2016: Third Quarter Favorites 22 picks from the last three months

Arca

Entrañas

[Self-Released]

Entrails. Arca’s image is the spill-over vessel, one that tips over when filled to the brim, then rights itself. Small strands of water escape the container and flow out; each stream finds its own channel, fertilizing earth, bringing everything into becoming. The vessel could refer to the body that is spontaneously filled with illuminated music. The music finds meaning-channels spontaneously, according to the language-state of the listener. Then the vessel pops upright and is filled again, and each day it overflows. It’s a chaotic process — but one from which something always comes into being — a body of bodies — Pérdida, Girsasol, Sin Rumbo. The trauma of this is found in the melancholic timbre of the subject, located brutally between the vessel’s overflow — its spillage and fulfillment — a body spilling over itself into constant new forms. As such, there are pipes and flutes that differ in length, their various notes differing in pitch. Hence, the multiplicity and complexity of long and short, low and high tones. Although tones vary in a thousand ways, the principles of their endowment is the same. The music of nature is not an entity existing outside of things. The different apertures, turnt pipes and flutes — the snakes, the torero, the vicars — in combination with all living beings, are Arca’s sound. –SCVSCV

Christian Fennesz & Jim O’Rourke

It’s Hard For Me To Say I’m Sorry

[Editions Mego]

There’s a very special kind of sorrow in knowing that you’re wrong — the queasy taste of your own tongue, holding ground within your throat, an invisible wall of your own making that refuses to let you say what you know you need to say. With all the tension of a pregnant pause, It’s Hard For Me To Say I’m Sorry is another loaded session from old drone guards Christian Fennesz and Jim O’Rourke, but on their first dual collaboration, the two have come together in the spirit of coming apart. Scarred guitar chords and rosy synthesizers mix to form a concoction resembling a shoegaze romance distilled into pure, weightless air, as majestic and harrowing as watching a tornado unfold in slow motion. But It’s Hard For Me To Say I’m Sorry isn’t a melodrama, nor is it carefree ambience; it’s a soft, dying light, the most lush O’Rourke or Fennesz have sounded in years, not to mention the most purposeful. Its two sides unfurl in massive sound that nonetheless feels intimate and small, an eternal yet brief moment taken wincingly, in the vain hope that it might not end. –Sam Goldner

D/P/I

Composer

[Shelter Press]

Dizzyingly complex it may be, yet Composer is music at its purest and most elemental. Not just because Alex Gray’s final LP as D/P/I was the product of a subconscious, almost randomized creative process into which convention can’t possibly intrude, but because its aural fabric sounds equally subconscious. The album’s seven chaotic tracks seem to lack all extraneous coloring and texture, their careening notes amounting to pulses of unadulterated tone that fly hypnotically through the air. In fact, so minimal are these notes in tonality and timbre that frantic pieces like “Semantics” and “Ecstatics” become music in its most abstract and subliminal sense. That is, they become less performances experienced consciously by their audience, and more direct signals to the brain, manipulating and programming it from within, without listener or composer fully understanding just what the hell is going on. –Simon Panhandler

Elysia Crampton

Elysia Crampton Presents: Demon City

[Break World]

Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet, “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” Elysia Crampton’s works have always sought to exorcise the distorting traumas of erasure and repression that explode with maximalist aplomb in mainstream, subverting hypermasculinity and schema of domination in an anti-historicizing archaeology of sound drawing from diasporic erasure and muddling intersections. On Elysia Crampton Presents: Demon City, her resolve to face upright the brutal incisions of history is palpably clear even while, throughout exercises like Chino Amobi and Why Be collaboration “Dummy Track,” the humiliating, antagonistic demons imbricated with the fabric of self-expression can’t be warded off by any measure of compositional incantation. They co-arise with us, in tandem foil to our survival instinct and interdependent subjecthood. The bitcrushed demonic voices and unremitting pentatonics of Demon City are not a funhouse reflection of our present reality; they are merely what one encounters upon listening and looking closely. –Nick Henderson

