Fluxblog 496: Other Music, 2004
Plus new music by Katrina Ford, Two Shell, and Mouse On Mars
This week’s playlist is OTHER MUSIC RECOMMENDS 2004, a compilation of songs from the supremely cool NYC record store’s featured new releases from 20 years ago. This is all sourced from Other Music’s archive of their weekly newsletter, which I recommend checking out – there’s some outstanding writing in those emails, and it’s an incredible time capsule of how cool people were thinking about cool music back then. This is the third in a series of playlists based on this archive – here’s the first one covering 2000-2001, and here’s the second covering 2002-2003.
If you’re young, if you’re not from New York City, if you never shopped at Other Music – the important thing for you to know about this playlist is that it’s a treasure trove of incredible music and the odds are good you won’t be familiar with a lot of it. It’s also an accurate snapshot of what would be considered cool taste at this moment in time.
I have a lot of fun making these playlists because I end up revisiting a lot of music I haven’t thought about in a while, or finding stuff I didn’t check out at the time which resonates with me now. There’s a bunch of songs in this edition that brought me immense delight in hearing them again this week – for example, Ghostface Killah’s “Tooken Back,” and The Concretes’ “Diana Ross.” I don’t often look back on the 2000s with much affection, but this playlist reconnected me with the pure excitement and enthusiasm for discovery that I felt at this time, the feelings that went into the early days of Fluxblog.
This playlist includes music by M83, Liars, Animal Collective, Keren Ann, MF Doom, Lali Puna, Junior Boys, M.I.A., Air, Wagon Christ, !!!, Califone, Camera Obscura, Ellen Allien, Arcade Fire, TV on the Radio, Electrelane, Björk, Devendra Banhart, Sufjan Stevens, Iron & Wine, Dungen, Fennesz, Four Tet, Espers, Squarepusher, Mouse On Mars, Franz Ferdinand, CocoRosie, Kings of Convenience, AC Newman, Destroyer, Feist, Stereolab, Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, Kerrier District, Superpitcher, Black Dice, Clinic, Bloc Party, Phoenix, Interpol, Oneida, Blonde Redhead, Madvillain, The National, Mos Def, Diplo, Elliott Smith, and a lot more. Oh, and if you’re listening to the Apple or YouTube versions, you get Joanna Newsom, who was a pretty big deal at Other Music in 2004.
[Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]
Things Are Growing Brighter All The Time
Katrina Ford “World On A Wire”
I’ve been writing about songs most days of my life for over 20 years and one thing I’ve learned from this is that a lot of the music I love most resists description. And of course it does – music is ultimately an abstract medium, something that exists to evoke and express things beyond words. There is something specific about the keyboard tones and Katrina Ford’s vocal performance “World On A Wire” that pull up very strong emotions in me, but I strain to describe these feelings that really ought to remain indescribable. But I can tell you what I hear: The voice of a woman who has experienced a lot, but is open to much more. Keyboard tones that are comforting but slightly alien, nudging the “adult contemporary” qualities of the song into a stranger realm. I picture bright colored lights filtered through misty air. I hear lyrics that are sometimes too obscure to parse, but mostly convey the feeling of knowing you’re in a precarious position but focusing on a sense of equilibrium to find your balance. She’s not focusing on how easy it is to plummet, she’s in awe of how many things don’t fall.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Pretty Please
Two Shell “(rock✧solid)”
Two Shell make exciting music about feeling excited. Like, if there’s any other point to a song like “(rock✧solid),” I can’t discern it. They want to make people excited, so they built a track that piles on exciting sounds so it sounds like the excitement is eternally escalating, and you can feel their excitement in the studio come through the speakers. Good energy is contagious. Also, it was only a matter of time before someone made a great track mixing that Go Team/Justice “kids chanting” trick from the 2000s with PC Music tricks from the 2010s. It works!
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Mouse On Mars “zeHrog”
This track is part of a score Mouse of Mars made for Werner Herzog’s film Fata Morgana, but was ultimately never approved by Herzog. I’ve never seen this film, so I can only hear it for what it is – music that Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma composed and performed in real time. It’s the real time aspect I find fascinating, particularly on this portion of the score which is relatively chill and groovy in context. It’s interesting to hear this knowing there’s a significant degree of improvisation going on, and that the two of them are switching up instruments and other gear while moving through the composition. I like the looseness, and I especially love when the song picks up tricks from dub reggae, most obviously on the reverb-drenched blasts of vocal sounds.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• Here’s Mark Richardon with a very thoughtful blog post about Cat Power’s rendition of The Boys Next Door’s “Shivers,” with a lot of historical tangents about the song.
• I’m still digesting the new Tyler, the Creator album Chromakopia, but I really liked Craig Jenkins’ review of it for Vulture. It’s very good as a path into the deeper end of what Tyler’s doing on a conceptual level on this one.
• The new episode of Song Exploder features Graham Nash talking about how he wrote the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young classic “Our House.” At the end of the episode Hrishikesh Hirway compliments Nash on his vivid recollection of his life nearly 60 years ago, which I was happy to hear because I spent the whole episode being like “wow, this guy retains every detail!”