For each year's first three quarters, we celebrate by sharing a list of our favorite music releases. Unlike our year-end lists, these quarter features are casually compiled, with an aim to spotlight the underdogs and the lesser-heard among the more popular picks. More from this series
Moon B
Lifeworld
[1080p]
Wes Gray’s love of closed-door funk, retro-forward gear, and dollar-bin salvages knuckle up again as Moon B for label favorite 1080p. Lifeworld, Moon B’s first after a long run with Peoples Potential Unlimited, is far more sample driven than what you’d usually hear from Gray, whereas last year’s PPU releases — Moon B and II — don’t wander much from the smooth, late-night boogie heard throughout Moon B’s back catalog, The arrangement for the album changed too. Lifeworld ditches individual songs for a more fluid affair, distancing itself from a drum machine-driven production and drinking from a riverbed of vinyl cracks and warped sounds. Noted influences Delroy Edward’s Slowed Down Funk and “South Asian cinema clips” shape 30 minutes of loose, grainy shuffles overlapped like tattered a jigsaw. Gray’s love of physicality holds to more than wax or hardware heard through the tape’s hazy g-funk grooves; it gets us hot for what Moon B does next.
Food Court
Food Court
[Kye]
The cluttered din of parents and bored observers filing up the cramped amphitheater. Discussions and personal effects rustling as folding seats are unfurled, creaking under the put-upon weight. The orchestra members find their spot and begin to play. It’s an elementary style or informality that makes Food Court such an interesting force of non-composition. Side A is the warm-up, the intake of breath and the turning of pages as prevalent as the piece being played. Side B is the tear down, where the real fun of demystification begins. Like so many audiences, your focus gravitates toward the distractions. Those crinkles and coughs taking you out of the real beauty of fault. Food Court play with the challenge of expectations against results, so what plays out as little more than a local chamber ensemble practicing “Fumeux fume par fumée” is, in reality, a diversion. The real music isn’t the halting horns or the calm voice, but the spaces they create, the clicks and commotion the genius of Food Court. In a lesson always learned but quickly forgotten, it’s what you’re not hearing that should be the focal point. Everything else is to be ignored.
GFOTY
Cake Mix
[PC Music]
“G-F-O-T-Y.” Again proving to be one of the most nuanced and piercing of PC Music’s hyperactive, hyperreal experiments, GFOTY follows up TMT 2014 fav Secret Mix with another tampered batch of suite cake pop (locate nearest Starbucks). Sound delicious? Let’s do it! 1 cup 8-bit sunshine, 2 tsp disturbing noise, a pinch of strained exhalations. Blend with time- and pitch-shifting dry club mix until I want you to like me. The dis-affect will settle to the bottom, with HUGE sadness coming to the top in a way that was almost always Secretly obscured before. That brief glimpse at the in/difference between raw and artificial, when the huge sadness gets curved for a chiming smile of a song, is 20% of your daily saturated fat. Make sure to let the mix sit at 1-second intervals (just long enough to disrupt a sugary melody or plunge into another layer, deeper). By the time her <3-felt mis-appropriation of “All The Small Things” lands with massive bass synth and some self-same na na-na-na na-na na-nas, GFOTY has taken us beyond the realm of self-consciousness into a pleasurable no-stalgia-topia. Its 11 minutes are catchy, tragic, playful, biting, delicious — sign me up. The frosting is the mix’s bridal chorus finale — omg wait, it’s a wedding cake! Listen to GFOTY have it, eat it, cut right through it. Let’s do it!
Björk
Vulnicura
[One Little Indian]
It’s somewhat difficult for an American to write about Björk (an Icelander) and Arca (a Venezuelan) without alienating at least part of our international audience. The easy way around this would be to talk about the universality of deep emotional pain and vulnerability, how most all of us can relate to the helplessness of losing someone dear, how music that can truthfully, openly articulate these feelings in a way that’s both original enough to intrigue and familiar enough to identify with is a rare thing indeed. But fuck all that. We ain’t MoMA. Vulnicura is one of our favorite albums of 2015 so far, because in addition to what we said here, it brings to mind those ridiculously expensive Björk B-sides in the import section of Tower Records, because it feels like another important addition to Arca’s discography, and because something tells us Beavis & Butthead would approve.
Lolina
RELAXIN’ with Lolina
[Self-Released]
It’s funny that I’m summarizing this (relatively) surprise-release EP from Lolina (Inga Copeland), because what keeps me coming back to her music again and again isn’t an intuitive connection to her music or an intrinsic knowledge of its nature, but the mystery and unknowing that has persisted throughout her recorded career. Just like on her previous release, Lolina operates here in a zone as a producer/vocalist that seems not to belong to a particular time or place, but for her own singular, perplexing, fascinating world. It feels cheap to brand this release with an “outsider-art” perspective as some have, because Lolina seems completely aware of both where she fits into the world and how to subvert it in her own enigmatic way. I don’t think I’ll ever truly wrap my head around a single, well-defined impression of Copeland’s music, but I wouldn’t want to — and RELAXIN’ with Lolina is another crucial piece of (mis)information that dispenses with straightforward assumptions and instead offers a curious mystery.
For each year's first three quarters, we celebrate by sharing a list of our favorite music releases. Unlike our year-end lists, these quarter features are casually compiled, with an aim to spotlight the underdogs and the lesser-heard among the more popular picks. More from this series
