WEIRD MUSIC QUARTERLY: April-June 2024
By my count, this is the sixth consecutive month I have uploaded an article. I’m very glad to see that I’ve stuck through for half a year of doing this. It’s also the sixth month that I’ve realized that 2024 is an incredibly weird era for music and its culture. April and May especially. Everything feels so hostile. Here’s Mel with the weather.
Another You’s ‘Hermetic’
One of the best bits about techno is its ability to sink you into a place without any readily apparent imagery. By this metric, Plaster Fe co-founder Another You is a master at the craft. Exhibit A of his prowess lies in ‘Hermetic’, with its cycling, druggy melodies that drone with the textural hook of a basic kick drum. ‘Life Gestates’ is a forest, its white noise and chirpy background textures bringing a sense of liveliness yet calm in its far-too-short runtime. ‘Life Changes’ is a more straightforward romp, dealing with very few elements but deviating with them as time goes on in an extravagant example of musical minimalism.
Bałtyk’s ‘Hope You Can Hear Me Now’
I have more to talk about than just this meager paragraph, as you will see in July, but let it be known that this is among many contenders for my album of the year. It has made me cry, it has given me a sheet of reality to comfort me. This will not be the last you hear from me about this one.
cicadae sillick’s ‘orion’
‘orion’ is framed as a spiritual renewal. It is also entirely recorded with a microcassette dictation machine, possibly one of the most aesthetically godless assemblies of rock and metal to haunt this accursed earth. Equally, the album ranges from the ethereal to the jagged, the day and the night. ‘dipper’ begins the experience with a cathedral-esque echo, an ambient piece whose peace and solitude is interrupted by the mechanical rupture of a tape, complete with noise and a percussive sound that is positively barren of character. This same sound acts as the main ‘snare’ of ‘we value your continued patronage’, whose other instruments congeal into this morose, lo-fi pulp. The recording quality obscures cicadae’s words, which becomes a running theme for the rest of the album — if it’s not the building of acoustic guitar melodies punched like a ticket through the recording process, it’s the solemn moans of a lost soul rung through microscopic iron shavings that still manages to be comforting in its melancholy.
Fax Gang & Parannoul’s ‘Scattersun’
Fax Gang and Parannoul both came to prominence in the eye of the storm that was the early 2020s, one for their bitcrushed trap-pop fusioneering and one for his heartbreaking ‘emogaze’ and noise-rung guitars. In 2022, they convened for ‘Four Walls’, a collision of sound still so massive and cavernous in its scope that it betrayed its cold, depressive lyricism and acted almost as a shining light toward better futures. In the time between that bombshell of a song and now, the two acts have forged new relationships with their art. The former, finding comfort in shedding the distortion and leaning heavier into the chipper internet pop of their contemporaries — while the latter leaned further into the wash and mellow malaise of shoegaze and indie emo with a record on Topshelf Records.
‘Scattersun’ acts as a continuation of ‘Four Walls’ but opts to expand its palette to a stupefying extent — at points it sounds like a mix between soul-ish melody and tight boom bap drums while the lyrics portray an almost apocalyptic love, the type that ignores the intermittent collapse of all the other things we hold dear. Sometimes the lyricism is as upfront as the instrumental. ‘Wrong Signal’ being a psychedelic chasm of anger and political trauma, fully sober from the curtaining of unjust murder at the hands of governments and their sycophants. But even when it zeroes in on the self, there’s hints and moments of pristine beauty in its solemnity: The title track especially flips through various beautiful, almost chiptune synths and club rhythms as it chronicles the explosion of the sun. Even in this moment, PK Shellboy asks: “Will I be dead or live stronger?” It’s this question at the heart of ‘Scattersun’, and it’s left open and vague — perhaps a question asked by more than we realize.
