Crystal Stilts: Radiant Door EP. Statik Selektah / Action Bronson: Well-Done. Childish Gambino: Camp. The Black Keys: El Camino. yMusic: yMusic, Beautiful Mechanical. Quilt: Quilt. Co La: Daydream Repeater. Kid Sister: Kiss & Tell EP. Yamantaka // Sonic Titan: Yamantaka // Sonic Titan. Jónsi: We Bought a Zoo OST. Desertshore: Drawing of Threes. Fred Falke: Part IV. Laura Veirs: Tumble Bee. Fennesz / Sakamoto: Flumina. The Roots: Undun. Undun is the story of a man, Redford Stevens, dying in reverse, rewinding from the moment he became a statistic and hitting the points in his life where he's at his most self-aware.
That he's a criminal who got caught up in the familiar street-hustle trappings that the modern media's documented countless times is a pivotal detail-- it's hit at an angle that seems to emphasize the futile inevitability of it all. His life could be any number of misdirected narratives that ends with a toe tag, and what details listeners learn about him are hazy, buried under archetypal turns of fate and decisive struggles. That this protagonist is a fictionalized composite of a handful of real people, filtered through a matter-of-fact narrative that splits character ambivalence with journalistic impartiality, only makes his lack of direction and the failure of any real closure stand out even more.
"Lotta niggas go to prison," Dice Raw states on "Tip the Scale", "how many come out Malcolm X? " Eddy Current Suppression Ring: So Many Things. The story goes that the members of Eddy Current Suppression Ring decided to form a band during a drunken jam at an office Christmas party.
The "office" in that scenario was the Corduroy Records vinyl pressing plant in Australia. The story's captured on their first song, 2003's "So Many Things", a track with ragged, propulsive energy; a juvenile sense of humor; sloppy vocals; and a loud, meandering organ. Wives: The Roy Tapes. Keep Shelly in Athens: Campus Martius. You'd be forgiven for thinking Planet Mu is all about twitchy, high-tempo music these days, given prominent albums from Machinedrum and Kuedo, not to mention their ongoing documentation of the Chicago footwork sound that influences those artists.
But over the past two years, the English label has placed just as much stock into warmed-over and vaguely nostalgic sounds, riffing off of chillwave and hypnagogic pop but dressing it all up in beat-oriented structures compatible with the UK bass dialogue that Planet Mu otherwise engages with. Charlotte Gainsbourg: Stage Whisper. Throbbing Gristle: Second Annual Report / D.O.A. / 20 Jazz Funk Greats / Heathen Earth / Greatest Hits. "Yea yea twist again better than we did last summer, laughing in the face of all rock and roll historians collectors revivalists purists inquisition members puritans bores creeps and not forgetting the fussy midgets with obscene hairdos.
" So wrote Claude Bessy in the liner notes to Throbbing Gristle's Greatest Hits, one of the five classic Throbbing Gristle albums Industrial Records have just reissued, and which now sit upon my desk, uncanny and accusatory, over 30 years after that pre-emptive fit of snark. Throbbing Gristle were never meant to be reliable, but here they come again, ready to be harvested by the very culture industry they alternately solicited and spat upon so long ago. Kate Wax: Dust Collision. James Holden's Border Community is a label known for its between-genre dislocation, an imprint that takes dance-music influences, warms them over on the stove, and then buries them in fuzzy pink noise.
Home to artists like Nathan Fake, Luke Abbott, and, of course Holden himself, it has a habit of drenching techno in longing nostalgia and stasis, music caught in some dimensional rift between dance and pop. It seems a likely home for Swiss artist Kate Wax then, who made her name six years ago on bizarre spoken-word electronica on Mental Groove, but whose sound has slowly gelled into something more palatable, and certainly more traditionally pop. Mac Miller: Blue Slide Park. At the 2000 VMAs, Eminem's performance of "The Real Slim Shady" featured him walking across Sixth Avenue in Manhattan and into Radio City Music Hall followed by a few hundred extras that had been styled in his image, bleached hair and all.
The performance was an arresting, and very literal, visual representation of the song's claim of there being "a million of us just like me. " Pittsburgh rapper Mac Miller is having his "'The Real Slim Shady' at the VMAS" moment right now, even if he'll never actually perform there. There are hundreds of thousands of listeners trailing him intensely-- Blue Slide Park sold just about 145,000 copes in its first week in stores, making it the first independently distributed debut album to go No. 1 in 16 years.
And the reason Miller's mass of fans follow him is not because of his music, at least not completely. It's because he looks just like them, because they can see themselves up on the stage behind him, if not next to him. Emika: Emika. The idea of a British-born, blue-eyed Berlinite turning Aaliyah's "Try Again" into an industrial-dub robot dirge seems pretty suspect.
But somehow, 25-year old Bristol-bred Emika pulls off "Common Exchange" with flying Grisaille colors. Chalk its success up to the electronic composer/sound designer's belief that life and dance music alike are fatally boring when you stick to the blueprint. This Mortal Coil: HDCD Box Set.