Foodman

IKEIKE

[Postgeography]

Of all the Foodman releases we in the States have yet heard, IKEIKE arguably does least to confront the senses. But don’t let that fool you: Foodman is still concerned with disrupting dance music’s elemental schemes. IKEIKE just does it in a finer way. Where Ez Minzoku, Foodman’s previous 2016 US release, was a barrage of needles, pricking and prodding at irregular intervals, this tape is elemental mercury — silvery and glinting, squirming just beyond contact. Tracks range from the off-kilter floppy-drive jitters of “Foot” to the jarring, stuttering “Erekutoro.” On each track, the groove remains futilely just out of reach. Not so on “Osoi” or final track “Kitekudesai” — the disruptions in rhythm and texture are still there, but they don’t shatter as much as they glitch. It’s subtler subterfuge than we’re used to from Foodman, but the strange details are still unmistakably his. –Chris Kissel

Frank Ocean

Blonde/Endless

[Boys Don’t Cry/Def Jam]

Up to our waist in the wave of the year, we hear the parsing rush of fluids. Half-fashioned biles sneer assaultive thoughts and the phlegm of prophesied tonics promise resolve. But despondency is messy: how do we hydrate a soul? Past the flood of quiet is the pulsing throat, a blood and a voice and “what can I do to show my love?” It’s an Endless unwinding, a life in round, the soul of unity one letter at a time. It’s rain, glitter; it’s Blonde on Blond, a trans-conjugation balanced in betweens, a kiss and a twist. Like water, the voice fills the grain, washes without definition. The voice is everything, the many-gendered human soul between a static of a self’s “what’s your name?” and a universe’s “how far is a light year?” In the unbound wash is the voice. It’s Frank, a life, a soul, and it’s more than a voice; at its best, it is love. –Frank Falisi

G.L.O.S.S.

Trans Day of Revenge

[Self-Released]

Identity is a source of political power, even as it remains tied to the structures of oppression that provide its source. G.L.O.S.S. understand this, starting from a rejection of cissexism and a police state rather than the location that these forces place them in. In the spirit of classic hardcore, transgender here is a term of resistance, and the inclusion in the community that the EP inevitably builds is structured on those terms. With sneakily catchy shout-alongs and tried-and-true d-beat at the base of this flawlessly executed piece, its unironic call for violence and call-to-action against cissexism and the police state acts all the more strongly alongside the invitation to a community of refusal and difference provided by its delirious sonics. Injecting the distinct timbre in vocals and affect that their subject positions provide to the hardcore continuum, G.L.O.S.S. says “fuck you” to respectability politics and nearly everything else while still letting the rest of us in. It’s no wonder that Epitaph, that major label icon for the young and rejected, wanted them, and it’s no wonder G.L.O.S.S. said no, but the news that they’ve broken up still comes as a sad surprise. But with this last release, they’ve suggested a path forward for hardcore and, perhaps, gotten out while the path still remained a potentiality rather than yet another overcoded node of marketable identity. Here’s to the new community. –Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli

Gucci Mane

Everybody Looking

[1017 Records]

Gucci Mane enters and exits with [La]Flare. That is, a uniquely brilliant, creative spark. A dynamic dynamite that makes rubble of your preconceptions, clearing the way for his vision. Whatever else that may be, it’s also a bridge between Project Pat and Harmony Korine, bumping perennially like suboxone or the sub-octaves of this interned artists’ interim releases’ intros and outros. Now, though, those sounds abound. Gucci Mane may not actually be a clone, but make no mistake; he has been cloned, and his clones run rap. If that feels like science fiction, then let’s drop some science on it. Everybody Looking is a litmus test for your tastes. It’s either the ultimate comeback album or your last chance to stop staring. –Samuel Diamond

Ian William Craig

Centres

[130701]

