Category Archives: Music

Mixtapes, Music, Myself

The Second 2016 Playlist

Just in time for April, another selection of songs that makes my head bop, my toes curl and my fingers fly on the keyboard.

I have had Grimes’ new album, Art Angels on heavy rotation the last few weeks. My love for this album has been bolstered by a long interview with the artiste that I read recently, and a book called Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory. It’s a stunning collection of tracks — accessible and complex at the same time, and self-aware, in a strange way. Grimes has appeared on my older playlists, obviously, but I have never been as completely blown away by the totality of her earlier albums. ‘Kill v Maim’ is here because it’s one of the weirdest songs on Art Angels: the video is all glitter and J-pop, and her voice takes on textures that . What makes the song really special is the concept ­— it is sung from the point of view of Al Pacino in Godfather II, except ‘except he’s a vampire who can switch gender and travel through space’. Um, yeah. Fuck.

Klimeks is a British producer that falls squarely into the ambient/synthpop genre, much like Burial and even Mura Masa, both of whom are artistes I love. In fact, if ‘Tokyo Train’, a track from 2013, had pitch-shifted vocals, I would probably think it was Mura Masa. Though that’s kind of doing Klimeks injustice, he has a very distinctive sound that makes for great listening both at home and at work. Calm yet filled with nervous tension.

Moderat’s new album Moderat III is out already, and this was one of the first singles that I heard from it. The video features a sci-fi story with teenagers harvesting crystals in a dystopian world, and it feels like an avant garde video game someone else is playing when you get high. The song is so distinctively Moderat – the sharp synth wail, the repeating 5-beat snare pattern at 16 bar intervals, the layered vocals.

Julietta’s ‘Conquest’ is a catchy pop song about heartbreak. It has this unsettling tremolo synth loop going on at first, which is kind of distracting, but the song ultimately wins it with her voice and the main hook.

Early Winters is one of my favorite bands, and their second album ‘Vanishing Act’ is my album of choice on silent, meditative nights. Their third album has been forthcoming, but what we got was a 2:13 minute song that proves that they have not lost a little bit of the wonderful sound and the unique mood of their collaborative act. Justin, Carina, Dan and Zach, please finish your album.

 

Shadow and Light are a Delhi-based band that caught my attention through a random link that someone shared. Pavithra Chari and Anindo Bose make for a wonderful collaboration; she is the vocalist and lyricist, while he works on the music production and provides harmonies. Oh, the harmonies. ‘Dua’ makes me very happy indeed, with its nimble mix of the jazz piano and a mellifluous ghazal.

Synthwave is a genre inspired by 80s film, video and TV soundtracks, mostly driven by non-American bands. You can hear the sound in the OST of Drive, or in the music of Com Truise. This Carpenter Brut track needs no endorsement. The video is batshit insane, and the propulsive synth-driven beat puts you square in the center of B-movie action.

What is it with young British electronic musicians? Feint is 22, and his Drum and Bass songs burrow their way into my brain like nothing else. Veela’s vocals work beautifully on this song.

Thomas Vent is electro-funk with a dollop of dubstep. You better have your dancing shoes on.

I had included Sir Sly’s ‘You Haunt Me’ in an earlier playlist, but my preference was for the remix of the song, rather than the original. This song drove me crazy, with its hypnotic beat and Landon Jacobs’ whisky-smooth voice and the throbbing, glitchy arpeggiator that comes in somewhere in the middle. The video’s wonderful too, makes you want to not blink at all.

It’s funny how artistes take on new meaning with a bit of context. I heard Mr Oizo one fine day, thanks to a random online recommendation. Two days later, while in conversation about weird cinema with a bunch o’ fellow-nerds at a signing, the name Quentin Depeaux came up, who is a French film-maker that has made some surreal films. Turns out Mr Oizo is Depeaux’s side-project as a DJ/musician. And his music is as sufficiently weird as his filmography, according to people in the know.

A New Zealand-based band that has settled in LA, BRÅVES has had its share of crazy videos ­— including one with full frontal male nudity. This video is tamer, but the song is a crisp crowdpleaser.

I stumbled across the work of the pianist/multi-instrumentalist Lambert while looking for more artistes like Deaf Center and Nils Frohm. German artiste who has recently performed at the Hotel Cafe, and I wish I had known of him before his act. Must have been fun to see him live.

Ibeyi means ‘twins’ in Yoruba (a language spoken in Nigeria), and true to their name, the band is made up on twin sisters Lisa-Kainde and Naomi Diaz, whose music combines Cuban, French and Nigerian influences. I paid attention to their music from a remix of ‘River’, which removed their vocals altogether, focusing on the thumping percussive beat of the track. A waste, if you ask me, because their voices give you goose-bumps, and the video leaves you holding your breath, literally. I love how the song ends with Yoruban lyrics. These sisters are incredible.

