Hello! Catching up on past broadcast tracklists…again! 😓 Been wondering what that one song was on that past show? Why didn’t you just Shazam it? Well, in any case, I’ve got ya covered. This week we’re looking back at April’s Joker Mode broadcast and May’s special two-hour After After Hours show with a guest mix on hour one by my long-time e-pal, whom I’ve known since the Tumblr years (as early as 2009, if memory serves!), the *John Travolta voice* WiCKedLY talented, one and only, Vida Beyer. <3
In April, I made like The Creation of Adam by reaching across the way to my omnipresent teen self to go ~my particular flavor~ of Joker mode, which manifested as a brooding hour doused in cavernous reverb and strung along by fuzzy, downtuned guitars, atmospheric downbeats, and melancholic vocals. Gregg Araki soundtrack vibes, kinda.
Now that the temperature is dropping in San Diego, this one is looking like a good one to curl up in again. When I put this together it was in stark contrast to my cheerful spring surroundings. The superbloom was in full effect, with bright yellow flowers sprouting up along the sides of the highways, but I was in a, uh, superdoom state of mind, or something.
In retrospect, it’s clear to me that this whole mix is built upon the foundational soundtrack to my teenage NINcel years. And, hey, surpreez surpreez, “Closer (Deviation)”, a NIN remix by Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto is included in the brooding stew. Dangers’ takes the familiar tune and dips it in his distinctively ominous and layered production style, replete with groovy, clattering percussion, textural sweeps, and dark, driving synthlines.
A sense of foreboding and introspection permeate the hour. The commencing industrial auguries of Baths’ “Earth Death” and the discordant percussion in Lakuna’s “The Veil” are balanced by moments of somber sensuality, with tracks like Crustation’s “Close My Eyes”, Heather Duby’s “You Loved Me”, and Hysterical Love Project’s “Sever/Strike”.
The mix concludes with one of my frequently played closers, “Choice” by Outcast (not to be confused with OutKast), which was a trip hop project by producers Beaumont Hannant and Richard Brown. This track, and a few others on Out of Tune, the only full-length release the duo put out, features vocals from Kirsty Yates of Insides, one of my all-time favorite duos. I admire the complexity of emotion conveyed through Yates’ hushed vocals. Set against the sounds of strong, shifting wind patterns and complemented by incisive lyrics, her voice wields a subtle but potent seductiveness, even as it communicates a sense of vulnerability and uncertainty. It’s a really powerful track.
Throw this one on the next time it rains or if you need a little sulk. 🐌
May 31, 2023 - After After Hours with Special Guest Vida Beyer
Vida Beyer is an interdisciplinary artist who excels at expressing complex, intimate feelings and experiences through an idiosyncratic visual language of pop culture signs and symbols. Their work, which takes shape across mood boards, essays, phone notes, playlists, embroidery, painting and so many other forms, possesses a commanding vitality that makes for a joyful experience to behold. The work they’ve created and shared over the years makes me feel like I’ve been granted a noble privilege to enter a private world full of secrets and special messages for my heart to decode. I am chuffed we were able to collaborate on this show, even if through a distance as a sort of call and response project.
Vida provided May’s ‘After After Hours’ theme and created the beautiful art for the show. “The songs I was arranging were songs that felt small and intimate and like they were being sung to you close, late at night or early in the morning,” they wrote to me over email. “A lot of them are confessional or explore a sort of longing/fantasy space that exists when a person is not totally waking or sleeping.”
When I listened to Vida’s mix and was thinking about how I wanted to approach my own to complement theirs and the overall theme, I considered it a rest stop of sorts. It was a welcome break along my sustained journey to plumb the depths of electronica. So, on the second hour, I strung together a handful of not-strictly electronic songs that have, over the years, been there to help soothe my soul, or otherwise accent the sleepy, red-eyed experience of being the only person awake during the small hours of the night.
Another blend suitable for this autumn. Big thank you to Vida for all their patience and thoughtfulness that went into this show. It means a lot!
Enjoy the music. ♩
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Since Angel Pen is described as a “cyber diary of love”, I’ve decided to create a new section of this newsletter called Love Notes. This is the first installment. Hi! >ᴗ< Under this header I’ll wax on things I’m enjoying in a low pressure, casual way and (hopefully) won’t feel an internal demand to write a whole damn in-depth analytical dissection about something to the point of stagnation or burnout, as evidenced by the tumbleweeds that have been drifting by for too long on here. Let’s goooo:
Right Here, Right Now: Is there a chance for a big beat revival?
TransFX (TFX) - Biggest Baddest Beatest (2023)
I’m very hyped to have received a test pressing of Biggest Baddest Beatest, the new big beat effort by the formerly Olympia-based, soon-to-be Los Angeles-based TFX, in advance of its slated November 20 release.
In a piece published in The Guardian in 2008, Damian Harris, Skint boss and co-founder of the Big Beat Boutique club night, wrote of the subgenre, “It started as a breath of fresh air, exciting and liberating, and ended up like the loud, annoying drunken bloke you really wish would leave the party.”
Big beat is misunderstood, that’s for sure. It has fallen by the wayside as it was once known. Today, the high-octane style of big beat is commonly lampooned as music set to any footage of a hacker typing furiously on a keyboard cracking into encrypted portals thanks to The Matrix soundtrack and that “You wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy commercial, and the funkier offerings à la “Ooh La La” by The Wiseguys likely puts most in mind of late 90s-mid 2000s comedy film trailers with a voiceover telling us to “Meet Steve, he’s just a regular guy”.
As I see it, big beat is the missing link between electronica/sample-based music (acid house, dnb, jungle, breakbeat, hip hop) and rock. But even that definition is reductive and excludes the extent of plunderphonics and music history juxtaposed and integrated within it. It’s a style that does not take itself seriously. It is carefree, it is chaotic, it is a live wire whipping around, inviting you to test your own limits, of physicality and humility, on the dance floor. As far as sampling goes, anything and everything is up for grabs. Cha-cha, jazz, chopped up news soundbites? Chuck it all in the stew and see if people move to it. The more surprising and transformative the blend of wild and disparate sources, the better, seems to be at least one of the aims for most producers. Big beat lived loud, hard, and fast. As a result, it died young and has ultimately been dismissed as a flash in the pan.
