The DAA Round-up: Issue 1
Recommendations from the past three months in music
A blurbed list of some of my favorite new releases from Nov '24 to Jan '25. I'm not sure how often I'd like to do this, or if I'll even do it with any regularity, but I hope to do it again whenever my next window of time/motivation arises. Writing about this particular three-month span is nice because I get to cover the last couple months of the calendar year, which is when things typically slip through the cracks. Anyways—hope you enjoy checking some of this stuff out!
Juice Machine - The Deer (Hymns, Nov 5)
If your Floridian grandpa ever puts out a killer noise record, it'll probably come out on Hymns. Artists like Chefkirk, Hal McGee, and Ironing sit somewhere in between the heritage of '80s/'90s American noise music—with all the caterwauling pranksterism that implies—and the more restrained and deliberate playing that characterizes EAI. Juice Machine were a husband and wife duo hailing from Oregon and consisting of Roger Smith (aka Chefkirk) and Heather Chessman; their music opts for interlocking patterns of fulsome synthetic texture and rhythmic propulsion over spare, shrill tones or tidal walls of sound. It's noise music that functions as songwriting rather than as minimalist composition; in that way, it reminds me of Aaron Dilloway and Lucrecia Dalt's Lucy & Aaron. Sadly, Chessman passed away last year—a mere couple of months after recording The Deer. Juice Machine is no longer. I'm happy that this album brims with as much infectious joy and momentum as it does; it's more than capable of serving as affirmative testimony.
Germ Lattice - Gipping Through the Ages (Horn of Plenty, Nov 8)
A collection of tape-filtered non-rock jams that sounds like it could've come out on Kye in the '00s. When everything's running on a harmonic and timbral grayscale, it's crucial to keep the music moving the way Germ Lattice do; whether they're plodding at a steady pace, sustaining a drone, or letting sounds crash against the confines of a narrow frequential bandwidth, that sense of momentum is never lost.
twinalchemist - twinalchemist (self-released, Nov 28)
Thanks to a guy on Twitter named gage, I was able to feast upon a list of the best Ohio had to offer rap in 2024; this self-titled project is what hooked my ear the hardest. "GG" and "Spendabag" are driven by the irresistible propulsion of eighth-note claps à la lowend, and the verses exchanged by the duo are chock-full of the best I've come to expect from Gen Z referential wit—e.g. "I don't do the scammin' / don't call me Mr. Beast" or "like a Beyblade on your block / I'mma spin it." But the deftness of the sampling and beatcraft are a big part of what keeps me coming back over and over again: "AnOTheroNE"'s pluggy synth envelopes are simply mesmerizing, with flows alternating between mid-ranged, laidback prosody and sharper, higher melodies whose AutoTune drips with an almost bratty frustration—I really wish I knew these rappers' names… When, in the latter register, one of them yells "it's only Monday / I'm like 'what the fuck?!'" I feel that shit in my bones. The scuttling syncopation of beat and bass undergirding even more lush synthwork on "Cake" is also a real treat—a certified bounce banger for the Soundcloud kids. And "Sumslightfreestyle" is an immaculate closer that perhaps best showcases the incredible chemistry that twinalchemist have, with each rapper taking turns putting down the broke-ass/lame-ass motherfuckers you know like it's open mic at their sleepover party. Easily one of my two or three favorite rap releases of 2024 + desperately hoping for another from these two in the new year.
DJ Manny - Party All Night EP (Moveltraxx, Dec 6)
DJ Manny fucking rules. The best and most accomplished footwork revolves around the "stuttering" of the sample—i.e. (1) when the loop gets cut off and restarted in tandem with the beat, (2) the withholding of the full sample until the end of a phrase, chorus, or even the entire song. The coordination of these elements is what sets a track's dopamine flow, and each track on Party All Night is calibrated so that the climactic high points of a sample hit at all the most satisfying moments.