Joy Guidry’s ‘AMEN’
Joy Guidry’s ‘Radical Acceptance’ was a free-jazz epic that wasn’t afraid to get dark and brooding even with a relatively heartfelt emphasis on self-discovery. ‘AMEN’ takes this backdrop of queer self-acceptance and adds to it a spiritual, religious layer. The sounds of New York jazzisms, Christian gospel, and Louisiana blues idiom penetrate to the core track of the album, its runtime devoted to a classic call-and-response espousing the comfort of angelic forces on your shoulders. The surrounding songs are extremely ambient, heavenly in their atmosphere and never heavy with the guilt of human, mortal quandaries. Joy’s bassoon performances, scant as they may be sometimes, are haunting to the bone and comforting to the heart. Various synth pads and electronic flourishes also await, though never tipping over into spatial tackiness or worship of synthesizer architecture, instead choosing to use electronic synthesis as a vessel for grounding the listener and exposing them as a proverbial echo of the heavens. The album is as close to God as someone like me can probably experience.
Koka Nikoladze’s ‘People’
Norwegian sound artist and contraption crafter Koka Nikoladze’s latest work was produced primarily in Final Cut Pro, a video editing software. Snipped together bangs and clanks from cardboard boxes, the common speech and hysteric wails of everyday Norwegian folk, and some duct tape on occasion. It reeks of painstaking effort and feels like the most academic possible equivalent of a YTPMV, balancing with this obtuse tiptoe of humor and splendor. It’s an earworm too, oddly enough, the marching-band-esque rhythm of “Quick. Brow-own. Fox. Jum!ps. O’er-The-Lay-Zee-Dog” becoming a self-propelling memetic hazard to anyone with an ear for funny rhythms and the inherent groove in human speech.
Lust$ickPuppy’s ‘CAROUSEL FROM HELL’
Lust$ickPuppy has the command of aesthetic and clownish horror I’d expect in a Negativland album or sarky Stephen King novel, except it’s taken toward a much more industrial, mechanical hell instead of one purely reliant on magic in its satanic splendor. ‘CAROUSEL FROM HELL’ and its nineteen-minute runtime, combined with the blistering combination of fast rapping and distorted hardcore kicks, present a lot you won’t be able to process on a preliminary listen — not to worry though, its brevity also allows for replay and reexamination. It also has a surprisingly catchy array of frenzied hooks and pulsating rhythms, the type that grow on you until “Put this pussy on the table / Make you scooch ya seat up // All you bitches starving for me / But you eat this meat up” repeats in your head ad nauseam in an uncontrollable whirlwind of simultaneous joy and fear. Come join the carnival.
opposition dolls’ ‘a burden i beg to keep…’
In the school years of 2021 and 2022, I had the pleasure of being in a public high school with a smorgasbord of artists and visionaries. Among them were a band forming with the radical aesthetics of yesteryear’s ‘riot grrrl’ movement (though this didn’t last long) — this band was the opposition dolls. The prospect of a punk band from my high school manned by women and queers was nothing short of enrapturing, to the point where I tried to find anything I could get my hands on. Tickets to shows, demos, interviews, factoids, you name it. Eventually, I graduated and wouldn’t hear from them again until a couple years later when their split with fellow Florida queer skramz act gravess reignited my passion for this band.
As such, ‘a burden i beg to keep…’ is perhaps the canary in the coalmine of Florida hardcore I needed to regain my faith in transgressive art within the state limits. The EP is shrill and manic, pained with the burden of so many different traumas and neuroses that Orion, the vocalist, can barely keep their yelps comprehensible. Every track has this push and pull between slow, sludgy gloom and frenetic distortion, complimenting the scattershot lyricism plagued by queerphobic violence and the crumbling living prospects of South Floridians.‘i can only tell you what it feels like’ and the title track are written like skramz tunes from elden years, only further electrified by their almost metallic performances and the energy of a panic attack turned violent retribution.
