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

sky needle: end games (bruit direct disques)

Man, oh man, it’s been a great few weeks for videos. First came Oneohtrix Point Never’s amazing (and sadly temporarily non-existent) collaborative techno-erotic exploration with Jon Rafman. Next came Tim Hecker’s exquisitely warped and washed-out gothic video for “Black Refraction,” a track from his forthcoming album Virgins. Now, viewers are presented with this little bit of genius from Brisbane’s Sky Needle.

So simple and yet so totally intense and absolutely effective, like some sort of primitive psychedelia, build, build, building to its demented Dionysian climax.

ME AH BOY THE STAR OF THE HEAD BORN A STAR YOU THAT STYLE THE FLOOR FLAWED WE ARE VILE THE GASSED OF DOOR PLAN BORED IS BY THE WAR RYE KNOW EYE WE ARE BY THE GUEST OF THE HEAD BORE A PIE THE BOAR HIGH RISE HORSE BEER OR MILES THROUGH OUT THE N I G H T BUY BILE STARTS SKY ONE WHY WHALES BE BEE OUT SIDE WALK THE…

And what are these words now but squawks of sound and passion: phlegm, lungs, loud, wind, whine, throat, thrust?

(UNINTELLIGIBLE) WE ARE SO HOT SO SOLAR…

In promotion of their latest album, Debased Shapes (out NOW on Bruit Direct Disques), Sky Needle just finished a European tour alongside Melbourne skuzz-rock act Mad Nanna. If you dig Debased Shapes, make sure you check out 2012’s Rave Cave. It’s similarly fucked up, but in the best possible way, of course.

on tmt

gil michell: no friends (this thing)

I want to call this footwork. I mean, just check that percussion. But if this is footwork, it’s certainly not a strain we’ve heard before. This particular mutation — the latest offering from Melbourne label This Thing — is deep and mellow. Beats like this have never sounded so cool, so totally chill. Seriously, this is what it’d sound like if you gave Traxman’s “Footworkin on Air” a couch, a couple of brews, and a Valium.

“No Friends” is the first single to surface from a new collaborative project between This Thing stalwarts Galapagoose (Gil) and Wooshie (Michell). And it sees them trading in their wonky, disjointed hip-hop for a much more ambient, contemplative sound. For now, the vinyl’s only available to pre-order, but I’ve already copped a listen, and man it’s good: #forserious. New territory for both artists, no doubt about it. Or maybe even just straight up new territory. New ground being — oh so cooly — trod…

on TMT

friendships: i'm an impressionist, you're dumb: a compilation of bass tracks

friendships entered the room. [1:22 AM]
tmtcrew entered the room.
squirrell_nuts entered the room.

*Type /help for a list of commands.

Friend_ships: DAMN [1:22 AM]
M I S H A: LOL [1:22 AM]
CliffOrd //M//: Hi! [1:22 AM]
Friend_ships: waaaaaaaaaa? [1:22 AM]

M I S H A: I’m an impressionist [1:23 AM]
Friend_ships: You’re dumb [1:23 AM]
JP∆rk: Ur a Drag [1:23 AM]
JP∆rk: Drop that B A A S S S S [1:23 AM]
Skinimin: word [1:23 AM]

M R P: 1am (slow release) is tiiiiiight [1:23 AM]
CliffOrd //M//: mmdammmmmnnn [1:24 AM]
RaRakin: represent [1:24 PM]
Friend_ships: who the hell is squirrel_nuts!? [1:24 AM]

TMT

scissor lock - churn (self released)

Let’s begin with that cover. Because it’s not so much a cover as a framing device. A freeze frame actually. Taken from the exuberant video to JB’s “Beauty and the Beat” just as a drop of water partly blurs his face. 

What is captured here? A number of different things, I think. In stillness, movement. In intimacy, distance. In celebrity, a void. And in the familiarity and pleasure of pop, a strangeness: a distortion.

