This is a cool synthwave album of cinematic sounds that often catches you off-guard. It’s the soundtrack to a movie you’ve never seen, but want to find just from hearing it. It might exist in another dimension, or on a dark web torrent stream. Either way, it’s one of the neatest records I heard all last year.
Speaking of cool synthwave, Mandy, Indiana‘s debut album was a stunner on multiple fronts, as it covers not only synthwave, but also cold wave, dance punk, goth, and general chaos. They’re quickly becoming one of those “bands everyone’s talking about,” so don’t miss this record.
Only King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard could get away with naming an album something like that. It was their return to thrash metal, this time built around one of their favorite subjects – protecting our fragile planet. It was one of the best metal records of the year.
This album held my top spot for a long while, as it’s a powerful stoner / psych / cosmic rock record that hits hard with shredding guitar, pleading vocals, and roaring drums. It’s all about dreams, death, and what-the-hell-are-you-doing-with-this-life-you-have-that’s-gone-like-a-flash-of-lightning-you-git introspections.
Simply put, this is the most beautiful record I heard all year, and it’s a prime example of why you should always read old e-mails. This sat in my e-mail box for about four months before I finally got to it. I’m glad I didn’t delete that e-mail in a big purge, because Halsall’s album of ambient jazz, field sounds, and slight trip-hop touches is one of those albums that changes the attitude of the room wherever it’s played.
Thanks for reading and for sticking with me another year. Onto 2024!
This one came to me fairly early in the year and was an immediate favorite. It’s full of jagged guitar lines, weird drum fills, and plenty of power equal to the cosmic cover imagery.
Speaking of heavy cosmic riffs, this album from Auralayer is full of them and plenty of Buddhist philosophy to boot. This trio about floored me when I first heard this album and were one of my favorite discoveries of the year.
Would it be a “best of” list without a King Gizz album? I mean, they release at least two albums a year, and this year they released an electro / krautrock album full of synths and drum pads that turned out to be a fun time. You can tell they enjoyed stretching muscles they don’t often use, and they filled it with references to Egyptian mythology, which just made it weirder and cooler.
Yes, that’s the same cover image, and it’s almost the same album, but KGATLW decided to release two versions of the same record, with the extended version having long mixes with additional lyrics for each song – the short of which is just under eleven minutes long. It’s even better than the regular edition of the album and lets them do lengthy synth-jams that often move into rave territory.
Speaking of long synth-jams, Ki Oni‘s tribute to his deceased grandmother and his meditation on peace and death has tracks with minimum lengths of seventeen minutes, and all of them are beautiful. This is the kind of record that takes you away from anything you’re doing and drops you into a warm pool of peace and presence.
Who’s in the top ten? Come back soon and find out!
This is a techno EP based on the mythological tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece. I don’t know what else to write to make you keen on hearing it than that.
This unearthed, previously unreleased live recording of Motörhead destroying a jazz festival is nothing short of outstanding. They were firing on all cylinders during this tour. Count yourself lucky if you saw them in 2007. If, like me, you never got to see them live, this gets you close.
Rich Aucoin has a cool gig. He gets to collect and play with vintage synthesizers, arpeggiators, sequencers, and organs and make albums with them. This second volume of such music sounds like it was recorded yesterday with new gear. It’s full of dance tracks, ambient cuts, trance beats, disco riffs, and more.
Now that 2023 has passed us, it’s time for my annual countdown of some of my favorite stuff of the previous year. Who made the top 25? Read on and discover!
#25: Cavaran – Nights at Josan
Named after a bar near their recording studio they’d frequent after recording sessions, Belgium’s Cavaran returned with a solid record of desert / stoner rock that was a badly need dose of rocket fuel into our collective veins.
#24: Gimenö – Movement Remixes
Just like 2022, there was a lot of good EDM released last year, and this album of remixes by pals of DJ / producer Gimenö was among it. There isn’t a bad track on here. It’s all floor-fillers.
#23: Big Miz – Where I Belong
Another excellent EDM EP, this one from Big Miz on the Homage label. Miz combined house with trance and does it with subtle, slick skill.
#22: Bodywash– I Held the Shape While I Could
Shoegaze made a fine return this year, and that makes me happy – as did this cool record by Bodywash that bathes you in guitars, reverb, and clove cigarette smoke vocals.