As water bleeds ink, Ian William Craig bleeds his voice, draws the space between recorded worlds into runs of color and incidental stains. What’s gone and what stayed still? Centres is unfinished, thrown to time, a process-album. His words say what the music had been all along, “These hands are set to lapse/ Never knowing to say when.” It’s captivating for the clarity of Craig’s voice in a brokedown choir, for the decay drowning out every moment of clarity, for the collapse of audition in the live room headspace that these songs sustain a portal to. A forgetting-machine, like us, that traces a bounding circle around listening. It contains the draw-distance geography of Mount Eerie, the gravity of Ravedeath, 1972, the field life of Will, the memory translation of An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, the quieting space of A Forgetting Place. But it will never contain you, won’t contain anything at all. Everywhere at the end of time, stretches of heart reveal themselves where before there was background noise. Everything in decay, everything in generation, on arrival and becoming. Obsessed with the drift to void, something in the way Craig’s sketches sing out their endings promises relief. Exhalation, expiration: It need not be hopeless. –Pat Beane

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma

In Summer

[Geographic North]

In Summer beautifully sums up and condenses what Jefre Cantu-Ledesma got so right on his last two full lengths, A Year With 13 Moons and Love Is A Stream. It stutters to life with a wash of keyboards and Linndrum samples, then swings in with a gorgeous guitar melody that sounds like it’s collapsing into itself. When it finally peters out nearly eight minutes later, he segues perfectly into the field recordings and drone of “Little Deer Isle,” giving the listener respite from the noise — with a different kind of it. Replacing the textural guitar with field sounds (actual birdsong, wind rustling) makes literal on record the connection to nature that bands like Slowdive hinted at in their videos. If you follow this site, you by now hopefully know and love JCL's modus operandi. In Summer offers that up in miniature as one of his finest creations. –Joe Davenport

KA

Honor Killed the Samurai

[Iron Works]

On August 13, Ka quite literally self-released Honor Killed the Samurai. After announcing his intention to do so via social media, the Brownsville-based rapper-producer brought his album to the people, setting up on a New York City sidewalk to sell his brand new album out of the trunk of his car. In a year where we've endured Apple Music/TIDAL exclusives, Kanye changing The Life of Pablo 87 times, and album teases that would make the Enigma machine blush, Ka's method feels refreshingly real. It's with that same approach that Ka envisions himself like the titular Japanese warrior, bound by a code to live a life of morality, discipline, and integrity in a world that has none. Over simple yet affecting beats, he delivers a masterclass of rhymes and wordplay, detailing a life besieged by drugs and violence. But whether it's the kung-fu movie-esque synth of "Destined" or the haunting guitar of "I Wish (Death Poem)," everything serves to elevate Ka's message: There can be a salvation in it all; there can be more to life than the forces of evil that threaten to consume it. We have a word for people like this, those who by protecting others are able to save themselves. They are known as samurai. –Jeremy Klein

KABLAM

Furiosa

[Janus]

Furiosa you are the hero who drives through Hell.
Big rig on the run.
Big booming drums.
Fire fills the air as you swerve around bombs.
Yet still you race on,
a mindless machine,
free, automatically.
Furiosa all over bloody and gleaming.
Fearless and strong.
Furiosa gets a multi-kill,
twisting scrap meta
into metal machine song.
But we know worse is yet to come.
A psychic horror encroaches.
Furiosa get your big gun.
Evil is real and growing near.
Only you know the way out of here.
–Adam Devlin

LILLITH双生

(SEASON_0) Hazard Garden

[Dream Catalogue]

