Fluxblog #277: Indie 08-10 / Rap 97-99 / Industrial 86-94 Playlists • No Joy • St Panther • Okay Kaya
Three more new playlists this week!
THE NEW INDIE 2008-2010
[Spotify / Apple]
This one is an exploration of the sea change in aesthetics that set the foundation for what "indie" would mean in the 2010s. I recommend listening to this when it's overcast or rainy – somehow a majority of music in this period sounds like it was made for white skies. (An ironic exception on this playlist is the Vampire Weekend song "White Sky.")
B-BOY DOCUMENTS: RAP 1997-1999
[Spotify / Apple]
Hip-hop in the boom years just after the deaths of Tupac and Biggie, the turning point in culture just before rap becomes the center of music culture in the early '00s. This is more of a blue skies mix – some of that's the crispness of a lot of the sounds, and some of it is the "we're really doing it, the world is ours!!" optimism and confidence at the core of a lot of this music.
BURNING INSIDE: INDUSTRIAL 1986-1994
[Spotify / Apple]
I teamed up with industrial lifer Sean T. Collins to curate this one, which is basically an introduction to the genre at its creative and cultural peak. Sean and I have talked a lot in the past about how in the '90s there was this cultural line separating indie rock and industrial as music cultures – it felt very taboo to cross it aside from maybe digging crossover acts like Nine Inch Nails on one side and Sonic Youth on the other. We grew up on different sides of that line, and I like to think of this set as an offering to the indie-aligned people who never properly gave this music a chance. If you are looking for something with a relentless intense energy, this ought to do it for you.
August 19th, 2020
Just Keep Calling Me Baby
No Joy “Four”
In retrospect Jasamine White-Gluz’s discography as No Joy is like this reverse “anxiety of influence” arc in which she resists emulating the things she grew up loving to the point that it was limiting her creativity, and she fully becomes herself when she gives herself permission to embrace the largely uncool late 90s/early 00s music that shaped her taste. Motherhood, her new record as No Joy, boldly integrates elements of nü-metal, the commercial end of trip-hop, and quasi-futuristic pre-millennial production trends you’d recognize from albums like No Doubt’s Return of Saturn, The Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore, and Madonna’s Ray of Light into her established romantic shoegaze aesthetic. She sounds truly free on this record, like someone who is unafraid to let you see who they are. This starts in formal terms but carries through to the emotional content of it – even when lyrics are hazy and the sound gets abstract, there’s an open-hearted vulnerability on display that’s poignant and relatable.
“Four” strings together all the stylistic extremes of Motherhood into one remarkably coherent piece of music. It’s basically a suite – an atmospheric shoegaze section flowing into a groovy trip-hop section flowing into a thrashing nü-metal finale – and a lot of the reason it works so well is that at least from White-Gluz’s perspective this is a fully intuitive progression. The trip-hop section is the main draw here. It’s very confident in its funk despite this previously never being an element of the No Joy sound, and I love the way the juxtaposition of White-Gluz’s voice singing “just keep calling me baby,” a pitched-down masculine voice, and a baby giggle that’s clearly in homage to the famous baby sample in Aaliyah “Are You That Somebody” suggest a lot of ideas about female sexuality and motherhood without explicating anything. It’s more of a Rorschach blot, or the song deliberately posing a leading question.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
August 20th, 2020
Work Through The Mud
St. Panther “These Days”
Daniela Bojorges-Giraldo sings with a soulful rasp and a very mature level of nuance and control, but that’s just part of what makes “These Days” so captivating. The most fascinating thing for me is Bojorges-Giraldo’s performance on bass and drums, which keeps a nice pocket groove with a loose feel along the lines of Mitch Mitchell’s drumming for Jimi Hendrix. It’s an R&B song stripped down to raw essentials without feeling “minimalist,” and she gives space in the arrangement so that common elements like backing vocals and horn parts hit with maximum impact. Everything sounds very in-the-moment, nothing feels overthought. She just sounds like a musician with great instincts who fully trusts those instincts.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
August 20th, 2020
Waiting For The Locksmith
Okay Kaya “Comic Sans”
The central rhythm of “Comic Sans” is a gentle plodding groove that becomes a bit more emphatic as basic percussion and guitar parts come in but never quite picks up. The lyrics follow through on this feeling of a pleasant rut as Kaya Wilkins sings about moving around in a daze after getting dumped. The song comes from the perspective of not really having a solid handle on the situation – was this actually a bad relationship? Is this actually good for her? Should she feel aggrieved? A situation has resolved itself but left her in a very unresolved state, and even as the music moves laterally through slightly different moods and a chorus that relieves some angst at least on a melodic level, there’s no sense of direction. When the song tapers off and abruptly stops, it feels emotionally true even if it’s a bit unsatisfying in terms of ending a song.
Buy it from Bandcamp.