Fluxblog #377: Fresh Pepper • Flying Lotus • Satya
Plus all the motorik grooves you can handle
This week’s playlist is HALLOGALLO & SONS - MOTORIK GROOVES, a collection of songs spanning six decades derived from Neu!’s Krautrock classic “Hallogallo.” If you’re not familiar with “Hallogallo” I think once you hear it and then the other songs in this set, it will all make sense. It’s a very particular groove/aesthetic, and it’s been mined for years by some of the coolest bands in the world. Also, you can really zone out to this one. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
Guitars Floating Down The River
Fresh Pepper featuring Dan Bejar “Seahorse Tranquilizer”
The novel conceit of Fresh Pepper’s debut record is that all the songs are in some way set behind the scenes in restaurants. There’s a lot of ways to approach this subject matter in music that would explore the stress and tensions that come up in a restaurant – consider the way the music supervisors of The Bear edited a live recording of Wilco’s “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” into a setpiece depicting a kitchen falling into chaos – but Fresh Pepper instead aim for a lite jazzy vibe so serene and relaxed that it comes across as surreal or sarcastic. A lot of the record feels like an odd dream with a very specific setting, with odd details about “new ways of chopping onions” and “mushrooms in the frying pan” floating by without much context. The aesthetics of this record are heavily indebted to Destroyer’s Kaputt and so Dan Bejar’s presence on “Seahorse Tranquilizer” feels totally natural, maybe even inevitable. Bejar doesn’t quite play along with the album concept but that actually works just fine in the context – he basically sounds like an interesting patron at a fine dining establishment, and the two other voices seem to respond to his presence like servers. They gush to him about how they “harvest insane roses” for the tables, and he seems to humor them while basically lost on his own trip.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
The Same Old Song
Flying Lotus featuring Devin Tracy “You Don’t Know”
Devin Tracy sings about unrequited love in “You Don’t Know” as though he’s plagued by intrusive and involuntary thoughts, totally passive to a strong attraction to an indifferent person that may as well be like the moon’s affect on tides. This could easily be an anxious or angry song but he and Flying Lotus convey the feeling with a delicate grace, letting the feeling of love be central to the song rather than the frustration. It certainly gives the listener a sense of why this is so hard to pull away from – there’s a lovely sway and warmth to this music that seems more likely to elevate a person than pull them down.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
It Don’t Have To Be Spoken
Satya “Oakland”
“Oakland” is a fairly tight 3:30 pop song that moves with a very light touch and an unhurried feel, perfectly evoking both a relaxed and natural dynamic with someone and a strong gravitational pull towards them. Satya’s vocal is very low-key in her cadences but there’s a fire in her phrasing, making her sound like someone who feels calm and controlled in the moment but is on the verge of being overwhelmed by passion at any moment. The more rhythmic vocal parts are the hook here but the soul of this is in the melodic nuances – lead guitar parts that move between hesitance and eloquence, a warm bass groove that tightens up for an unexpected bridge, vocal harmonies towards the end that leave the song feeling open-ended. There’s not a lot of tension in this song, but that feeling of “what happens next…” is so potent.
Buy it from Amazon.
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• Here's Elias Leight at Billboard reporting on how scammers are uploading identical copies of songs performing well on Spotify to divert revenue into their pockets.