Conal Blake - Two Speed (Feedback Moves, Dec 16)
Two Speed's premise is too anecdotally valuable not to take brief note of: when playing live, Conal Blake set his backing track to play at half-speed by accident, without realizing this until his set was almost over. Track one of the album is this live recording, while track two is a home recording with the same backing track played at the intended speed. Blake, in the liner notes, attributes his uncertain perception of the slow-down to nerves during the performance. I think his experience speaks volumes as to the way performing something live can, in general, defamiliarize the sonic material at hand, even when it's your own; one can't help but speculate about the overlap between the phenomenology of the pitch-/tempo-shift and that of stage fright—or some other heightened affect. It's not at all uncommon for chance (mistakes included) to play a factor in live performance, but it's a lot less common to unwittingly commit to a chance decision that one ends up having to see through to the end. Knowing all this leads me to listen to Two Speed with a certain sense of precarity—one that puts me in an odd kind of solidarity with the performer who finds themself navigating the Bermuda triangle of technical error, nervous agitation, and a general ambiguity draping over the relation between intention and result. But that's the fun of the ride, isn't it?
tom soloveitzik - 麻布 diaries (Aloe Records, Dec 20)
Despite Aloe Records having only been around for two-ish years now—and despite its runner, Sun Yizhou, only being 24!—the label has quickly amassed a roster of all the most important players in the Beijing experimental music scene. 麻布 diaries is easily one of the best releases from Aloe to date. Each track feels like a complete idea that stands on its own as a meditation or experiment. The way Soloveitzik explores clarinet resonance on "七 [南麻布]" [track 1] and "八 [南麻布]" [track 3] indicates a level of control over his instrument where the frayed harmonic edges that free solo reedists typically like to exploit coexist in tension and vacillation with a traditional, clean intonation approach. On "Minato music salon room #5?" the sound of Soloveitzik plucking the reed of the clarinet itself has a delightfully metronomic cadence, conveying the deep satisfaction that can sometimes be found in the act of marking time. The sound of smooth jazz wafting in the distance captured on "[蔵王温泉] thousand eyes," the album's final cut, makes for a strangely reflexive conclusion to one's listening experience: the recording act itself occurs within a saxophone; this gesture, a classic resonance study of sorts, is used to capture a musical form that, while using the same instrument, may as well be on an opposite branch of the genealogical tree that stems from the earliest jazz. The gap in between them yawns, as do the silences that ground the rest of 麻布 diaries. But no patch of negative space on the record is entirely serene or eerie, calming or provocative, etc.—at any given point, it could be one, the other, or both. Which is, of course, the beauty of it all.
Ben Peers - Doubled (時の崖_tokinogake, Jan 11)
One of the most compelling short projects I've had on repeat this past month. Each track is carried by irregular yet highly controlled spasms of drum sequencing whose phrasing is tied to the insistent repetition of a sawn-out chord; the music stops, starts, and flows with remarkable immediacy and dramatic force. They're exercises in the best sense of the word: each articulation sharp and focused, without a single wasted breath.
ake 阿科 - ake 阿科 (Sub Jam, Jan 12)
The following blurb was originally written for issue 170 of Tone Glow.
I’m a sucker for anything from Beijing experimental circuit—many releases from which come out via Sub Jam, Ftarri, Zoomin'‘Night, Aloe Records, and a miscellany of other labels and solo Bandcamp pages. It’s a comfort zone for me. It’s not 100% predictable, but it’s a set of sounds and procedures that I never tire of as either objects of focus or sources of ambience: drones, field recordings, junkyard/DIY electronics, unconventional uses of found objects, the human voice, percussion, and reed instruments—all within an aleatory and/or hyper-minimalist framework. What I appreciate about the Beijing scene, as well as its relatives in Japan (onkyo + its legacy via the labels Improvised Music from Japan/Ftarri) and Korea (anchored by the label Balloon & Needle + the performance venue Dotolim) is a casual yet sincere commitment to both the aesthetic and democratic premises of “experimental” music. A given set-up may work or it may not, but once it’s put into motion, you might as well see it through; there’s little preciousness over a particular recording and performance, and if one doesn’t click for me, another that’s ostensibly the same in its essentials will totally captivate me. Furthermore, there’s an emphasis on the participation of untrained and non-musicians; this is especially true for the Beijing scene and Chinese experimental music at large, where some of the best stuff to come out of it can be found in open-invite “amateur” compilations like Yin Yue and there is no music from china.
