The Letter M

Tag: Cousin

  • 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.