POLO PERKS ❤❤❤, AyooLii and FearDorians’ ‘A Dog’s Chance’
One of the funnest things about seeing new rap sounds and scenes pop out left and right is seeing how people experiment with them. POLO PERKS understands this all too well, his Surf Gang-hosted ‘PUNK GOES DRILL+**’ tape blending the then-developing sample drill sound with a refined taste in 2000s indie rock and emo. One of my friends, Zazie Bae of Rural Internet fame and Femtanyl managerial expertise, introduced me to a new sound several months back that initially perked my ears and then hooked me in like a helpless fish on their way to the surface. Milwaukee lowend, constant claps, the humorous wailing of a Certified Trapper. It took a month but I was in love. Naturally, when POLO PERKS and AyooLii dropped their fully-cleared sampling and chopping up of a Teen Suicide track, I was in love. Imagine if you told me then that there was going to be an entire fucking album of that.
Of course ‘A Dog’s Chance’ is good. The dichotomous vocal styles of POLO and AyooLii work like gangbusters on emo samples chopped and decorated with constant claps and kicks. On the couple of tracks where the two converge, the beats always circle back to this almost crunk-esque groove while the two exchange verses demonstrating their prowess effortlessly. POLO’s solo tracks are mood tracks, the type that you can dance to but that you can just as easily chill out to despite its tempo. AyooLii’s solo tracks range from exciting to manic, his performances making FearDorian’s beats his domain for espousing his brilliance (and rightfully so). ‘They Love AyoLii’ and ‘TONY SNELL’ especially reek of this nutty ecstasy, this soaring high only reachable by his ilk. I appreciate the FearDorian-starring closer as well, it brings a nice and atmospheric close to something bursting of energy at the seams.
tdstr’s ‘7 Grand Dance’
In the interview tdstr and I partook in, he claimed he didn’t want to come back to the dariacore sound for a full album until he had a concrete concept for it. This followed various diversions across multiple aliases, taking him from his most popular material on ‘Internet Brainrot’ to more traditional drum and bass, then granulizer-worship ambient, and then cyber-metal and noise fusioneering. With more than two years separating his last major advancement in the space and the present, what innovations came to light?
‘7 Grand Dance’ takes the stylistic humor and bassy flourish of dariacore and increases the ‘core’. Nary a moment goes by without a giant frenchcore kick or the aggro screech of a hardstyle stab decking you in the face — it lives and dies by the kick. With the addition of three extra beats per measure, tdstr takes pop songs and transmogrifies them into beastly compositions fit for an apocalyptic soundsystem. ‘DRKE-07’ is a stand-out track that blends the orchestral austerity of Neon Genesis Evangelion’s soundtrack with the bizarre acapella of everyone’s new favorite punching bag. The electro-psychedelic edge and nonstop sequencing lead to this sense of radical, physical alleviation, the type that I imagine a raver feels with or without the ingestion of enough drugs to kill a horse.
Honorable Mentions & Other Sidenotes
As per usual, there are certain albums and releases from these months that were incredibly important to me but that I cannot feature fully-fledged here lest it be a conflict of interest or otherwise would find not useful to write about. Please see below:
- ava online’s ‘six pack 2’
- Bring Me the Horizon’s ‘Post Human: NeX Gen’
- christtt’s ‘www’
- Ekko Astral’s ‘Pink Balloons’
- LL Cool J making this absolutely smooth ass song (‘Saturday Night Special’) that has no fucking right to be as good as it is.
- RiTchie’s ‘Triple Digits [112]’
- Ron Fleek’s ‘Menace Beach’
- Vince Staples’ ‘Dark Times’
- This SiIvaGunner shitpost from their April Fools’ event. I legitimately could not explain why.
As a personal note, I’ve been thinking about opening a Patreon or Ko-Fi or something like that. I don’t know exactly how monetizable this hobby is, because I want most of my written work to be public and not hidden behind a paywall, but if there finds a way to make money from doing something I love while still keeping everything out there, I’ll figure it out.
Thanks for reading!
