end-of-year-ism and the 'best' of 2014 with PC

Musings with PC on endofyearism and the best of 2014 over at Far Side Virtual #pbs

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oneohtrix point never: r plus seven (warp)

R Plus Seven is Daniel Lopatin’s fourth full-length release under the Oneohtrix Point Never moniker, and his first for the pioneering Warp Records. It’s a perfect home for him. There are few artists currently working whose output has been as restlessly forward thinking: even as it is also heavily referential and thoroughly postmodern. Pulling off that balance has been Oneohtrix Point Never’s greatest trick: to make music that is at once overtly conceptual and yet thoroughly listenable.

Slowly but surely over the course of the last 5 years, Lopatin has increasingly moved away from his roots in ambience and noise. Whereas 2011’s Replica was an unsettling collage of vocal fragments, fractured loops and hazy half-memories, R Plus Seven finds Lopatin working primarily with ‘generic’ synth-sounds and presets. From the canned pipe-organ that opens the record, to the ready-made strings and choirs, arpeggiators and e-pianos that feature throughout, somehow Lopatin is able to carve out something strange and exquisite. As if to say, these distinctions we like to make between generic and authentic, prefab and original, banal and transcendent are less clear cut than we often imagine. There is real beauty even in the apparently mundane, just as the unique and soulful quickly resolves itself into monotonous convention. Even Mozart used presets, after all. It’s just that he called his an orchestra.

Originally posted at PBS106.7fm

ital: dream on (planet mu)

If you’d asked me a year ago which artists best exemplified the state of the contemporary avant-underground, I’d have said Daniel Lopatin and James Ferraro, and left it that. No doubt about it. Today, I’d want to add Daniel Martin-McCormick to the list. 

While mainstream pop is busy converging on a single mutant mega-genre — euro-dance, feat. R&B, feat. hip-hop, feat. rock, feat. euro-dance, feat. R&B — elsewhere the name of the game is radical eclecticism and artistic self-difference. Multiple projects and personae. #keeponmoving @changenotevolution. N E V E R S E T T L E. And the attitude always seems very deliberate, studied. The musical sensibility I’m getting at here always seems to have an agenda. This is the era of the concept musician, the PhDJ and their necessary foil the academicritic.

Look how perfectly Daniel Martin-McCormick fits this bill. He first made a name for himself between 2001 and 2004, releasing two excellent records with the post-hardcore turned free-improv and general freakout five-piece Black Eyes. After that, his next project was Mi Ami. Initially Mi Ami did post-punk, though with more than a passing interest in dub. But by 2011’s Dolphins, the group had discarded the paraphernalia of rock entirely, trading in their guitars for “ancient drum machines, a sampler that runs on floppy disks, and the simplest keyboard presets imaginable” (TMT Review). The result was a kind of dystopic, ultra lo-fi electro-pop that, although it was clearly indebted to old-school house and disco, nevertheless wore its own lack of roots in the dance tradition firmly on its sleeve. And if this were true sonically, it was even more obvious visually. When Mi Ami made the shift to Not Not Fun offshoot 100% Silk for their most recent effort Decade, it made perfect sense.

In fact, Martin-McCormick’s association with Not Not Fun had already been established for some time as Sex Worker, probably his weirdest project to date (which is saying something). And when the Ital moniker emerged in 2011 on a series of EPs for 100% Silk, there were mumblings right from the very start that maybe this was an artist we’d heard from before. If it was hard to tell, that’s because this was the first time Martin-McCormick had abandoned his trademark squawk, hitherto the only continuity between the various projects. Moreover, this wasn’t just a surface level difference. It signaled that for the first time Martin-McCormick might be interested in making straight-ahead dance music rather than some sort of semi-ironic commentary on it. Not “hipster house,” just house. And by 2012, he had duly made the move to the estimable Brighton-based electronic label Planet Mu.

In another era, that’s probably where this brief synopsis would have ended. In 2012, it’d be wrong of me not to mention Martin-McCormick’s regular (and high-quality) output as a critic for Dusted magazine as well. Look at the records he’s reviewing. Look at his favorites of 2010 and 2011. This is a guy who’s not just listening to but theorizing exactly the same stuff we are. Which is to say E V E R Y T H I N G: noise, dubstep, techno, punk, footwork, hip-hop, African disco, reggae, Colin Stetson, Matthew Herbert, Cooly G, Laurel Halo, Hype Williams, and plenty of Oneohtrix Point Never. And it’s fascinating to notice, for instance, that Martin-McCormick reviewed Planet Mu’s superb original Bangs & Works compilation shortly before signing to the label and suddenly injecting a heavy dose of footwork into his own sound. The result, “Doesn’t Matter (If You Love Him)” from February’s formidable Hive Mind (TMT Review) is for my money one of the standout tracks of 2012. The fact that “Privacy Settings” follows only two tracks later is testament both to the depth of Martin-McCormick’s talent and to the breadth of his artistic vision. “Privacy Settings” offers four of the darkest, most unsettling minutes you’re ever likely to experience. Footwork this ain’t.

It’s this diversity that makes Martin-McCormick such a tantalizing proposition. You get the sense that anything goes with him; that’s he totally unalloyed to genre; that he could go anywhere or do anything next; that none of the rules apply except when he wants them to, except when he’s deliberately invoking and exploiting them; that having already tried his hand at punk, noise, and improv — and admirably so — on his next album he might simply abandon electronica entirely and move on again.

He didn’t. Not this time at least...

head here for the rest of the review.

and i did a bit of an artist focus on dmm on my radio show here if you fancy some high quality listening

will guthrie: sticks, stones and broken bones (antboy)

I’m in awe of this record and in awe of the guy who made it. It dropped into my inbox one day a few months back with a view to giving it a spin on this radio show I do, and I was immediately impressed. The musicianship, the sheer muscular intelligence of Will Guthrie’s technique, the raw immediacy of 40 minutes spent engrossed with nothing but a man and his drums. It’s not just that the record’s good (and it is); the values it seemed to embody felt really unfamiliar and exciting to me as a result of the kind of soundworld I’ve been inhabiting recently.

Don’t get me wrong. I won’t be arguing the now infamous Julia Holter line that aesthetic merit is somehow commensurate with or proportional to artistic labour. We all know the virtues of the aleatoric, the ‘unskilled,’ the rough-around-the-edges. But I will say this: there is and always will be something impressive about technique — the beauty of chops hard-won, a body rigorously disciplined and spectacularly in tune with an obviously sharp mind. Give me a run-of-the-mill post-bop gig — keys, fingers, and sticks flailing, performers’ bodies lost to the propulsive groove, heavy breathing — any day of the week over its drone, minimalist or chillwave equivalent. Or at least for the time being anyway. A couple of months back, Sticks, Stones and Breaking Bones was exactly the record I needed...

Full review here.

And I'm excited to report that Will will be in the studio next week on my radio show on Melbourne's PBS 106.7fm spinning some of these tracks, along with a bunch of other current faves and influences.