundredth hour” is a great line AND a great piece of advice, and I’m always down for a Soulwax remix — speaking of groups that make the most out of the borderland of rock and rave.

    The Femcels – He Needs Me

    Stunningly, this is the Femcels’ debut single. From what I can tell, the duo (Gabriella and Rowan) are London-based college students and fashion models (Vogue, The Face, etc.) who are internet-pilled enough to name themselves “The Femcels” but also internet-poisoned enough to be neocities kids with an endearingly cryptic social media presence. Whatever their lives are like though they have announced their presence with an absolute scorcher of a track. Every single part of “He Needs Me” is an absolute blast to listen to, from the start-and-stop rave-up of the punky, chiptune-y instrumentals to the joltingly sincere bridges to the chant chorus but still none of those hold a candle to the jaw-dropping insanity of the verses. Lyrically, “He Needs Me” is a tragedy. Delusion tears us from the highest highs (“He needs me! Aaaa!”) to a fragile baseline portending total collapse (“I’m just crazy / You’re just crazy / yeah nice”) via some of the most comical bars ever put to tape. “Sometimes I trip over in front of him, because it humanizes me.” “He must be really busy like, eating burgers and stuff.” “I know that he’s had like, so much skateboarding to do recently.” “He Needs Me” takes you from losing your shit dancing one second to losing your shit laughing the next. I cannot wait to hear what the Femcels put out next, because this is one of the best debuts I’ve ever heard.

    The Rapture – Echoes (DFA Remix)

    You know what else that Femcels cut is? Honest-to-goodness dance punk. With all due respect to the Rapture, this is a Femcels blog now. Sorry. “He Needs Me” was the catalyst of this show, the tracklist was built with it at the core. The Rapture are a very different kind of dance punk (unmistakably New York, unmistakably DFA, unmistakably 2000s) but they and their DFA affiliates are the last time I can remember music that was so dance and so punk. Much to my delight the DFA remix takes “Echoes” to full disco jam territory, something that the Femcels have not touched yet but I have hope they will in time. To break away from the central theme of the blog (scandal!) – I picked up this record over the weekend from the excellent Speck’s Records and Tapes in North Portland to further my light delusion of becoming a vinyl DJ, and I have to applaud DFA records for their commitment to only pressing good records. Maybe it shouldn’t be that surprising given James Murphy’s commitment to the form as expressed via Despacio Sound System, but even this label-filler three track remix compilation is pressed to heavy, solid vinyl. I have full albums that cost 7 times the price that are on pringles compared to the brutalist slabs I have from DFA. Shoutouts to good quality control.­

    Babymorocco – France

    Alright enough about music formats, back to the REAL focus of this blog: endless yammering about “He Needs Me” by the Femcels. Did you know “He Needs Me” isn’t actually the Femcels first credited song on Spotify? No, that honor goes to the intro from Babymorocco’s recent album Amour, in which they team up with iKeda and “totally not dimes square 100 gecs” duo Frost Children to bring Babymorocco across the threshold from the mundane world into the rave world a la Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. I had put off listening to Babymorocco for whatever reason (most likely his stage persona, which we will get to) but I had to do the research on my new favorite band, and don’t you know it I was sleeping heavy on Mr. Morocco. Amour is a deeply fun record that draws from the same hyperbolically sexualized aesthetic as Babymorocco’s social media presence (I genuinely don’t think I’ve seen a photo of him where he’s not flexing. Combine that genuinely impressive muscle mass with his facial expressions and puzzling choice in glasses and the overall effect is something like a college freshman who arrived on campus and realized he had 24/7 gym access for the first time in his life. His commitment to the bit is commendable, even if it did lead me to [foolishly] write him off as fratty the first time I saw him). “France” ended up as the selection for the tracklist largely because I could play it on the radio with minimal censorship, but the Justice-inflected synth work and goofy lyrics about taking the Flixbus to the title country succeed on their own terms.