All that being said, there is a perpetual threat of orthodoxy settling in—one that’s historically gone hand in hand with precarity and the staving off of disintegration, but which now comes with the novelty of attention received from international outlets and newfound collaborators, increasing stabilization of performance schedules and venues, etc. There’s always incentives to keep doing whatever it is you're doing. So even as I enjoy the consistency of output from the Beijing experimental scene, it’s nice when something that feels like a genuine mutation comes along.
This self-titled ake 阿科 record makes me feel this way. In one sense, it’s a hodge-podge of ideas and motifs from the work of others running in the same circles: vague, muffled knocking sounds on track 1; clipping mouth noises on track 5; slow-motion melodic deconstructions for voice and guitar (track 3) or toy piano (track 7)—all with varying degrees of field-recorded ambience audible in the mix. But there are subtle choices throughout that are remarkably compelling. The knocking on track 1, “how to destory the wall 如何毁掉墙,” sounds as if it’s coming from within a small closet or some other space with a high noise floor/low noise ceiling. But as the piece goes on, one can hear cars, voices, and other sounds in the distance, which, while faint, possess greater clarity. This takes the knocking sounds out of isolation and places them in ambiguous relation to a broader landscape; one gets an impression of intimacy separated from the outside world by barriers of both cognitive interiority and concrete exteriority. The most shocking and immediately enthralling piece here is “now, first 此刻，首先”—a ten-minute cut of ake (presumably) sobbing. There aren’t any other sounds to distract the listener, nor anything in the way she cries to suggest how it might be performative in some way or another. But without knowing the occasion or circumstance, there’s no other way to listen to the crying except as performance, to sit with it as sound and rhythm; it’s a beautiful experience.
The rest of the album is full of other highlights: “mismatch 不合” reminds me of a Taku Sugimoto/Minami Saeki duet, but less ethereal or plaintive and more listless or prosaic—sort of how the beauty of the rural mundane compares to its urban counterpart; the toy piano piece, “expatiate on something 对某物的详述,” is driven by a metronomic pulse that evokes an imaginary simple machine—the sort whose efficiency has undoubtedly been surpassed by some descendant technology, but whose operation brings one greater comfort and whose presence sits more organically within the domestic ecosystem. As a whole, and despite its high degree of abstraction, ake 阿科 feels like a personal record. The liner notes describe ake’s impetus toward music making as “a desire of being exist and a planty of still time, as the only valuable propoty of many people.” I think this hits on why this sort of music affects me as meaningfully as it does in its best moments and iterations. A lot of art (and a lot of product) promises stillness amidst the frantic whirl of the 21st century’s capitalist death drive. But it’s difficult to deliver on that promise, and no means of doing so can be repeated endlessly without reneging on its potential as a panacea. Even within a space that encourages mindfulness of time and the stillness of reflection, one must find ways of rethinking and reorienting one’s purview upon the steady flow and relational depth of things.
v/a - Safe Places, Pt. 1 (Swallowing Helmets, Jan 25)
A contemporary who's who from a very specific spectrum of DIY electronics, post-industrial, and murky songcraft that I vaguely intuit as descendant from (1) the transatlantic tape/noise underground of the '80s/'90s, anchored by labels like Sound of Pig, Harsh Reality Music, and Chocolate Monk; (2) the lo-fi song-oriented experimentalism of labels like Siltbreeze and Kye from the '90s/'00s. The label that best covers these domains at their straddling point is Tanzprocesz, whose catalog features many of the names from this compilation. Of course, there are many, many other labels of a similar ilk which fall under a broader lineage that allows for greater emphasis on one root or the other: Penultimate Press, Regional Bears, Krim Kram, Infant Tree, Tribe Tapes, Grisaille, New Forces, Refulgent Sepulchre, HologramLabel… If you want even more points of reference—especially for the noisier shit—check the "favorite labels" sidebar on Noise Not Music, run by the inestimably more knowledgable-than-myself Jack Davidson. To elaborate this broader historical scope would be too much, really, just because most of the DIY side of what gets called "experimental music" today, whether underground or semi-acclaimed, owes itself in substance to at least one of the branches aforementioned. To bring it all back to base: if you like the synth-ier/song-ier side of this mudcake I've been struggling to triangulate, Safe Places, Pt. 1 is an absolute buffet that manages to cover the breadth of a "scene" that, among the heirs of the experimental, is one of those that hew closest to a spirit of radical unseriousness.
Thanks again for reading! ‘Til next time…