The big 3 (Fatboy Slim, The Prodigy, Chemical Brothers) spilled out of the underground and into the international mainstream where the hallmarks of the sound became commercialized, workaday and, therefore, cringe. The world moves on. Then freaks like me come along to make a case for its redemption.
Also enter Biggest Baddest Beatest in 2023.
It’s an exuberant exercise in playing with big beat’s sonic syntax. Among sundry other samples from 60s psychedelic pop to dialogue from Barbershop, Biggest Baddest Beatest is a tapestry of turn of the millennium memories. Chris McDonnell, TFX frontman, uses nostalgia as a vehicle for exploring the mainstream music landscape of the past by cutting and pasting together the ‘good parts’ of tossed-off one-hit wonders and overplayed earworms into an exciting recombinant collage. The result allows listeners to revisit those moments in music history when these tracks dominated music video blocks like TRL and infiltrated our collective consciousness on car rides to school or during mall hangs. It serves as a reminder of the emotions and memories tied to them. I’m trying not to over-intellectualize here, but I think, besides the ultimate goal of getting you to dance, the album invites reflection on the commercial aspect of music and how that affects the life cycle of a particular song—that is, how a song gets burnt out. TFX gives those songs a new place to live.
“8 Big, Bad, Beats. All recorded using the AKAI S5000 to 1/4" tape of all things. No CPU, no problems. Made with love for all of y'all. On a Fatboy tip,” read the record’s liner notes on Bandcamp. The Fatboy Slim influence on the record is heavy and BBB hits many of the intricacies Norman Cook explored in the 90s. In a true homage to Cook, McDonnell samples from some of the artists sampled on Fatboy tracks. Just as Cook lifted vocals from the Lizard King on “Sunset (Bird of Prey)”, TFX borrows the chugging guitar riff from The Doors’ “Peace Frog” on “(Workin’ That) Hard Time Floor”. As I write this, there are two singles available for streaming so far, the punchy, stuttering “The Drip” and the twangy “Good Time”, which takes American country singer Alan Jackson on an acid trip through the cowtowns of old TV westerns.
My favorite off the record is the sassy “B!tch”, a track that ingeniously samples (past Fatboy Slim collaborator) Macy Gray's "Slap a Bitch" and infuses it with a disco energy reminiscent of Basement Jaxx. A clever twist here is turning up the pitch on "She's Not There," which transforms the Zombies into a harmonious 60s girl group. Driven by a groovy bassline, it's a fun track that had me bopping around in front of my turntable. I can’t wait to play it out.
By mashing together elements of junk food radio jams, TFX invites us to rediscover the charm of the guitar melody in CrazyTown’s “Butterfly” (itself built out of a fraction of RHCP’s “Pretty Little Ditty) or the cascading scales in Coldplay’s “Clocks”. These songs may have been dismissed as disposable or annoying in their original forms, but TFX’s approach breathes new life into them beyond mechanisms for passive consumerism. Listening to BBB is like watching the competing chefs on Chopped turn random ingredients into a meal. It takes a breadth of taste and strategy to craft something both versatile and solid. Beyond the technical skill involved, the true demonstration of expertise behind a project like this is having a broad sense of musical knowledge and the context necessary to juxtapose and reappropriate elements in a way that sheds new light on a bygone era, lest it become junk food itself. Another thing, it can’t be too in love with its cleverness and obscurity, or else it risks becoming overwrought and loses the fast and loose energy of the sound’s underground roots, which is something I think TFX manages to avoid on BBB.
What do we think? Time for a big beat reappraisal? Have the beats rocked my block off? In a way, big beat is an approximate to fractal and frenetic meme video edits, nightcore remixes, and the general diverted attention landscape we currently inhabit. Could this translate to a new generation’s appreciation for the sound? Idk.
I don’t know if I can convince anyone to appreciate big beat. You have to hear it for yourself.
You can preorder Biggest Baddest Beatesthere. While you’re at it, listen to Daisies and past TransFX releases!
Come and knock on our door
Speaking of big beat, Aaron and I have been watching Spaced, a show that heavily features tons of big beat and funky breakbeat tracks. Written and created by Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson, Spaced is a half-hour British sitcom that ran from 1999-2001. It follows two strangers, Tim and Daisy, who meet in a cafe and eventually decide to pose as a “professional couple” in order to secure a flat in London’s competitive housing market.
It’s been fun collecting tracks and IDing faves while watching. Big beat is an appropriate style to soundtrack the antics of quirked up layabout 20-somethings and the cartoonish, larger-than-life plots they are thrown into. Most of that music was being made by UK producers so it makes sense how dominant it is in a show exploring urban London living. Not to mention the music is a dynamic complement to Edgar Wright’s zippy directing and editing styles with his signature dolly zooms, extreme close-ups, whip pans, and wipes. Wright’s visual gags and references to pop culture are a cinematic analog to the sampladelic nature of big beat.
I first binged the series during a depressive state in my early twenties so I basically feel like I’m watching it again for the first time. Although, I did remember the bits about Colin the dog most. Not very far into my rewatch, but here are a few of my favorite tracks to get you sorted:
The All Seeing I - Beat Goes On
Love the stuttering loop effect on the vocal sample from Sonny & Cher’s “The Beat Goes On”.
The High Llamas - Homespin Rerun (Cornelius Remix)
Off-kilter exotica, fat 303 squelches, and the soothing sound of ocean waves. High Llamas are one of those groups that I always mean to zone further, but just never make time for. Need to rectify that. This track is remixed by Cornelius, though, and his signature sparkling chirps, space-age beeps, and time-stretched snares are all prominently featured.
Additionally, on an Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg tip, I rewatched Shaun of the Dead, and something interesting to note is that Shaun and Ed’s flat is full of Ninja Tune posters. I found this article on DJ Food’s website that identifies and gives some context to the set dressing.
My favorite is the Funki Porcini Fast Asleep poster. See? All this electronic shit wasn’t just some niche thing, it was a MOVEMENT!
Where were you in ‘95?
Halloween has come and gone. For much of my young adult life I avoided several scary movies, but Aaron has put me on to so many horror films that I’ve become a bit of a horror film snob. At this point I’m in a position of having watched most of the classics & “good ones” that now I’m snuffling along in search of forgotten and underrated horror films like an animal hunting for crumbs in the cracks of the floorboards.
I watched a lot of new-to-me horror this season, among my favorites were Cronenberg’s Rabid, James Watkins’ The Woman in Black, James Bond III’s Def by Temptation, and Clive Barker’s Lord of Illusions. The latter is what I want to bring to the table in this edition of Love Note.