R u on the grid? (SEASON_0) Hazard Garden is the cracked asphalt underfoot in industrial wastelands the world over. The streets burn, the skyline has disintegrated: the holograms can only imitate the rubble and dirt left behind; the vision vanishes. And, still, every dying moment is a new beginning. Death2saiba, the Hazard Garden thrives, long live LILLITH双生. No fake optimism, no consummate gloss, but a gauzy, endlessly transmogrifying projection of the neofuturist self, surveying the wreckage under neon-lit skies. Maggie always said there was no such thing as society, and you can bet your candy-ass that LILLITH双生 is on that same tip right now. The vapors that linger in the air are that hard; you can feel them hit the back of your throat. Impermanence never seemed so reel. –Soe Jherwood

M. Geddes Gengras

Interior Architecture

[Intercoastal Artists]

"Interior Architecture? Is that some kind of euphemism for tuckus noises?”
– my roommate

To be fair, my roommate doesn’t much like the Grateful Dead either; Interior Architecture is the futuristic, super-long “Space” session of Phil Lesh’s dreams, folding poise and precision into a barely-contained whole, like a Möbius band of liquid, steam, and light. Modular god Gengras is as new-age here as he is free-jazz, carving his own uncanny valley between ambience and expression. There’s something blissful and serendipitous about Interior Architecture; the stumbling and squelching attributes of an improvisational moment take their place in the structural mapping of a subterranean, monstrous force. It probably doesn’t help that I’m doing my listening, in lieu of the cash for a decent pair of monitors, on an old pair of Logitech™ computer speakers that emphasize the bubbly and farty parts of these four electroacoustic jammers over the undercurrent of voluminous uncertainty, from which my roommate might otherwise have reeled in the dimensional confusion I felt in moments of headphone intimacy. To steal a page from Kylie Jenner’s book, “2016 is the year of realizing things,” and in time, all of our roommates will come to vibe with the architecture of a different interior. –Will Neibergall

Macula Dog

Why Do You Look Like Your Dog?

[Wharf Cat]

Here, read this. Seriously. Leave this FEATURE and read this (it’s the same link as before, so if you were going to check, you don’t have to since I just now confirmed that they are both the same link). I’m not going to expound near as well as CYNOCEPHALUS on the subject of Macula Dog’s Why Do You Look Like Your Dog?. All I will say on the matter is that this album is a sure-fire slam dunk. And that’s “slam dunk” as in basketball. –Bort

N-Prolenta

A Love Story 4 @deezius, neo, chuk, E, milkleaves, angel, ISIS, + every1else…. and most of all MY DAMN SELF

[PTP]

We live in a hurricane of self-serving intentions, a stormy nexus of Love Stories 4 our OWN DAMN SELVES, every body precariously positioned downwind of somebody else’s screams. Everybody’s joints hurt, predicating a drastic change in pressure. This is a Love Story 4 those who have ever been crushed by it, 4 those born in lightning storms wrapped in metal umbilical cords, 4 those who can drown it all out with electronics and memories, 4 those who’ve ever looked on in silent horror while it all burnt down, 4 those who benefit from staggering fear while being driven by their own, & 4 every1else. We all live in a fucking hurricane. This is what it looks like when there are no more walls, no more basements, no more roofs: bodies turned upward in hope, in despair, in query. Futile bodies subject now only to each other and to nature’s indiscriminating torrent. This is our Love Story. Step outside and be part of it. –Jackson Scott

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds

Skeleton Tree

[Bad Seed Ltd.]

“While the bones of our child crumble like chalk,” Cave sings on 1997’s The Boatman’s Call, “O where do we go now but nowhere?” The stakes on Skeleton Tree are fundamentally different, however, and so is the answer to that question, which can only truly be worked out in light of actual tragedy. Cave’s excellent 2016 record traverses the dark and winding valleys of despair, eventually coming to the conclusions to the questions that The Boatman’s Call could only pose. The haunting drones and heavy cadences of “Jesus Alone” establish the album’s gravity, and the songs that follow see Cave working through his alienation as elegantly and as creatively as ever. The subtle, magnificent “I Need You” is one of the most thematically and sonically crushing songs of the year, but ultimately it is “Skeleton Tree’s” concluding mantra (“And it’s alright now”) that lights the way home. –Adam Rothbarth