    Alice Longyu Gao – Kanpai

    “He Needs Me” also reminds me of the sizzling hyperpop scene that reached a creative apex in 2021, particularly the melting pot of neon oddballs who revolve around the Goop House collective. Alice Longyu Gao is the most energetic personality to emerge from that moment, both on record and in her captivating stage presence. “Kanpai” is a glittering dancefloor destroyer that weaponizes Alice’s self-confidence to manifest celebrity. I saw Alice perform in a club basement in Somerville, MA in front of generously 150 people, but when she puts herself on a Mount Rushmore with “Britney, Lindsay, Amanda Bynes[…] Taylor, Drake, Kardashian tribe” you can’t help but believe she’s already there.

    Plus One – Bonk

    “Bonk” was one of my favorite tracks of 2024, and a great example of a structural trend present in some of the year’s biggest dance tracks like Flight FM by Joy Orbison and Honey by Caribou which I’ve been referring to as rattlers. By song structure, rattlers resemble American buildup-drop (ahem) EDM/brostep/whatever, but strip out the grating grandiosity and self-insistence. Instead of generating tension artificially with trance snare rolls or whatever the hell metal guitars Excision uses, rattlers gently tease the “drop” section then slide into it with an abbreviated buildup at most. It’s a similar deployment of tension and release as the buildup/drop structure, but in a way that’s less disruptive to the flow of the dancefloor. “Bonk” is a textbook rattler, with a/b sections that are similar enough to flow smoothly but different enough that the extra oomph of the b section is constructively jarring, like afterburners kicking you to a new top speed.

    100 gecs – xXXi_wud_nvrstøp_ÜXXx (Remix) [feat. Tommy Cash & Hannah Diamond]

    Speaking of 2021 hyperpop… This remix is the highlight of 100 gecs and the tree of clues. It’s my favorite track from 1000 gecs flipped by two people with some of my favorite voices in hyperpop over a style of track I wish both of them would make more of. It’s bouncy, danceable, funny, unpredictable and referential without feeling chained to the past, all of the qualities that make hyperpop so appealing to me. It’s not the most innovative song by any means, nor do I think it will be remembered as well as some of the genre’s more pioneering and out there cuts, but it’s always fun to listen to, and that’s an achievement to be proud of.

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    Sully – Broadway G

    Have you ever had a moment where you hear a word you’ve heard a million times and out of nowhere the etymology just clicks? That’s how “Broadway G” makes me feel about dubstep. It’s not quite the same dramatic snap (usually followed by a dumbfounded moment of “am I an idiot?”) since I was already well aware of the genre’s genealogy, but there is something beautifully satisfying about tracks that arrive at dubstep by… dubbing out two-step. It’s like a good fresh-sliced deli sandwich or a perfect piece of sashimi. No need to drench them in sauce, because the joy is in tasting the pure flavors of the basic ingredients.

    Buckley – Void 19

    Buckley is operating in a similar space here, but this track feels less like “dubbed out 2-step” and more like dubstep with some 2-step flourishes. There is no concession of bass in the name of melody or wonk here, just pure subby oomph snapped together with crisp, echoed drums. “Void 19” feels impactful, intentionally so. The hypnosis here is all in the bass imploring you to rattle with the speakers and phrase-end fills placed in just the right spot to induce your hands to fly in punctuation. It doesn’t so much borrow the buildup-drop structure of trance or American dubstep as compress it into half-second doses to release the pressure in jerking steps throughout.

    Bruce – The Price

    This one really is something. Bruce has, fresh out of his pop era, delivered a track that sounds like Noddy Holder’s industrial techno side project. I want to like it, I really do, but the lead melody stirs up horrible memories of my underwritten GarageBand techno tracks from middle school. That said, it’s a fun beat and an inspired collision of styles. “The Price” moves; it begs to be DJed with. I look forward to finding new pockets of rhythm hidden in the swing. If nothing else, Bruce has convinced me that a great techno track with a glam stomp beat is possible – not something I would have imagined a week ago.