#21: Eaves Wilder – Hookey
Another fun EP, this one about break-ups, screw-ups (in the world of mental health care), and drink-ups. Eaves Wilder might be “the next big thing.” Get in on her stuff now and become one of the cool kids.
Who makes the top 20? Come back tomorrow to find out!
Thanks to all who listened to the first “Mystery Monday” show of 2024 on WSND. It was three hours of electronic dance music to kick off the new year. Here’s the set list:
Stephen Buono (by Matt Gribben) / Finom (by Alex Viscius) / Nels Cline / Ricardo Dias Gomes
Last month, Church Chords announced their debut album, elvis, he was Schlager, set to release on February 23rd via Otherly Love Records.The collaborative recording project led by musician/producer Stephen Buono brings together accomplished musicians from his time spent in Philadelphia, New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, to create music that honors experimentation and collaboration.
Today, Church Chords returned to share “She Lays on a Leaf,” their avant-pop krautrock featuring guitar from Nels Cline (Wilco) and vocals by Finom‘s Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham alongside Ricardo Dias Gomes (Caetano Veloso),who also penned the song’s lyrics.
When asked about the track, Buono shared more about collaborating with Cline: “For this song, I asked Nels to imagine John McLaughlin playing the opening guitar solo on ”Mother Sky” by Can. I think the solo on the alternate version is one of his best on record. It is such an integral part of the song that I gave him writing credit. On the album version, I love how co-producer John Herndon synthesized the solo to sound like I don’t know what.”
The story of elvis, he was Schlager, begins ca. 2016 in Chicago where Buono had relocated after four decades as a Philadelphia area resident, who frequently traveled to New York in his 20s & 30s soaking up the scenes at Tonic and The Village Vanguard. In Philly, in addition to his ubiquitous presence at a multitude of performances, Buono notably volunteered for the renowned avant garde presenter Ars Nova Workshop and put on his own live events at a series of West Philadelphia spaces. He also founded, wrote music for, and played guitar in the post-punk outfit, Split/Red, which BrooklynVegan called “Beefheart-ian….punk with an unbridled, avant-garde antagonism.”
Deeply embedded and inspired by the fertile music scene in the Windy City, where he moved at 38, he wanted his first Church Chords album to be fully Chicago-centric, using only locals. Buono oversaw a session at Steve Albini’s famed Electrical Audio that attempted to, as he puts it, “synthesize ‘electric-era’ Miles Davis with Black Sabbath.” A laudable experiment that he felt was ultimately a failure, opting to stick it in his back pocket for re-evaluation later on.
In Fall 2016 Buono relocated to Los Angeles and, a year to the day after his Electrical Audio session, dusted off the shelved material in a session with bassist Devin Hoff (Julia Holter, Sharon Van Etten), percussionist John Herndon, and multi-instrumentalist Ben Boye (Ty Segall, Bonnie “Prince” Billy). The trio laid down new rhythm tracks for six songs from the original session — a 35-minute continuous improvisation that changed the dynamic and structure of the work. In addition, Buono produced an additional 4 songs from tracks laid down by Chicagoan multihyphenate Jim Baker on ARP2000. Elliot Bergman (Wild Belle) produced one of these songs, “Recent Mineral” aka “Renda,” which has versions in both English and Portuguese.
For the next little while, Buono started massaging this mass of material into shape alongside co-producers in the vein of a hip-hop producer. As he did, more voices and players from an equally vibrant L.A. scene were folded into the proceedings. Among them, keyboardist Sam Barsh (Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar); guitarists Nels Cline, Jeff Parker (Tortoise), Mark Shippy (US Maple), Brandon Seabrook; horn player Josh Johnson (Leon Bridges’ musical director); percussionist Kenny Wollesen (Bill Frisell, Tom Waits); and Nate Walcott (a multi-instrumentalist known for his work with Bright Eyes, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Phoebe Bridgers).
It was at this point that Buono made some crucial decisions related to the album and the Church Chords project as a whole. The biggest was that he opted to lessen his contributions as a performer; to instead take on the role of a producer in the mode of Teo Macero or a member of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad. He would be directing the sessions and helping finesse the finished product but otherwise staying out of the musicians’ way as they wrote lyrics and improvised.