Nombe is Noah McBeth, a musician from Germany who now lives in Los Angeles. The lead guitar riff in the song ‘California Girls’ reminds me of ‘Finally Moving’ by Pretty Lights ­— the song that Avicii and Flo Rida made huge hits of. But that resemblance is just enough for you to pay attention to it, the song stands up well on its own.

The first thing that gets me about Tom Misch’s ‘Memory’ is its use of steel drums. The song weaves its layers around this single bar loop, which changes only when the vocals come in, almost 2 minutes into the song. It takes off with a crunchy guitar solo, and a drum-and-clap beat that glides in and out. Beautiful, beautiful track.

OH SHIT! This Four Tet remix of Jon Hopkins gut-punched me when I heard it the first time. The piano, if I may, is like moonlight peeping in through the trees as you drive through a dark forest late at night. Not your normal moonlight, more like moonlight in high contrast and embroidered with gold and fairydust. And then there’s stars going supernova as you suddenly begin flying into the sky, and there are colors everywhere and you can barely feel your own body. The closest you may get to this experience is if you are sitting on a window seat and your plane is about to land in LA late in the night. Or something like that. The video is insane on its own, but with the song, whoof!

Umm, yeah, Hans Zimmer’s theme for Batman v Superman featured heavily in my listening all of last month. “Day of the Dead’ particularly, because it goes from tenderness to dread to melancholy to bombast in the space of a few minutes, weaving layers over the four note Kal El theme from Man of Steel. Especially with the pizzicato strings ticking along like a time bomb.

That would have been the last song on the playlist, but for the fact that I noticed that Hana had released the video for her exquisite ‘Clay’. There’s also the added connection of her opening for Grimes in her last tour. My favorite moment on the song, the point when I knew it was going to be on constant rotation, is when the beat comes in at 0:56. Love the use of echo in her voice, and the warbly violin-sound that creeps into the track.

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Movies, Music

On watching and listening to Under The Skin

Pal William handed me a DVD of Under The Skin last week, a movie that we had talked about before and which he recommended with such enthusiasm that I bumped it up my queue. Took me a while to finally pop the disc in, but glad I did. The movie is bizarre and unsettling and wonderful, and Scarlett Johansson’s character makes me afraid and aroused at the same time. In the beginning, it is a strange mix of what feels like candid, unscripted moments of Ms Johansson driving around a strange land and picking up strangers. Scenes of seduction that make you hold your breath while waiting for the pay-off. When it ended, two-odd hours later, I found myself tingling with excitement, the kind  that comes from consuming something that is beyond what you expected. [ref]I have yet to watch Her and Lucy – two very unlike films, I know, but part of ScaJo’s recent filmography that convinces me that this lady is one of the finest actors in the business today both in terms of skills and the choices she makes. I loved the short appearance in Chef, for example, and her New York Jewish girl in Don Jon. [/ref]

Nowadays, I prefer to go into movies without the burden of expectations that the publicity machine brings along. Oh, I am not talking about the big-budget franchises. That’s an infinite hype train subway where the exit doors lead to yet another platform and yet another ride. But it’s films like this, that come sans trailing numbers or colon-separated sub-phrase in the title, that bring me the most joy. Not just the way they play with the monotony of the three-act structure, but the way they give an actor like Johansson a role beyond the mundane.

But therein lies the problem – not boarding the hype train also makes it hard to pick a journey, and sometimes the ones you pick prove unworthy of your time. My criteria for this is simple – if I pause or get distracted while watching a 2-hour movie, I rethink whether it’s really worth my time. One of the ways to get around that is to watch movies only in someone else’s company, but that brings down the opportunity to watch a film at home by a large degree. I realized, after having finished Under the Skin in one non-stop sitting, how rare it had become for me to switch on my TV after I get home.

What also got me about that movie was the judicious use of music throughout the nearly-wordless sequences. Violins that play like cancerous lungs gasping for breath; creepy pitch-bends that make me feel as if there are glitches in my audio-spatial perception; the steady thump of a muted drum. This is music that truly lives up to the idea of the movie, the musical accompaniment to an anomalous entity exploring herself (itself?). The composer is a British lady named Mica Levi, stage name Micachu, and this is the first time she has worked on a soundtrack, can you believe that?