This Halloween, we watched Clive Barker’s 1995 film, Lord of Illusions. Ever since I watched Hellraiser for the first time a few years ago, I’ve been meaning to read Barker’s stories. Having done so might have provided me with a bit more context for Lord of Illusions. Loosely based on Barker’s short story “The Last Illusion” and set in a place where glamor and grime collide —Los Angeles!—Lord of Illusions follows P.I. Harry D’Amour. When we meet D’Amour he’s a bit shaken up from a harrowing exorcism case, but he takes on a tax fraud case in LA thinking it’ll be a vacation. Soon enough he is thrust into supernatural conflict and danger when the guy he’s supposed to tail unwittingly leads him into a seamy, secret society of magicians, illusionists, and indiscriminate henchmen.
But D’Amour specializes in cases dealing with the occult, so not much fazes him. As I was watching, I wasn’t personally drawn in by Scott Bakula’s portrayal of a Phillip Marlowe-type character. Upon reflection, I must admit that his made-for-TV face adds to the pulp world-building of the film. Bakula’s D’Amour is somewhere between Columbo and a Jersey side character in The Sopranos. Barker deemed him perfect for the role. In any case, it’s unfair of me to compare any modern hardboiled anti-hero to Elliott Gould’s Marlowe in The Long Goodbye.
Anyway, I’m digressing. I’m not trying to focus much on the film’s story or the plot as much as I am invested in expressing my appreciation for the practice of casting Los Angeles as a robust character. It serves as an effective documentation of ideas, lifestyles, perspectives, and the physical space in a particular point in time. I am also interested in presenting a li’l thought digest based on its mise-en-scène and how it influences characterization and fleshes out the world of a film.
Barker and his production team did an excellent job at drawing out the skeevy undertones of LA. Take for instance the way Los Angeles is introduced. After accepting the case in LA, the camera pans to D’Amour’s New York apartment window. It’s a rainy day in New York. The blinds fade in over a sequence of static shots of iconic LA landscapes: palm trees lining the roads against a bright blue sky; a panoramic view of the Santa Monica Pier; a view of DTLA, smog overhead on a temperate day; an interaction with a young hotel valet driver with frosted tips. D’Amour has arrived, but not before looking up and catching sight of a billboard advertising a show by Swann (a famous illusionist/important figure he will encounter later) and remarking, “Oh, LA,” and punctuating it by donning his sunglasses.
We cut to night and land on a tight, voyeuristic shot: a saucy scene through a motel window. A naked man is dancing with two topless call girls. A smutty reality contrasting the travel brochure idealism of Los Angeles tourism. As the sequence progresses, D’Amour follows his investigation subject and descends further into the underground with a dreamlike flow.
Later in the film, there is one particular shot of the sun setting over the city where you can nearly feel the heat radiating off the screen and smell the thickness of the air. A hazy red fog hangs over and vanishes into the darkness descending upon the skyline. It’s kind of a bad trip in a good way. Oh, LA. <3
Obviously, costumes are a huge part of characterizing a film’s players but equally as important are the environments in which they inhabit. The dominant visual style in the film is describable as “whimsigoth[ic]”, a term coined by Evan Collins, architectural designer and cofounder of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, to describe the aesthetic style of the late 80s and early 90s decor influenced by whimsical and gothic imagery and Romantic design elements. Spindly wrought-iron bannisters, ornamental brass, tarot iconography, jesters, the sun, the moon, the stars. There’s a lot of that at play in the film. It’s enchanting but also so dramatic there’s a foreboding edge to it.
Maybe it’s due to budget constraints, but everything is presented in a way that suggests the characters, especially the illusionist Swann and the cadre of magicians at the Magic Castle, are striving for sophistication. In Swann’s case, his living space demonstrates that his fortune went to his head, became a distraction, and left little room for taste. The set design choices make his world comes across chintzy, aspirationally materialistic, and reminiscent of a cheap porno backdrop. The film’s color palette is dominated by dusty, muddied jewel tones. One can look at jewel tones as the maturation of a color from its simplest state. Think of mixing colors: adding a hint of black provides depth to a hue. This can suggest a ripening, and signify sensuality, wisdom, and elegance. As with real jewels, jewel tones tend to pair well with metallics and neutrals, like the black and white checkered floor in Swann’s foyer.
A hanging sun decoration unlocked core memories of the numerous decorative sun and moon objects my mom and my aunt had in their homes in the 90s. Why was celestial imagery so popular during this time in North America? Is it really something as simple as an increase in NASA space shuttle programs inspiring collective wonder into the great beyond, or a saturation of witchy and supernatural media? I also am reminded of the glow-in-the-dark stars I’d fall asleep under on my ceiling.
It made me and Aaron long for the mystery and wonder felt in the photography of Walter Wick, famous for his elaborate collages for the I Spy book series and for designing the album art for Cocteau Twins’ Four-Calendar Café. What inspires that sense of curiosity? Maybe it’s the hazy, dreamlike quality of the spreads. Maybe it’s the sensory overload aspect. All of these bits and bobs with their tiny, intricate details divorced from their intended uses scattered about. So many items to process, identify, and categorize. What effect does it have on our minds?
It’s probably because I was only a kid, but the spiritual and occult felt more cryptic and elusive back then, even if it was super-commodified. Chalk it up to the last few years before the Internet became more accessible?
All of this to say that this style of set decoration, which I’ve previously noted in two other films released in 1995, Tom Noonan’s The Wife and Patricia Rozema’s When Night is Falling, offers us an unabashed peer into a specific sphere of Western upwardly mobile “adult contemporary” lifestyles characterized by a polished, worldly-cum-academic, and lavish interior design. I appreciate films with an attention to details like this because it can provide insights into the trends and values of a culture at a particular time and place.
I realize that this fascination and fixation is a nostalgic impulse harkening back to my childhood conception of what adulthood looked like. I can’t help it, some of these design elements fed aspirations to my developing mind. And Famke Janssen in this film is so emblematic of the handsome modern woman I thought I would mature into. See also: the woman in this old Moto Razr commercial lmao.