As well, Buono decided early on that the material he was conceptualizing for elvis, he was Schlager needed vocals, and lyrics. Through his many connections in the community, he became friends with Ricardo Dias Gomes, a Brazilian artist who has worked with the likes of Caetano Veloso and Arto Lindsay. Initially, Gomes was going to contribute lyrics to a single song, but as he heard more of the music, he was inspired to write words for the majority of the tracks. Also making vital contributions were multi-instrumentalist/producer Matt Mehlan, who wrote “Warriors of Playtime,” a powerful song written in the wake of George Floyd’s murder; and old friend Kristin Slipp (Dirty Projectors, Mmeadows) who contributed words and vocals to “Alone, Under The Water” and several others.
Gomes, Slipp, and Mehlan’s lyrics were treated with immense care and compassion by the people Buono tapped to sing on elvis, he was Schlager. As with the rest of the album, the vocalists are an array of jaw-dropping talent from Genevieve Artadi, here singing in Portuguese for the first time on record, Brazilian Thalma de Freitas (Kamasi Washington, Madlib), electropop genius Takako Minekawa to L.A. dynamo zzzahara (the Simps) to the avant pop group Finom (f.k.a. Ohmme) to Ako Castuera, an artist who worked behind on Adventure Time.
The number of contributors and the storyline behind elvis, he was Schlager, is a little dizzying to comprehend. And it may sound like a recipe for a mess — a situation with too many cooks. But thanks to Buono’s steady hands guiding each step of the process, the album is a complete, cohesive statement. An exploratory, daring, and engaging expression of music’s transformative power. A mood piece that flows steadily and smoothly from vibe to vibe, guiding the listener through each melodic twist and rhythmic turn.
Keep your mind open.
[Lay your e-mail address on the subscription box while you’re here.]
The album has the band diving headlong into their not-so-secret love of synthwave, EDM, rap, and krautrock, starting with the uplifting “Theia” – a song about how we are drifting on silver cords that attach us to ethereal planes we can’t describe but sometimes catch glimpses of now and then. It’s instantly catchy and uplifting, with all the synths and electronic beats rising us up to the natural follow-up of the title track – a beautiful track about birth, death, and rebirth. “Set” is about the wicked Egyptian god (and Egyptology and mythology is all over this record, which delights me to no end) and has a cool rave beat throughout it.
“Chang’e” has the band singing about a goddess of dreams and builds from almost an ambient track into a full-blown dance cut in perhaps the loveliest moment on the record. “Gilgamesh” brings techno-Viking beats to the classic tale of the eternal hero. “Swan Song” uses industrial beats to encourage us to cut the cords that bind us to our attachments and egos and “Go explore. Be untethered. Be unequalled. Grab the sword. Be emperor. Be yourself. Be an orb. Be your spirit. Don’t fear it.”
The closing track, “Extinction,” tackles one of KGATLW’s favorite topics – the destruction of the Earth by mankind’s idiocy and greed. There are hints of “Crumbling Castle” in the beats and lyrics (“Castles crumble with a groan.”) as well. The album ends on an encouraging note, however, as they sing, “I can see everything. I can be in the music.”
So can all of us.
As if The Silver Cord isn’t good enough, and a cool enough project from KGATLW, the band also released an extended version of the record in which they explore long-form synth-jams and add further lyrics to delve further into the album’s themes of death, reincarnation, the afterlife, and enlightenment. The shortest track on the extended version is the ten-minute and eighteen-second-long version of “Set.” The longest is the extended mix of “Theia,” which is just over twenty minutes. All the extended mixes are excellent, and some could be dropped into a DJ set without trouble.
Hailing from Glasgow, Big Miz put in the work behind the decks at at local clubs to build not only his skills but a thriving EDM community there. His first EP for the HOMAGE label, Where I Belong, is a good introduction to his music.
The title track gets it off to a great start with shining beats and bass hits that make you move whether you want to or not. “Everything’s Fine” uses vocal samples to neat effects, and “The Feeling” is a song about getting back to the dance floors and the clubs after we all had to dance in our living rooms during the pandemic (“We gotta bring back that feeling. Yeah, you know the one I’m talking about. That feeling that’s been gone…for way too long.”). Its slick beats will make you want to rush out to the nearest club.
The EP ends with a nice remix of the title track by LUXE that brings up the lush but doesn’t skim on the thumps.
It’s a sharp EP, and every track is solid. Don’t skip it.
Keep your mind open.
[Your e-mail address belongs in the subscription box.]
Diving further into his love / obsession with 1980s horror / thriller synthwave music, Boy Harsher‘s Augustus Muller teamed up with artist / kinky movie maker Vex Ashley of Four Chambers to create two films scores – one to a film that already existed and another to one that is new, and both of which explore the sexual relationship between humans and technology on the album Cellulosed Bodies.