Parts of the music reminds me of both classic horror scores – mostly Bernard Hermann’s flamboyant use of the violin and Morricone’s intense giallo works. But the album that I had to go revisit, after the movie, was Wojkiech Kilar’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula; at first glance, there isn’t much of a similarity between Skin and Dracula, but my brain somehow established a connection between Levi’s keening violin scrapes and Kilar’s old-school orchestral maneuvers. In case you are wondering, there isn’t much of a resemblance. It was probably a resonance of the feeling in my gut when I watched Dracula for the first time as a kid.

 

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Albums, Music

Deaf Center – Time Spent

What is it about the notes of a solitary piano that appeal to me so much, I wonder? This 2 minute 10 second piece passed my cardinal test for new music – which is that it made me pause in my work and give it my undivided attention. I expected the piano pattern to lead into some sort of aural explosion at the end, because this is how music of this sort conditions you; and it’s great at building tension, this track. The bass notes buzzes into existence around the 1:19 mark, but that is about all the variance you get.

The album, though, is more adventurous. A blend of cello-scrapes and breathy flute notes make up the bulk of the initial track ‘Divided’; it feels like a conductor raising his hands and waking an orchestra from a dream of centuries, a single note that is sustained over 4 minutes and 23 seconds. ‘Close Forever Watching’ is a sister track to ‘Divided’, going through a similar cycle of build-up of drone sounds that scream and whisper and sigh one after the other. Similarly, ‘Fiction Dawn’ is a sister track to ‘Time Spent’, a lone piano wandering through tense passages of full of promise. ‘The Day I would Never Have’ is a 10 minute track that marks the mid-point of the album, and combines the tinkle of the piano and the hum of the pads. Beautiful.

The problem with this kind of moody, creep-down-your-ears-into-your-spine music is how limited a window of opportunity I have to enjoy it. The bulk of my music-listening happens in the car, and what really goes well with driving is up-tempo beats and melodies. I have tried listening to Nils Frahm in the car, and I find myself slowing down on the freeway, or holding my breath in anticipation; the low-register subtleties of the music do not lend themselves to listening while on the move. At home, music gets put on in the background when I am cooking, or reading; the former brings in the same objections, and the latter makes it hard for me to focus on the reading.

This is also not the kind of music you want to listen to with others, not unless everyone’s willing to cut down on conversation and give a song like this their full-fledged attention. That is something that rarely happens in a group, and also, it is hard to get a bunch of people together that like the same things about a piece of music, or even that same piece, for that matter.

Similar to this genre are the weird, out-there sensibilities of Toru Takematsu or John Zorn, for example. Zorn’s music, in particular, would drive apartment-mates, my girlfriend and other assorted animals in the vicinity out of their minds. It’s hard to take this kind of music in for more than 2 or 3 tracks at a time, for sure.

Deaf Center would make for great meditation music, or walking-in-nature music. I don’t do much of the former, but I should definitely get around to indulging more in the latter. If only to listen to more space-hippie music.

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Mixtapes, Music

The First 2016 Playlist

I might as well stop arranging playlists by month. I started calling this the January 2016 playlist, but it’s already middle of February – and you will admit that’s kind of dumb.

Chairlift’s Moth is the first album I have fallen in love with this year. ‘Ch-Ching’ is the hallmark of the lot, featuring not one, not two, but three different hooks that latch on to your brain. Add to it the vogue-happy dance video featuring the lovely Caroline Polachek in that orange dress; the sexy brass riffs that sneak in and out of the vocals; the random “ow”s and “whoo”s punctuating the track. Patrick Wimberly’s drum programming – specifically the use of the rimshot and finger-clicks, and that wonderful ratatat drum phrase – also a winner. 27-99-23, y’all.

I saw Father John Misty live at Treasure Island Music Fest last year, and this zany song —accompanied by a video that is filled with Kanye-West-level of self-love — is one of my favorite tracks from his new album I Love You Honeybear. 

Gunship makes tripped-out electropop. This video has He-Man, Hellraiser, and a host of other B-show video tributes in claymation.

Is ‘Kamikaze’ the solo song that makes MØ explode on the mainstream scene? The lady made her name with her 2014 album (‘Pilgrim’ featured on one of my earlier playlists) and collaborations with Ariana Grande and Major Lazer, but the upcoming studio album with Diplo producing sounds like it’s on another level altogether. The tune’s so infectious, and the main instrumental riff (which sounds like a shakuhachi blended with a celtic violin) gets into your head faster than the fumes from a 43-year old bottle of Glendronach. ‘Take me to the party/kami kami kaze’ doesn’t make much sense, but sometimes a song doesn’t have to. Yet another vogue video, and it’s not a coincidence.