This wasn’t as quick and casual as I thought it’d be. Thanks so much if you read this far. I have a huge back catalog of things to write about and post on here, including an interview I’ve yet to transcribe (out of a reluctance to listen back to my own voice and a lack of time to focus on the task) that I conducted at the beginning of this year with an absolute electronica legend and the head of one of my favorite labels. Stay tuned. I tend to feel really energized around this time of year, so hopefully I can keep up this momentum—maybe a li’l less wordy next time. Cheers! <3
Hallo! It’s time for another double installment of Rare Charm track IDs. On deck are February’s Blue Valentine Special—equipped with more listener-submitted voicemail confessions of love so if you enjoyed last year’s mix, then you’re in for another treat— and March’s spotlight on one of my favorite record labels, Bungalow from Germany.
If this is your first time learning about Rare Charm’s Blue Valentine Specials, I’ll give ya a quick rundown!
First I send out a prompt in advance of the broadcast calling for listeners or friends of listeners (anyone who is game, really!) to call the Blue Valentine hotline (just a Google Voice number) and spill their guts anonymously.
Participants are encouraged to profess their love for their crush, vent about an ex, gush about their current relationship, etc, etc— no limits, as long as messages aren’t wildly hateful. I download all the messages and then incorporate them into the mix of music in a way that I hope is funny, cathartic, and beautiful. Et voilà!
The second annual Rare Charm Blue Valentine Special didn’t go hard with the glitchy IDM this time, mostly went with straightforward love songs or telephone-themed songs. The mix truly speaks for itself, so I’ll let you listen back and make up your own mind about it.
And thank you HEAPS if you submitted a voice message. I’m always afraid I’m never going to have enough to fill out the whole two hours, but the people delivered and I’ll never be able to thank everyone enough for being brave enough and open to participate. <3333
March 29, 2023 - Bungalow Special
Bungalow Records, the innovative German pop + electronica label, was founded in Berlin in the 90s by dj duo Holger Beier and Marcus Leisenfeld aka Le Hammond Inferno. The label offered listeners a refreshing departure from the apathy they perceived in the German music scene at the time. One of the ways they accomplished this was by traveling and sourcing music from around the world, as well as hidden corners of their homeland, to bring a renewed sense of humor and playful spirit to the dancefloor.
March’s show features a survey of artists they signed and licensed from other countries across various releases, compilations, and mixes, including the beloved Sushi 3003 + 4004 comps which played a significant role in introducing Shibuya-kei/Happy Charm Fool Dance Music (HCFDM) to an international audience. Listen back for a global blend of indie clubpop, electroclash, and big beat infused with elements of hip hop, chanson, lounge, space-age pop, and disco beats from Mexico to Japan back to Germany and beyond.
I was already familiar with quite a few releases on the label’s roster (big fan of Le Hammond Inferno and the Sushi compilations, of course!), but putting this mix together afforded me the opportunity to dig even deeper into their catalog. One of my favorite discoveries is Manos Arriba!, a compilation of tracks from Mexico’s electro scene during the early 2000s. It was hard for me to decide which track I wanted to use off the comp before deciding on Natos’ “Danzón-era”, a bombastic and brass-heavy banger with a squiggly liquid bassline.
My other favorite was Stereo De Luxe’s Glam-O-Rama. Although I featured the track “Lipstick”, a groovy little number with big HCFDM spirit, I had been laughing my head off for weeks over “Lincoln Continental” and its roast of American politics, cuisine, and capitalism. Kind of regret I didn’t go with that one, but you can listen to it here:
I also cannot fail to mention how much I love Dauerfisch’s “Bitte gehen Sie Weiter” which somehow manages to convey a wistfulness along with an upbeat sense of resolve without the tinges of melancholy taking over.
Along my trawl, I came across a zip file of the label’s 100th release, RISIKO 100, on archive.org, but no need to download it as a kind YouTuber uploaded it all last year.
RISIKO 100 was a giant compilation of greatest hits. It was pressed as a 12” and also released in a CD + DVD bundle featuring music videos from artists on the label which you can watch above. Included is a very sweet ‘Making of RISIKO 100’ featurette around the 1:47:23 mark which lets us peer into Bungalow HQ, the creation of the comp’s cover art, and some of the faces behind the label.
I don’t care if it’s a faux pas to share this because it meant a lot to me that Holger Beier was supportive of the mix. I really admire what Beier and Leisenfeld achieved through Bungalow. Their legacy lives on in all of the beautiful, bonkers music they created and championed.
🟡🟡🟡🟢🟢🟢🔵🔵🔵 🟡🟡🟡🟢🟢🟢🔵🔵🔵 🟡🟡🟡🟢🟢🟢🔵🔵🔵
Enjoy the music. ✤
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Rare Charm airs every last Wednesday of the month at 8pm PT on particle.fm ♪
🪩 LIL LOCAL GIG ANNOUNCEMENTS 🪩
I don’t have any flyers available yet but I will use this space to plug that I will be going b2b with my partner, Aaron Pretty, with an all-vinyl set at Part Time Lover on Friday, June 2—expect international electronica. Then on June 25 we are hosting ⓢⓞⓐⓟ, San Diego’s premier blissed-out night of chill-out, lounge pop, and cyberdelic grooves, at Whistle Stop with special guest dj Atrevido*, who tells me he’s going to bring out some UKG and pop remixes. 🤫
Guess you’ll just have to show up on the dance floor to find out for sure!
*If you’re in Seattle, be sure to catch Atrevido tearing it up at Kremwerk with JENNGREEN on Friday, May 19.
Life has been a little nuts lately which hasn’t left me with much time to dedicate toward tracklist upkeep (not that anyone has gotten on my case about it!), but I’ve been chipping away at it when I do find the time. In this dispatch you can listen back to the last Rare Charm of 2022 and the first Rare Charm of 2023, which are on opposite sides of the energy spectrum: a fun party mix and a chilled-out blend ripe for personal introspection.
For this show I pulled together electropop, Eurohouse, indie dance, and some new-ish tracks that draw from such styles for a two-hour blend of euphoric late 90s & new millennium sounds. 💠 A little sultry 🥂, a little sleazy 🦪, a little silly 🍧; a fun lil mix to groove to made just in time for NYE, but also perfect for a house party or getting ready to go out on the weekend ! 🪩🎊
I have to say, listening back to this mix three months later and I have some conflicting feelings about it. 🥴 I can definitely stand to practice blends, for one. Sometimes I get lucky with tracks that have intros and outros that are easy to layer. But if I’m able to land a smooth transition, 7 times out of 10 it was probably out of my control. It’s my biggest djing insecurity. On a more positive note, I’m confident about my selections; I appreciate the pacing here and had a blast hearing all the tracks again, some of which I had forgotten I’d thrown in (Italian duo Jollymusic’s “Disco Disco”, for example). I think it’s nice when you can surprise even yourself. Or maybe I should be concerned about short-term memory loss…
I am happy to report that I now own a 12” of Milky’s “In My Mind” which I am definitely going to try to work in a set whenever I play out again.