The first half is a tribute to David Cronenberg‘s 1996 film Crash – in which the main characters are turned on by car crashes. Muller’s six-song “score” to the film (originally done by Howard Shore). “Fur and Metal” slowly takes us into this new, weird world of strange pleasures and soon we’re “Sharing a Smoke,” but how much of it is from a cigarette and how much is from burned wreckage along a dark road? Muller’s use of synths throughout the six tracks are at times haunting and other times throbbing like the pulse in your neck after something stressful and / or sensual. “Perverse Technology” is a perfect example of this, as somewhat creepy synths rise and fall like a lover’s chest taking deep breaths to maintain control while the beats mimic the twitchy brain impulses to seize pleasure now instead of making it last as long as possible. “Body as Machine” sums up the theme of the album’s first half (and Cronenberg’s film) in the title and in the grinding, pulsating synth-beats, and “Shattered Glass” ends the first half with something that isn’t quite afterglow, but more “after-shadow.”
The second half is Muller’s score to Ashley’s film Automaton – which, according to the liner notes, “…features a severe computer entity and trapped prey, succumbing to pleasure…” Reading that, and then hearing the ten tracks that follow, you think, “Yeah, that sounds about right.” The tracks featuring fewer beats, but more experimentation – again the theme of exploring new pleasures that at first might seem frightening – such as “Initialize,” “Next Subject,” and “Endoscopy.” “Examination” uses some subtle industrial clangs for beats, but they never overwhelm the track. “Acceptance” has the “trapped prey” accepting its pleasurable fate (or is the computer accepting it?). I’m guessing it’s the former, because the next track is “You Belong to the Machine” – which builds with a slow menace like a snake that’s been released into a dark room.
“Observation” sounds and feels like the evil / sexy computer is watching its prey / lover from a drone that rises and falls like a hawk drifting on warm wind. “Stretching / Invading” is about…well, I think you can guess. “Who Is in Control” can be taken in multiple ways. It’s the question in a BDSM relationship. On the surface, the computer in Ashley’s tale is in control, but what would it be without its lover? The computer needs the lover to achieve some kind of feeling. The second half of Cellulosed Bodies ends with “Subdue Yourself” – the only track with vocals (from dominatrix Miss Marilyn) – on a whispering aftercare note.
It’s a strange, lovely, sexy record, and one of the more intriguing releases of the year.
Ki Oni (Chuck Soo-Hoo) set out to create an ambient album about spirits transitioning from life to death, perhaps wandering the world for a while, and eventually floating into something we here on this side of the veil can’t quite yet fathom. He not only succeeded in doing it, he excelled at it with A Leisurely Swim to Everlasting Life.
It’s difficult to describe how gorgeous this album is. It’s at times lush and other times as subtle as a whisper. Nothing is rushed across its five tracks. The shortest one, opening track “An Infinite Dive,” is fifteen minutes and twelve seconds long. “Floating in a Stream of Consciousness” is perfectly titled, as it’s a collection of the sounds your brain is trying get you to hear as you remain in the eternal present, but you’re always too busy or worried to pause and observe all this amazing creation coexisting with you.
According to the press release I got for this album, “Reincarnation at the End of the World” has Soo-Hoo wondering, “With everything going on in the world –– and if reincarnation is real, where would a spirit go if the world ended suddenly? What would that sound like? Would it continue to float on this deteriorated earth until new life begins or would it float forever into the abyss?”
It’s an intriguing question, and my answer is that we’ll be free from worry wherever we are. Soo-Hoo’s synths, field recordings, and loops emulate a blissful ghost drifting here and there, no cares, no stress, no extraneous thoughts…just calm bliss.
“My Grandmother’s Garden” is a lovely tribute to Soo-Hoo’s late grandmother and the days he used to spend as a child swimming in her pool and eating food she’d grown. “To Wander Beyond the Aquatic Center” ends the record with a song perfect for the cover image of a true infinity pool stretching out into a misty pink sky as birds soar overhead. We should all hope to hear something this lovely as we go into sleep, whether for a night or forever.
This album, this leisurely swim, is something we all need from time to time. We need to immerse ourselves in the present and reconnect with the beauty that is right there calling to us and being enjoyed by those who have gone before and will greet us after we come up from our dive in the pool.
Keep your mind open.
[Dive into the subscription box while you’re here.]