If you think Lana Del Rey is vapid and commercial music, you haven’t been paying attention – I don’t care if she is. She has her West Coast gangsta style melded with classic pop/rock  routine down pat (listen to the guitar riff and the tonal shift at 1:18. Isn’t that a Beatles chord from ‘And I Love Her’?), and it works so well. I have heard three different versions of this song, and they all bring different things to the table. The original is classic Lana, and the (mostly) black-and-white video gets bonus points for being shot in Marina del Rey, my hood till a few months ago.

One of the many songs that sample Quantic Soul Orchestra’s track ‘Pushin On’, ‘Triburbia’ is a delectable goblet of funk served chilled. Caution: It will stir and shake you.

Speaking of delectable, Pal William introduced me to the joys of New Jersey-born Melody Gardot. Add to that velvety-chocolate voice some old-school orchestral strings floating in the background, with a jazz brush-drum beat that patters like raindrops on windows, and you have ‘Baby I’m A Fool’. Yum.

If there was a playlist of music videos to get high to, Rone’s ‘Bye Bye Macadam’ would fall squarely under the psychedelia section. Observe how deceptively simple the song is, a miasma of sawtooth waves over a drum and bass track. I am starting to get into Rone’s discography now, and have high hopes.

NEW FALLULAH ALBUM END OF FEBRUARY, BITCHES! She has released 4 singles from the new album so far, and they are oh-so-wonderful.The tremolo in her voice makes my knees go weak every single time, and her use of the female chorus is flawless. Lovely to see an artiste grow so much over the years and still maintain a unique identity. Go check out ‘Perfect Tense’, the titular single from the album, also out on Youtube.

I heard the second part of this schizophrenic song first – ‘Dystopia’. ‘The earth is on fire/We don’t have no daughter/let the motherfucker burn’ was something that got into my head instantly. Found out the first part ‘Utopia’, and it was like Kraftwerk ate mushrooms and had wild monkey sex with a Korg arpeggiator to come up with alien disco music. SO much fun!

Fenech-Soler is an electronic outfit from Northamptonshire in the UK, which puts them in the same geographical location as The Magus of Northampton – consider this a gratuitous way for me to mention my favorite writer, who I haven’t talked about in a while. But their music is great. This song’s from their second album, which came out in 2013, and

Jarryd James’ ‘Do You Remember’ feels me with dread for some reason. Maybe it’s the ominous chords, or the layered voices. Or maybe the earnestness in the voice appeals to me and I am in denial.

I keep getting turned off by the sameness of the Indian live music shows – Coke Studio, MTV Unplugged, Dewarists and so on, but occasionally a song pops out and makes me jump right back in. Ram Sampath’s set, in particular his cover of the traditional Oriya ‘Rangabati’ did that recently. Sona Mahapatra puts heart and soul into her rendition, and watching the video makes me grin at the sheer joy of her performance – obviously her familiarity with the language helps, observe the change in expression when she says “Tuhu tuhu’ at 2:51. Tony & Rajesh’s rap kick your teeth in (not as much as when they sing the other Bharatiyar Love Rap) and Rituraj Mohanty is stellar. What a song!

The Chainsmokers’ ‘Let You Go’ is a perfect LA song. Shout-out to the Last Bookstore – and holy shit, never thought of it as a make-out zone. Runyon Canyon too, ha! The first comment on that video tells you exactly what to expect though, so er, be warned.

Yeah, there’s a band called British India. Yup, they’re pretty damn good. They’re from Australia, and contrary to my aversion to standard guitar bands, they have proved to be a good exception. The video is weird in a nice way.

Toldja I am a Chairlift fan, so had to end the playlist with the other song from their album that’s stuck in my head. This one has a crunchy rock guitar, pumping beats, and Caroline at her awkward best in the video. ‘Hey Romeo/Put on your running shoes, I am ready to go’ makes me want to go start running again. I probably should, right?

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Mixtapes, Music

The Last 2015 Playlist

In these last hours of the year, I figured I might as well publish one last playlist. It’s a little longer than usual, but its heart is in the right place.

It begins with ‘Heartsigh’, a song that will possibly remain the musical high-point of 2015 for me. This song feels like waking up on a morning with the sun streaming into my bedroom and the smell of bacon wafting in, while a puppy comes up on the bed and licks my nose. The video obviously has nothing to do with this mental visual, but  it stands wonderfully on its own, and conveys an idea of what a Purity Ring concert feels like.