That Shinichi Osawa track is such a banger. The perfect climax to end on and leave you and your friends basking in the afterglow of a celebration.
Bonus: check out this video of Osawa turning up at an Apple store in Shinsaibashi, Osaka in…~2007?
January 25, 2023 - Brenda Chenowith Special
January’s Rare Charm was dedicated to the complicated and seductive Brenda Chenowith portrayed by Rachel Griffiths in HBO’s Six Feet Under—one of the first prestige American television shows, along with The Sopranos. However, it doesn’t seem to carry the same level of cache the latter does, presumably because of the heavy subject matter. It’s definitely worth a watch as a cultural document in television history, for music-hunting purposes (lots of good downtempo stuff!), and an insight into the ways Americans handle death and grief. Plus, it’s funny in its own right.
~2 hours of new age 🕉, Latin 💃🏻, chillout 🧘🏻, and alt rock 🎸tracks used throughout the series that are reflective of Brenda and her inner & outer worlds, whether she’s alone, with friends, with her family, or in intimate moments with Nate—or other lovers. 🫢
The only track that was not featured on the show is the excerpt of “Porno 3003” by Pizzicato Five. This was a cheeky inclusion after Aaron had pointed out to me that the strings bore a striking resemblance to the series’ main title theme composed by Thomas Newman. It’s sexy and slinky and I thought it fit into Brenda’s world so I didn’t feel too bad about not adhering so strictly to my own mix prompt.
I love how music in film and television adds another layer to the characterization of on-screen roles. Not only does it help the viewer understand a character’s mental and emotional states but since much of the music you hear in Brenda’s scenes is diegetic, this calls attention to her character’s nuanced taste 😙🤌 (which I feel is something you rarely see executed with sophistication in media these days) and, as a result, strengthens the realism of the character by developing her as a convincing person.
I’ve been working my way through a rewatch of the series for the first time since I was in high school, which was 16 years ago! The complete DVD box set with the tiny headstone on a thin layer of AstroTurf on the hefty cube-shaped package was my reward for good grades my junior year. Aaron had never watched it, so it’s been nice to revisit characters and plotlines through his eyes in addition to viewing it through a more matured lens. 🧐
Aaron helped with the cover art graphics for this show btw. <3
Enjoy the music. ✽
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If you've kept up with his work or heard any of his mixes, then you know Mike Silver, better known as CFCF, is a deep listener and attentive to the relationship between sound and image. From the diversity of styles his discography explores down to the album design, CFCF aims close to the heart of music’s aspirational aspects, the worlds it promises, and ideas it sells to us. He's ventured into modern classical and UK garage and delivered on Balearic beats and the divorced dad sounds of confessional adult contemporary, and many sounds in between. He absorbs influences from the past then combines them with his own contemporary sensibility and perspective to create thoughtful reflections on music as a product of consumption, a source of pleasure, a means to process emotions.
Take, for instance, Radiance & Submission (2015), which presents a hybrid of transportive folk, jazz, and new age landscapes that synthesize ideas about ambient music's function as complex texture, something more than just background music. Radiance & Submission's cover art features a painting by Japanese artist Matsudo Matsuo. Dark figures huddled over in reverent or grief-like poses contrast against a stark, austere landscape and capture the paean "In Praise of Shadows", the title of the first track and a reference to the Jun'ichirō Tanizaki book by the same name which meditates on Japanese aesthetics like mono no aware, an acknowledgement of impermanence and the notion that objects bear empathetic response. This release is a direct trajectory leading from some of CFCF's earlier work, such as the Exercises EP (2012) and Music for Objects (2013), the latter of which more openly seeks to extract the dormant beauty and pathos out of everyday objects through minimal but layered compositions.
Look also to Liquid Colours (2019), a survey and synthesis of pre-Y2k electronic elements from drum n bass, downtempo, and jungle, presented with album art reflecting facets of lifestyle branding that call to mind the serenity and simplicity found in the catalogs of Japanese retail brand MUJI and the background music they employ in-store.
His most recent full-length studio release, memoryland (2021), is no different. Through a combination of illustration and motion-blur photography in tandem with hot pink accents and an iconic digitized typeface, the album art blazes with the rapturous spirit and boundless hopes of adolescent yearning rising alongside the turn of the new millennium. At once a tribute to the cross-fertilization of genres, music scenes, and the identities forged through a love for particular types of music—in memoryland's case, post-grunge, alternative rock, and electronica—and a distillation of that feeling of looking back on your past from the perspective of being young and looking to the future. CFCF notes, "As a kid I couldn’t wait to be in my 20’s; in my 30’s it’s bittersweet to look back. That’s the core of memoryland: the gulf between the fantasy, the reality, and the memory, and how we live inside each of those at different points."
I don’t think it would be wrong to posit memoryland as the current gateway point to CFCF as an artist, but his body of work and commitment to understanding a blend of musical styles on a deeper level demonstrates he isn’t just another clout-head clamoring for crumbs of relevancy because 'Y2k' is a trending tag on Depop. It stands that he can distill the essence of several styles and ideas to re-examine the past and explore new potentialities through them all while being unafraid to pull from sources that are considered "uncool".
Ultimately, memoryland encapsulates the experience of being young, restless, impressionable, and filled with hope for the future, especially when fueled by images in magazines, music, television, film, and the nascence of the Internet. Beyond the compelling energy of the music itself, I believe this is the thrust behind why it's so popular, especially since western societies put so much value on youth; and the emotions that come along with the freedom and possibilities of being at the precipice of the beginning of your adult life are huge. Even as a period piece, set at the dawn of the new millennium, it captures a timeless feeling. It will be exciting to see how CFCF boosts off the steam of what he's achieved on this record, and which concepts and themes he will channel into upcoming projects.