It’s the last of these pairs that seems to interest Marcus Whale. As one half of Collarbones, and in particular on the remarkable “Hypothermia” from their second full-length Die Young, he’s been responsible for some of the freshest sounding “pop” these ears have heard in a long while. Which is to say a kind of mutant strain of it: at once totally reverent of the mainstream and, at the same time, actively subversive of it. As if to say: yes, yes, I LOVE the Biebster’s “One Time,” I really do; I love its energy and its sincere enthusiasm, but wouldn’t it be better if it sounded like this? Wouldn’t it be better if experimentalism and pop hadn’t become so antithetical? You know, like back in the day when Aaliyah and Timbaland were kicking it? Or like some of Yasutaka Nakata’s recent production work for J-Pop sensations Perfume?

Churn (free download here) is Whale’s first solo release as Scissor Lock, following an excellent early-2012 collaboration with Thomas William. It’s less direct, less upbeat than his stuff with Collarbones, but it’s no less potent. Heavily processed voices drift over slippery synths and gently skittering beats on “Outer Space.” And the sparkling, metallic drones on “Churn” and “I guess” recall Oneohtrix Point Never’s Returnal. Except, with the distant and heavily treated vocals added in for good measure, perhaps this is closer to Laurel Halo’s phenomenal Quarantine (TMT Review), yet another experiment in the sonics of posthumanity, the experience of being always already mediated. Nowhere is this clearer than on the appropriately titled “None”: a near total effacement of self, the pop mainstream’s obsession with Auto-Tune taken to its logical conclusion. 

It’s as if with Collarbones Whale was trying to show how pop could be otherwise — more interesting, more experimental. And with Scissor Lock, he’s trying to re-imagine the experimental underground through the lens of pop. Which is to say we could read the cover image to Churn exactly the other way round. Not as a distorted take on pop. Rather, the focus here is precisely on the splash of water, the distortion. That’s where our attention is being directed. And what we’re being invited to see/hear is the pop that was always latent behind it, waiting to peak through.

Originally posted on TMT here

ECO VIRTUAL: VIRTUAL大気中分析 ( Advanced Climate Research & Analysis)

Vaporwave is dead. Long live vaporwave! What does it mean when a genre reaches its maximum saturation and influence to date long after its obituary has been written? Especially when that genre is so closely related to hauntology? And when its methods are so easily replicable? Or appear to be? At what point is a replica of a genre entirely premised on the logic of the replica (which is also to say its impossibility) no longer good enough? Which of vaporwave’s many afterlives will endure? And which will fade into the ether?

By pushing the genre’s techniques in new and interesting directions, Vektroid has already begun to answer some of these questions. With ECO VIRTUAL, things are less clear. On one level, this is total vwave boilerplate, a perfect clone. And yet there’s something really nice about the conceptual integrity here (the videos, courtesy of EcoVirtualTV work particularly well). Not so much innovative as a perfect realization of the genre’s already extant associations with weather: both its corporate soundtrack and the connotations of climate, ambiance, mood alteration, biomanagement, and perhaps even the stratospheric or transcendent.

naps - 7" (self-released)

A bit behind on the ball on this one. Sorry folks. I blame the holidays. But it’s too good to miss! Melbourne producer naps first caught my attention last year with a quality little EP called earthsea on This Thing. Watery, degraded, tropical, new age… and probably other words too; it was a genuinely intriguing proposition. Well, the follow-up is even better. The territory is similar sonically: still pretty chill, but with slightly more emphasis on the loping, disjointed beats. And there’s a definite weirdness here, something slightly uncanny about the lounge-y sample (is it even a sample? does it matter? maybe!) on “kids” and both the choice and treatment of the vocal on “squai.”

I’m struggling to think of comparisons actually. Daniel Lopatin by way of Dolphins into the Future maybe? Except that there’s a definite hip-hop element here too. I’d suggest you file it alongside TMT fave ahnnu, who (not coincidentally) turns up with a whacked-out remix here. Both artists are doing exciting things in what seems to be a particularly fertile backwater of the global beat-making community that has apparently made Soundcloud its home. It’s here evidently that, as 2012 becomes 2013, new territory is being carved. But you knew that already…

Played a killer set recently for BoilerRoomTV too. Was rad.