Mura Masa is the stage-name of Alex Crossan, a musician and producer from Great Britain, who is all of 19, which makes me mad and happy at the same time. Mad because fucking 19. Happy, because this is the kind of musician who provides a gigantic fuck-you to people who claim there is no good music coming out nowadays, or that the best music happened in the 70s, or whatever bullshit excuse they choose to come up with for their lack of musical taste or awareness. Mura Masa’s ‘Soundtrack to a Death’ is one of the best things I have discovered this year. His signature style – crisp beats, pitch-shifted vocals and instruments that delight and awe – mesh wonderfully with Shura’s vocals on this particular track, aided by the single-shot video.

I heard Duke Dumont’s ‘I Got U’ early this year, and that particular track hooked me quite a bit. But ‘Ocean Drive’ does one better, with its 80s aesthetic and insta-earworminess. A song that makes me want to take off in a convertible along LA streets at night, blasting it at full volume.

Eric Prydz’s ‘Opus’ is a ridiculous song, in the best sense of the word. 9 minutes long, with a 3 minute build-up, this is a track that confuses club-goers and kinda reminds me of the trick used during the filming of the motorbike sequence in The Dark Knight, where the sound designer revved the engine sound to a higher and higher pitch throughout. This song, similarly, keeps building and building and building to a maddening crescendo – and keeps going on, contrary to the drop-and-ebb rules of trance music. Has me smiling wide every single time.

Magic happens when you put two talented musicians together – and if they are Chet Faker and Flume, it’s organic, wild magic; a spell that wraps you with eldritch tendrils of delight. Sorry, just went full Arkham Asylum there. But ‘Drop the Game’ is just that good a song, the voice and the music and the dancing mesmerizing beyond belief.

I thought Lil Dicky was a lot of fun, and this video definitely plays it for laughs (pay attention to the motivational posters on the wall of the office). Love his rapping skills too, and that Snoop D guy isn’t a slouch either.

Humeysha is Goldspot crossed with Kula Shaker, and I suspect I would enjoy their music more with substances inside me. It’s by Zain Alam, a Wesleyan alumnus (neat, huh, N?) who spent time in India researching the partition and experimenting with Indian music. The band is the result, and the results are encouraging, to say the least.

Alina Baraz is 21 (sigh!) and from Los Angeles by way of Ohio. She follows the modern-day tradition (er, of my favorite electronic outfits, I mean) of collaborating with an electronic producer named Galimatias she met online, to come up with some tracks that make wonderful use of her voice and give us musical textures that are crunchy and delicious and very very satisfying. Just listen to the piano backing in ‘Fantasy’ to know what I mean.

I heart Jamie XX. I am letting his new album grow on me very very slowly, to savor it better. So far, I have obsessed over three songs, and this one’s the second, a beautiful quiet song about loud places and heartbreak and relationship expectations. The other songs will turn up on future playlists, I can feel it.

I heard Conner Youngblood’s ‘Confidence EP’ and was struck by how similar his voice sounded to that of a young AR Rahman, especially on the title track. This song is low on the ARR-semblance, but is the perfect late-night and dread chill combination. The sound of the trumpet resemble the the baying of wild animals in the distance; the voice creeps under your skin; the drone just is, in the background.

Cashmere Cat came into my life via Treasure Island Music Festival in San Francisco in November, the only music fest I went to this year, and an experience well worth the drive both ways. His set was incredible, and it befuddles me that there are still musicians like him that elude me but for pure luck. Mura Masa considers him a major influence on his music, and I can totally see it. ‘Without Me’ is a great video too.

Disa Jakobs hails from Copenhagen, and the original version of Sculpture is layered like Gregorian chants. The live version strips it all down, leaving behind a cheerier version of the song and her voice in full focus, but then the electric guitar kicks in and gives it another tinge altogether. I will be looking forward to more of her music.

‘Silhouettes’ by Floating Points is a work of art in every way possible. I could stare at the video for hours. I could (and have, actually) listen to them for days. Electro-jazz at it’s finest.

Both the Cashmere Cat video and that for ‘Disclosure’ by You & Me (which is also a Flume remix, btw, that guy keeps popping up everywhere) would probably melt Pahlaj Nihalani’s eyeballs because of the amount of onscreen kissing that happens in the two videos.

Tülpa’s ‘A Lil’ Rain’ is a beautiful instrumental, one that weaves its own dreams for you when you close your eyes and listen to it. But this animated fan video by Project 9 on Youtube takes it to another level altogether. This is like Sylvain Chomet meets Ivan Bilibin and the two enter a bar with George Herriman in tow. C’est incroyable!

Ben Khan’s ‘Eden’ and Bad Kingdom’s ‘Moderat’ are songs linked – at least in my mind – with a piercing brass shriek that turn up in both. You will know what I mean when you listen to them. My thought is that they are both the same sample, used in different ways and to convey different moods, in the two songs. You are free to disagree, but I am probably right.

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