In this interview, CFCF divulges his interests and some experiences that were integral to his creative development, cultivation of taste, and artistic preferences during his formative years in the late 90s and early 2000s. We chat about cross-media influences, his early listening habits, what his future projects might encompass, and more. He is very generous here with what he discloses, providing several launch pads for cinematic and musical discoveries, as well as significant context to his approach and the work he produces.
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✺ CFCF stands for "Canada's First, Canada's Finest", the call sign for Québec's CTV television network. What was it like coming of age in Montréal in the early 2000s?
As a kid I voraciously read local arts weeklies like the Montréal Mirror, Hour, and of course there was early VICE while it was still vaguely Montréal-associated. I was kind of outside the underground cool thing looking in, so it was more of a fantasy than a reality. I had to envision the kind of things that might be going on, and that I might be able to do if I were older, instead of actively participating.
I’d pore through concert listings, ads for raves, record reviews, spend hours in local record shops like Cheap Thrills and now-defunct Disquivel and Primitive and ultimately buy like 1 or 2 things because I was 13 and my income was $20 allowance a month. I have a fond and distinct memory of a rainy evening, my mom taking me to Cheap Thrills where I bought a CD copy of bis’s This Is Teen-C Power! EP, and the streetlights through the fogged-up windows on the drive home.
I’d read the paper screening program for Cinema Du Parc from front to back and wonder what the hell these terrifying movies were.
✺ I get a sense that you were left to your own devices growing up, which probably gave you a lot of freedom to follow your curiosities. When did your family get a computer and what sorts of things did you get up to on it when you were younger?
I had plenty of time to explore my obsessions within the confines of what was available at the time — magazines, comics, etc. — without a particularly strong internet connection until about 2000. That’s the point where I immediately downloaded Napster and polluted the family computer with pirated mp3’s, or would scour websites for the samples from my favourite records, and leave the computer on overnight so that I could snag 1 rare funk mp3 off someone on Audiogalaxy.
There was lots of visiting and building Geocities websites for my favourite artists, teaching myself rudimentary HTML and Flash (I loved the Kraftwerk website, which was entirely Flash animated), and of course beginning to spend lots of time on message board communities. My first there was the official Astralwerks message board, which I was unceremoniously chased off at age 14 for being ‘pretentious’, because I started a thread about Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson which I’d just discovered and was excited to talk about. I would make terrible music splicing already-well-worn samples together in Sonic Foundry ACID and sharing those on mp3.com.
✺ It was a pretty regular occurrence back in the dial-up days to wait hours for a song to download, only for the file to be corrupted with glitches. If the corruption wasn't too-too bad, I'd often take the L and listen to tracks in these degraded conditions to the point where when I listen to these songs now, I anticipate the artifacts from those corrupted files. What were your experiences of those early P2P file-sharing days?
I did a lot of searching for rare rips of funk 45’s, owing my to love to DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist at the time, as well as anything Shadow had sampled, which led me to discover things like Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Co., Embryo, and weird Euro prog like Supersister.
I joined a couple of Beastie Boys-specific FTP servers to unearth weird rarities and dubiously-named mp3 files. I’d also discover a lot of music from free MP3 sites like Epitonic.com, things like Tortoise and the Microphones and Josef K’s “It’s Kinda Funny”. I’d just have like the 1 free song by each band forever, I didn’t actually hear more of their music until years later.
✺ What was your first MP3 player?
It was an iPod video, probably around 2005, pretty late in the game. I couldn’t really convince my dad to buy me one prior to that, though I did have a Discman that could read MP3 files. For a long time I was pretty much only cassette mixes and then CD-R’s, which would always burn with tons of errors, and lead me to waste tons of plastic. I loaded the iPod video with a few Simpsons episodes to watch on the bus.
✺ Can you recall any specific tracks you associate with listening to music on an MP3 player?
The first records I loaded on the iPod video were Boris’s Pink, Sunn0)))’s Black One, Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night, and Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. This was my last year of high school and I was kind of playing with the black metal stoner metal drone thing, alongside a deepening love of soft rock.
✺ We’re both in our early 30s, so we came of age parallel with the early mass adoption of the Internet. Do you have any embarrassing early Internet memories you'd be willing to share?
What I will say is that there was a lot of internal drama on one of the forums I frequented, involving its then overactive and petulant userbase sabotaging its moderator’s ability (or desire) to further host it on his server, which led to an exodus to a new board, which itself was still severely under-moderated. The board had a lot of internal lore and in-jokes and plenty of ragequits and feuds. As I was coming to the height of my Sonic Foundry ACID sample-collaging, I composed a full-length soundtrack to the webforum’s struggles. It was largely made of samples stolen from Madlib and Shadow. It was terrible, but I guess it was technically the first album I ever made.
✺ Are there any defunct sites, music blogs, forums, etc., that you mourn?
Many of the blogs I frequented in the 2010s remained active in the last few years in severely reduced forms, like 20jazzfunkgreats. Prior to that it was honestly a hodgepodge of yousendit links of rare albums and forum threads, which I guess have been entirely supplanted now by reissue labels and Spotify playlists, but I’m not really the bitter or mournful type.
It was fun discovering music in those more wild west internet days, but it was itself still supposedly less meaningful than the tape-sharing mixtape era before it, or college radio, or whatever else. It sucks it’s all tech platforms, but finding exciting music you haven’t heard before is still exciting.
✺ As far as self-promotion and interfacing online as a working producer in the New Media Age goes, what’s your relationship now with social media?
It’s mostly pretty lame, but whatever, everything is kinda lame and we still have to participate with each other. I’m not a meme guy for the most part – it gets a bit tiring reading the same joke templates over and over. I mostly use it to keep people up to date with what I’m doing in music, keep up with my friends and to make dumb tweets about the silly hyper-specific things I’m fascinated by, like videos of Mark Knopfler kissing his guitar or whatever.
✻ Many of us were first consciously exposed to trip hop/IDM/downtempo/French touch through artists like Björk and the Smashing Pumpkins' foray into electronica with Adore, or with Sofia Coppola films (I know multiple people who used to fall asleep to the Lost in Translation DVD menu on loop), Michel Gondry’s films & music videos, and restless teen staples like Fight Club & Trainspotting. Was there a particular gateway film or memorable track in other media that led you down the electronica rabbit hole in your youth?