    Y U QT – You Know What I Want

    Y U QT made one of my favorite quick tracks of all time in “When I’m With U” and now they seem determined to ensure that it doesn’t fall from the top spot by making a pivot to your favorite genre and mine, Big Room Sad. This track has more of a disconnect between its parts than other genre pillars like Bicep or Overmono though, possibly because the drums are just so two-step and the synths are just so trance. Instead of coming together as one cohesive whole that blends the two genres it feels more just like, well, two-step drums over trance synths. Y U QT don’t yet sound comfortable with the scale that big room sad demands. Bicep’s best songs sound like Drumsheds or Printworks look, but Y U QT can’t quite leave behind the sound of a smaller, more intimate room. That isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it makes me miss the more straight-ahead sweatbox speed garage of their earlier tracks and it makes me wonder just how much the Big Room Sad sound has left in the (big, sad) tank.

    Dewey Decimal – Treat Me Right

    2-step, undubbed. This one’s a throwback in more than just the sound. UKG producer Riz La Teef put it out on his South London Pressings label (which also released some earlier Y U QT) as “PURE BLACK LABEL BUSINESS” — no credits, no art, no nothin’. All we know is that Dewey Decimal is “a well known artist” who is not La Teef himself, and that the song absolutely bumps. In terms of internet-age attempts to recreate white label exclusivity I prefer this to the timed-release CloudCore model, particularly since it puts more focus on the music itself rather than the hype of artificial scarcity. What would you rather reward, speed or taste? And how’s your Supreme bogo hoodie collection doing?

    Against All Logic – City Fade

    Sometimes I forget that high quality house is just the best music. Yes house can get boring, yes it can get formulaic, but when it’s made by someone who really knows what they’re doing it can sound like the last hundred years of musical progress all in one song. House is music’s best sponge, soaking up ideas from disco and techno and hip hop and whatever your favorite style is and turning them into something new. Nicolas Jaar as Against All Logic stirs in the organic microhouse of Ricardo Villalobos or Four Tet and the folk-inflected downtempo of Nicola Cruz and the result is pure alchemy.

    Plastikman – Konception

    This is a result of my recent project to flesh out some of the gaps in my familiarity with old adance music. I have a tendency to dip a toe into an artist’s back catalog (well, front catalog sometimes) then move on when I get the gist — which was great when I was trying to hoover up as much context as quickly as possible, but I ended up with a lot of half formed opinions shaped from the silhouette of music discussion more than the music itself. So here I am, giving a proper shake to Richie Hawtin in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty-five, and I see what I’ve been missing. Musik came out 30 years ago now, and still sounds like I could hear it in a club tomorrow and not blink an eye. The bleep-y, rounded off acid licks are a clear precursor to contemporary releases from people like Priori, D. Tiffany or Skee Mask — all of whom I wholeheartedly enjoy.

    X-Press 2 ft. Sailor & I – The Rain

    My path in to electronic music was through pop, and I’ll always have a soft spot for dance music that operates in a pop mode without losing too much of either aspect. “The Rain” is a hooky, understated acid pop track, which feels like a pile of contradiction but like the best music does it resolves those contradictions into satisfaction. In doing so it pushes all the right buttons for me experientially. You can get lost in its hypnosis one moment, then whistle the earworm vocal part the next.

    John Tejada & Plaid – Bittersweet

    This one’s just buttery smooth, starring synth lines with just enough buzzing harmonics that when the chords resolve, the entire timbre snaps together like aural LEGO. The sound of the 20s may be pristine hyper-digital sound design, but Tejada and Plaid show how satisfying rougher sounds well-composed can be.

    Aphex Twin – Tha

    The Aphex Twin of it all makes me forget sometimes how well Richard D. James can turn out a relatively conventional track. “Tha” is just sublime, one of those 9-minute tracks that’s a simple loop at its core but nevertheless tricks you into thinking it’s about three seconds long and should actually be played again right now, thank you. It reminds me of some my favorite Burial works, and not just because of the distant voice samples layered over scratchy percussion. Burial and Aphex have both taught me to expect the off-kilter in their works – broken beats, broken hearts, broken synthesizers that sound like broken power tools. Then, just when they’ve got you on your toes waiting for a punch to roll with, they serve up something sweet and straightforward but none the worse for it like “Tha” or “Ashtray Wasp.” I want to float away in “Tha” and let the clicky pulse of the kick drum rock me like waves.