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
Beat Detectives
Boogie Chillen / The Hills of Cypress
[Where To Now?]
Throw-away culture as if your being has any significance on society, to begin; orange and green and red and purple and Beat Detectives’ Boogie Chillen / The Hills of Cypress. Knowing exactly how to swim in the club when all your clothes are either hanging by a thread or are in heaps amongst the floor. Beat Detectives’ Boogie Chillen / The Hills of Cypress (much like other second-quarter listees, Angel-Ho, D/P/I, and Lil Ugly Mane) is exactly why the word “album” is an antiquated term in today’s music-making mayhem market. And it ain’t too far off from their new Not Not Fun LP Climate Change.[Transitional sentence that describe Boogie Chillen / The Hills of Cypress]. Faux(?)-live dubbing. Genre-blending beyond the 311. Hooks and rhythms and melodies that haunt your lobes and nodes. Sultry, mangled vocal resonances twisted into confinement. Beat Detectives’ Boogie Chillen / The Hills of Cypress is the old pair of socks you never wore, but after putting them on (now older), a magic immediately ensnares the fibers in warmth, possessing you to dance. Don’t fight it. Stretch with it and heal.
Cloud Rat
Qliphoth
[Halo of Flies]
Cloud Rat is a quintessential grindcore band, but one that desires to push the envelope in lateral ways. The band makes “beautiful” music, but in a way that’s different even from a grindcore classic like Discordance Axis’ The Inalienable Dreamless. While the beauty in that album comes from flawless, crystalline execution, Cloud Rat’s beauty is brandished using techniques from outside of the spectrum of metal and hardcore. It can be heard most clearly in the vocals on Qliphoth opener “Seken,” which approximates Julianna Barwick’s choral layering for just 22 seconds before all hell breaks loose, as Madison Marshall’s screams put JR Hayes to shame. It’s also there in the ambient instrumental “The Killing Horizon,” which packs a more memorable punch than stacks of records that do this gig full time. And it’s especially nice that, in 2015, something can be this crushing while also exuding its own kind of positivity: “Driving my heel into his scales/ I impale him with his own crown.”
Dr. Yen Lo
Days With Dr. Yen Lo
[Pavlov Institute]
I keep thinking of all the things I half-remember Gary Lutz saying in “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” when I listen to Ka of Dr. Yen Lo rhyme. The way his flow interconnects the sounds and textures of both meaning and literal throat activity, drawing dotted lines from consonant to consonant, vowel to vowel, this I want to analogize to the fiction of Gary Lutz for its compact and driving force. So much so that I looked the essay back up and I found Lutz describing what it is he wants to write: “narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language.” Yep. That’s it. That’s why I listened to Days with Dr. Yen Lo almost all the way through the first time before I realized there are hardly any beats, at least hardly any processional kick-snare-kick-snare, to be found. Sure, samples scratch and occasionally interrupt or talk back, and the instrumentals can stand up and walk on their own as vibe-out pieces, but the sustaining pleasure can be heard in Ka’s ability to patiently flutter language like it’s smoke caught in a vortex. Chill.
Holly Herndon
Platform
[RVNG Intl.]
Do the disembodied masses of short vocal samples spun together in granular synthesis dream of electric sheep, or home, or a better future? The most exciting difference between Platform and Movement is that Herndon now seems to really believe they do. Not everyone got what they wanted out of Platform because of its lack of tidy conceptualism or aesthetic unity, but the rest of us loved it because of the plurality of experiences it contains as well as its unbridled optimism. In the unique world of Platform, beat music, academic computer music, ASMR, opera, and pastoral narrative come together in a swarm of radical energy, like a cluster of drones flying apart and then back together against the sunrise, working together to establish a mobile, untraceable data reservoir. Ultimately, while it might help to read a bunch of critical theory, anyone anywhere can appreciate Herndon’s efficacy to make life better out here by exploring and shifting the physics of all the inside worlds of humanity’s physical and emotional investment.
D/P/I
Ad Hocc
[Zona Music]
“Gray has managed to disentangle himself,” SCVSCV wrote in his comprehensive review of Alex Gray’s latest D/P/I installment, Ad Hocc. The release is composed of a grouping of six variations of one album (three fundamental variants and three supplemental variants), released as a USB drive to further prove there was and might never be a decisive umbrella term to group Gray’s pounding, clashed makeup. Like a blacksmith swinging forevermore, collecting, adding, and forging, Ad Hocc is the smoothed katana, free of blemish, strong as iron, untangled and played one-by-one, all together through six separate speakers or any way we please. The popularly unfamiliar freedom of the album gives Gray a multiverse platform, where every moment is decidedly its own. It’s autonomy, a sonic tool Gray has always pitched with, but never to the self-aware, exploratory velocity of Ad Hocc. To catch oneself in it all is to play with what could be built. There are no limits to the only umbrella D/P/I will ever own.
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