I probably saw the videos for “Elektrobank” and “Da Funk” and “Around the World” and thought they were really cool. I specifically remember in late 1997 getting cassette copies of Dig Your Own Hole, Homework and Elastica’s self-titled album for Hannukah. Then only later learned those videos were directed by Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, and that Sofia Coppola was in the “Elektrobank” video, and that Spike also worked with the Beastie Boys a lot.
I picked up a lot of my music taste from my siblings, and we spent a lot of time watching Muchmusic and MTV together. We shared issues of SPIN and CMJ and Rolling Stone and The Face that floated around the house, and we’d steal each other’s tapes from each other’s bedrooms to make our own personal mixtapes on the stereo system in the family living room — lots of time on the record and pause buttons, lining up the songs precisely.
This is embarrassing, but I also remember I bought Björk’s Homogenic and loved it but also eventually weighed my priorities, traded it in for a copy of Limp Bizkit’s Significant Other, and then disavowed a year later when the Beastie Boys said they sucked.
Ultimately, visually speaking, music videos and MTV and MTV2 were king, and those video directors were kind of my entry point to cinema, especially once Being John Malkovich and The Virgin Suicides came out.
✻ You're uniquely good at taking material characterized by interiority, and then creating something expansive that transcends the personal. This lends your music a quality that evokes physical landscapes to experience or inhabit. How do you go about identifying the world or atmosphere you want to construct sonically? Do you have any routines, rituals, or practices that get you in a certain mindset to approach composition?
No particular routines other than constantly listening to music. I think I’ve developed a really visual approach to listen wherein if something’s really inspiring me, I start to envision the physical place it inhabits (or inhabited in the past) and work backwards from there trying to evoke that space myself, either by wholesale ripping off things I’m inspired by and fixing it later or using some of the cliches of those spaces.
I’m not afraid of being unoriginal because there’s usually a bit of a joke or a wink inherent in the process, like I’m fascinated by something that is widely considered bad and I’m trying to coax out the universal qualities that will change that perception. Lately I’ve been joking about getting a green Kia Soul for my first car.
✻ I'm really interested in how film influences your music and your sense of worldbuilding through sound. You’ve talked about being inspired by films like New Rose Hotel, Demonlover, Millennium Mambo — it seems like you're drawn to films that are moody and convey social detachment, the anticipation of loss, techno-paranoia, and the melancholy of urban atomization. You know the vibes! Can you say more about your interest in film; what sorts of narratives, scenes, characters, settings inspire you?
I like movies where people are struggling to connect within the various contemporary systems designed to keep them apart. That’s pretty broad I guess, but it describes a good many of the films I like. Ultimately it’s the voice of the filmmaker I connect with, and how their filmmaking style and choices and collaborations with the cinematographer and editors coalesce into an affecting experience.
It’s hard to really explain, but I’m definitely drawn to certain types of stories like in those you mentioned. I get really excited watching the camera move around in Demonlover or Trouble Every Day, the restlessness of what it chooses to focus on or exclude at any given moment, or how it doesn’t move at all in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films, keeping its distance from the characters and not offering any judgment.
✻ Could you drop some films that hint at the direction of what you’re working on now?
I’ve been going back to Hal Hartley’s work, and have adored recent rewatches of Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero and Comfort and Joy. It’s not a good film, but I have a warm spot for Roman Coppola’s CQfrom watching in the DVD era. I’ve been thinking about Tindersticks’ scores for Claire Denis, and a kind of wholesome playful indie vibe from the late 90’s/early 2000’s that was present in more crowd-pleasing stuff by people like Mike Mills, before it filtered into the mainstream via stuff like Little Miss Sunshine. I’m not a big anime guy but Masaaki Yuasa’s stuff has been inspiring, Kaiba and Ping Pong especially.
✻ Is there anything you've seen in recent years that's made your heart sing?
Those Bill Forsyth films are near perfect. I finally got around to Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar which was pretty monumental. I loved Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster and Exotica, and it was very lovely to have Cronenberg back this year with Crimes of the Future, which I think will be sadly underrated for a few years to come.
✻ Do you have any aspirations to get involved with film, whether through scoring or otherwise?
I have scored a couple, a film in 2015 called Boostand one this year called You Can Live Forever, both made by friends from Montreal. I’m definitely hoping to do more.
✻ The visual design of your records also helps situate them in the present. The pairing of Daylen Seu’s illustrations and the soft, motion blurred photography on the cover of memoryland strike a neat balance between paying homage to the aesthetics of the new millennium, without feeling like a caricature of the era. Can you talk a little about the process of working with designers and illustrators?
I worked very closely with the designer of the sleeve, Ben Sifel, in arriving at those concepts together. I’d send him little bits of inspiration, ads from magazines I remembered from the 90’s, he’d send back his own bits like amazing video games I hadn’t heard of. He’d send some approaches, I’d comment, and we’d adjust until we landed at this approach.
It was very atomized in the sense that we had a multi-format approach: I was in Montreal working directly on different shoots with the photographers Alex Blouin and Jodi Heartz, Daylen was doing her illustration work solo, and Ben was conceiving how they could all blend together. It’s a very rewarding experience not without its difficulties, but it feels so good when it comes together. I’m very happy with how much praise everyone has received for their terrific work. I think they put together something totally unique.
✦ How do you negotiate nostalgia in your work? Are there any questions you ask yourself in the process of shaping an album to ensure your work is transformative or critical and not purely an exercise in self-indulgence?
It’s pretty abstract, but I did a lot of work on memoryland to try to imbue every track with a layer of comment and distance. I definitely tried very hard to avoid simple genre pastiche, while also having to embrace and incorporate that superficial element of it. How can I get a 90’s French-touch tribute to also feel like it’s the soundtrack to your life coming apart at the seams?
I think nostalgia is something that you can either get lost in, or which you can harness and use as a tool, as colour or context for something broader you’re trying to express. I suppose that’s the difference in my calling the record a period piece rather than it being pure nostalgic, stylistic replication.
The Y2k era is the setting for the story, there are all the necessary set dressings of genre and aesthetic, but they are not the central focus. The focus is the loose narrative across the album, and the idea of the distance between then and now.
✦ Liquid Colours and memoryland point to a specific time and place that was defined by overlapping cultural and socio-political factors, and a penetrating awareness of increasing global excess and tumult. You’re probably familiar with the concept of hauntology, the notion of "lost futures" that Mark Fisher used when discussing post-2005 electronic music's inability to capture the social imagination's anticipation for the future.
