Fluxblog 538: WORLD WITHIN THE WORLD
An interview with Julia Gfrörer plus new songs by Drugdealer/Weyes Blood, Sextile, and Tchotchke
I wrote a feature length interview with the comics artist Julia Gfrörer for The Comics Journal. I’m very happy with this interview. Julia is an incredibly intelligent and provocative person, and I think if you’re already familiar with her art you’ll have a deeper understanding of where it comes from, and if you’re not, you’ll want to investigate further. Like, if you’re a goth in any way, you definitely need to get in on this.
I’d love to do more long form interviews, particularly with visual artists, so if you enjoyed this piece and would like me to do something similar for you, hit me up!
So Proud That They Found Me
Drugdealer featuring Weyes Blood “Real Thing”
“Real Thing” is a very deliberate musical homage to early 70s soft pop – Carole King most obviously – but the sound is even dryer than actual 70s soft pop, making it feel a little bit surreal in its clean precision. I assume that’s also a deliberate decision, leaning into the ways a digital recording can yield similar but fundamentally different results. But getting caught up in those details is obsessing on the frame rather than the painting. The real meat of this song is Natalie Mering’s vocal melody, lyrics, and understated phrasing. She’s singing rather plainly about finding a new love that makes her feel appreciated and understood after years of feeling like that might be an impossibility. A lot of singers might approach singing about this by focusing on conveying euphoria, but she’s so measured and calm. You get the sense that she’s trying not to jinx anything, but also honoring the ways this love brings her happiness and comfort in small ways she might not have ever considered. It’s a very mature and adult way of writing and singing about love.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Here’s That Sound That You Wanted
Sextile “Women Respond to Bass”
There’s a few different Jicks-era interviews where Stephen Malkmus says that some lyrics he wrote were just some nonsense meant to sound cool and fake-tough, essentially him doing his semi-ironic take on boilerplate 20th century rock conventions. That’s more or less what you get in this Sextile song, but in a bratty rude electroclash/Prodigy mode. And like, what would be the point of doing anything else with a hyperactive banger like this? It’s pure abrasive head-empty energy – lyrically, you’re just gonna have to change your pitch up and smack that bitch up. Also you can just say something true – yes, women do respond to bass!
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Tchotchke “Did You Hear?”
Pretty much everything about Tchotchke – their melodic sensibility, their vocal affect, their look, their slick but understated lead guitar parts, their lyrical POV – calls back to the late 70s and early 80s power pop scene I showcased on this playlist from a few years ago. And this is clearly by design, they’re working at a high level in a sub genre that was played out well before any of them were born. Beyond the impressive craft, the thing I find interesting here is how the lyrics about dating a man with erratic levels of interest make sense in any time period. And I think that’s the meta point here – the game of love doesn’t change very much, this type of guy will always lead on these sort of girls, and maybe this playful sort of tone is the best way to approach it.
Buy it from Amazon.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• Spoon posted an extensive oral history of their classic album Gimme Fiction on their official Substack. It’s really well done, and a smart idea for a well known artist joining the platform. I love the section about “The Beast and Dragon, Adored,” which is one of my favorite songs in their catalog:
Britt Daniel: “Beast And Dragon” was the last song written for the record, and from the very beginning of its existence, it sounded like an album opener to me. And then I thought, “OK if it's the first song, maybe what I should do lyrically is reference the other songs coming up. Wouldn’t that be cool?”
The title came from this magazine I found at my grandmother's house. She was a painter and there was a piece in some nice 50s art magazine on Middle Ages French tapestries, which were all religious, and one of the tapestries was called “The Apocalypse: The Beast And Dragon Are Adored.” I heard a lot of talk about the apocalypse growing up, in church and at home, and I thought that title was something else – really creepy.
I love the intro to it. You can barely hear a little recording of Eleanor Friedberger singing a Fiery Furnaces song in that intro. She never noticed, so I doubt anyone else has. She’s singing, “The hardest thing I ever done,” which was a lyric in a song they did, “Rub Alcohol Blues.” I felt like, when I got to the end of this record, I did consider making it the hardest thing I'd ever done. And it was Eleanor and you know, I loved Eleanor. I ramped the master volume up at the end of the intro manually so it would feel even more huge when the band came in.
• The excellent musician Casey Dienel is also now on Substack, and she wrote a great post about Robyn’s classic song “Dancing On My Own.”
• Kate Knibbs of Wired wrote about a musician accused of making over $10 million in royalties by using bot armies to continuously play AI-generated tracks on streaming platforms.
• Sonny Rane of The Gen X Jukebox has a post telling the story of how The Verve got screwed over for royalties by The Rolling Stones for their mega-hit “Bitter Sweet Symphony.”
• Nicole Tremaglio’s Nicstalgia newsletter is always overflowing with ideas, and there’s a lot to chew on in this week’s issue where she critiques the emerging media trope about Gen Z people waiting on line for clout. I particularly like the section where she’s looking at reasons why so many young people know lack social dexterity.
Both of these things are part of an intergenerational process that’s been codified and accelerated by social media. The “waiting on line for clout” phenomenon absolutely originates with Gen X people on 2000s blog-era internet – you’d know this if you ever waited on line at the Madison Square Park Shake Shack in the mid 00s. And the demonization of “small talk” and lionization of the antisocial “introvert” is a Millennial 2010s internet meme largely pulled from jokes created by Gen X and Gen X-adjacent comedians. The Gen Z kids are just a result of coming up in the world we all made for them.
• Electronic music expert Philip Sherburne has put together two playlists paying tribute to the German label Kompakt on the occasion of their 500th release.
It never fails to amuse me: generation dissing that utterly ignores the rather obvious question of: if this generation is a bunch of losers, WHO RAISED THEM, ASSHOLES?