Would you characterize your work as attempts at gathering ghosts from potential futures that were never fully realized and giving them a more defined place to breathe and wander in the present?
(An aside: I think Vanilla Sky, despite or maybe because of its shortcomings, is exemplary of this concept of lost futures, especially since it was released a few months after 9/11, which ultimately caused a shift in mainstream appeal for certain narratives in North American media for a long time... It also has a killer soundtrack —Peter Gabriel, Todd Rundgren, Chemical Brothers, and Looper???)
Vanilla Sky felt like a mess to me but my favourite bit, aside from Mark Kozelek screaming at Tom Cruise to fix his fucking face, was the promotional video for the procedure Cruise’s character undergoes. Very utopian dreamy Gap-ad vision of death.
I was certainly attempting to superficially incorporate some of the Fisher ideas of the cancellation of the future, although I’m not sure I succeeded, since I haven’t really read enough of him in earnest. It’s more just being inspired by the fashion and design of the pre-9/11 era, attempting to express that this was maybe the last real moment of optimistic futurism, even if it was among the trash of the 20th century, before permanent paranoia and surveillance and militarism took over as the broad definition of our future.
✦ Generally, when people talk about memory it connotes a bittersweetness, leaning toward feelings of fondness. Were you pulling from any sounds, styles, or tonal elements that you didn’t like from the late 90s/early 2000s that you grew an appreciation for, or only the good stuff to engineer the ‘perfect’ land of memory?
The thing with fashion is that it represents a specific momentary consensus of appetite that is always temporary — there are always new or, more often, recycled appetites around either corner being proposed and waiting to be adopted. So to be ‘in fashion’ is to reside in that specific brief pocket and to be ‘out of fashion’ is to reside in the broader realm of possible appetites.
I pulled from plenty of music and style that is generally not included in Gen-Z Y2k style boards, because it’s the stuff I remember of that era and was part of the fabric of the era. For me it was all one tapestry, because I was watching it and consuming it in consolidated places like MTV or SPIN or whatever. It wasn’t atomized into genres and scenes from my perspective as an outsider, it was one big thing. I think that’s how the whole current Y2k-revival thing approaches it as well with a more cherry-picked aesthetic mood-boarding, which feels very sacrilegious to people who were, say, exclusively devoted indie rockers or ravers in the 90s.
I was generally a fan of the cross-genre things like Beck and Grand Royal and Mo’Wax. I thought it was cool when there was scratching in Modest Mouse’s “Heart Cooks Brain”, and how the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion worked with Dan the Automator and Alec Eiffel, and, like, CAN put out a remix album featuring Sonic Youth and UNKLE and Eno alongside Carl Craig and A Guy Called Gerald (conveniently titled Sacrilege).
For me there was a bit of an idea of trying to expand the canon to include those kinds of sillier toss-away things that — in their disposability and lack of longevity — were the epitome of cool at the time.
❈ I think there is a lot to mine from the era of overlapping electronica styles that Liquid Colours and memoryland survey, but I imagine you probably want to move onto something new. Can you tease what sorts of sounds have been inspiring future projects?
I’ve been thinking about the same general era, but from the approach of “i regret the jet-set”. Lounge music, indie music, post-rock and experimental electronic, attempts at bossa nova, a kind of globalized music scene from that era, from Japan to Europe to the USA, and a bit of the more glossy and cute and playful strains of dance in the Mirwais/Röyksopp vein. But, also, just writing genuinely pretty and fun melodic things and approaching music without all the angst and darkness.
❈ There’s a gold rush ethos that permeates all art forms, where artists chase after a certain idea or element that has become commercially attractive until it's worn out. The parallel opposition to this seems to be to embrace raw materials from the past that are considered corny, outdated or crude, extract the elements that are charming, and reconfigure them to align with the present, or with the intention of boosting them toward a future-oriented goal like a hope or a wish, until the cycle repeats and that eventually becomes the new hot commodity.
Does this hold any weight over you when you're starting a project? Do you ever feel like your creative interests diverge as a reaction against the creative climate of your contemporaries?
It’s a tough thing to avoid if you’re someone whose listening habits have always involved a bit of digging, searching for hidden gems etc. I try to balance the stylistic exercises with attempts at strengthening areas I’ve neglected.
For memoryland I went all-in on world-building and sound design, but now I’d like to focus more on songcraft, a tiny bit of theory, just in a more classicist sense, like thinking about how many of my favourite artists are inspired by things like Burt Bacharach.
❈ How do you approach a DJ set?
I try to include things I’m currently fascinated with, but also I have to tailor it to the crowd while I’m playing. Ultimately, I want people to have fun while also trying to avoid playing the exact same set as any other DJ out there. I like stuff that’s a bit fast and loopy and silly, lots of early tech-house and bouncy euphoric trance.
❈ Do you prefer vinyl to digital?
Both are fine. I’m not an audiophile or a purist whatsoever. I have lots of records, I dj vinyl sometimes, but it’s cumbersome and, honestly, it feels amazing finishing a set and not having to carry 200 pounds of records around. I’ll try to track down the best possible quality, but also I’m probably one of the DJ’s most likely to drop a 128kbps MP3, if it’s the only thing available because fuck it.
❈ What types of places do you like performing at? Is there a venue (real, bygone, or imagined) you dream of performing or DJing at but haven't had the opportunity?
I would have loved to play a proper 90’s oxygen lounge, or a similarly posh nightclub amid the 90’s advertising boom in London.
❈ Do you express yourself creatively in any non-musical ways?
I used to draw, but haven’t in ages.
❈ What have you got on current rotation these days?
Double Virgo and bar italia, tons of Sonic Youth as usual (“JC” from Dirty, “Jams Runs Free” from Rather Ripped, and Murray Street and Sonic Nurse in general), some nice Morr Music bands like Guther, the second album by Insides called Sweet Tip. The new Yo La Tengo song “Fallout” is really lovely, pure YLT. Lantern Parade, a cool sample-based project the started in the 2000’s from Japan. Lovely folk music like Bridget St. John.
❈ And, for the sake of my own curiosity as a longtime Beck fan, did you sample that skippy, frog-like drumbeat in "Deadweight" for "i regret the jet-set"?
Um, maybe I did! I can neither confirm nor deny!
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Catch CFCF performing memoryland LIVE at The Lodge Room in Highland Park on Saturday, February 11, 2023 with support from Casey MQ & Jia Pet.