Princess Nokia

1992

[Self-Released]

Spanish-Harlem raised. Done stepping up. Remaining zoned-in and culturally LAWLZ. Not exactly keeping it “DRAGONS,” but just about. Princess Nokia (a.k.a. Destiny Frasqueri, f.k.a. Wavy Spice) keeps a strong-feminine presence without fabricating heterosexism or gripping nuts in your face to demand alpha dominance in 1992. There’s no screaming like in some Beyoncé/Adele/Lady Gaga joint. Nothing past the “chill point” that Katie Got Bandz, JunglePussy, or Sasha Go Hard try to push. Princess Nokia is a firm cross between Sade, Janet Jackson, and Angel Haze. Like, if “Tomboy” doesn’t make you feel fem-sexy (whether the listener is male or female), move on to “Mine;” if the EP’s title 1992 doesn’t lyrically unfold into a kaleidoscope of nostalgic signifiers, if the front cover don’t get you wearing XXL long sleeves this Autumn, if you only gotta worry about how they‘re moving, anything below your hips is a complete GREY-area while blaring Princess Nokia because life is forever happening. Princess Nokia gives hope to the future of dehydrated MCs, so pay close attention to reality. –C Monster

serpentwithfeet

blisters

[Tri Angle]

serpentwithfeet: the name of the project itself is allusive enough, drawing on a plurality of meaning — evolution, original sin, self-acceptance, sex as a slimy, holy communion, etc. blisters is less scored than strung up, reminiscent of sadomasochistic liaisons, the soundtracks for Sirkian melodramas, and strange fruit swaying in the breeze. Just the same, Josiah Wise’s method is florid and ripe, bruised and bruising. “How can I touch somebody who won’t even touch themselves?” he asks on his debut EP’s centerpiece, Jacob and the angel wrestling within, etiologic forces winnowing away the distractions of the modern world, until only the most elemental truths remain, a clean-chiseled tablet excavated from under eons of dirt, diary entries cut and arranged into a perfect chapbook of poems, a symbolic narrative that dresses itself up in the arcane and unknowable, and yet stands, unmistakably, as a totemic reminder of birthrights given and rescinded, and of the distances we Canaanites have travelled in exile and on the long roads back home. –Embling

Valerio Tricoli

Clonic Earth

[PAN]

Valerio Tricoli has amassed one of the most frightening discographies in contemporary music. Each of his albums contain something like 20 genuinely uncanny “is the void in my speakers” moments. 2014s Miseri Lares brought us again and again to that place — groaning doors, knocks, unknown tongues, whispers — all hurtled our way, whipped deep into our psyches with the intense, achy clatter of his signature Revox tape-looping technique. If Lares was a turn inward, a pathological scrutiny of Tricoli’s and our own deeply embedded fears and anxieties, then Clonic Earth, this behemoth of a record, is the glaring, crackling vision of all outside, our sight cataract over with a foggy, knowing patina of existential dread. It’s an undistillable polyphony of voices, myths, ideologies, beings; it sounds like something living, a real other-world. There’s something else uncanny, though, in how easy it is to take; there’s something sweet, shiny. Maybe it’s Bill Kouligas’s progressively slicker, smarter, and winkingly digestible cover design. Or maybe it has something to do with the thrilling, chilling, flash-bang-boom blockbuster mastery this thoroughly experimental, enormously honest artist has over composition and sound itself. –Jim Coltson

YG

Still Brazy

[Def Jam]

Post-hyphy’s national radio rise circa “Tell Me When To Go,” West Coast rap has dug its roots further south, away from the Bay Area and back to L.A. And now, in 2016, the roots have been set for a minute, and there’s a circle of rappers hanging around the canopy. When placed alongside untitled unmastered, Blank Face, and Prima Donna, Still Brazy comes from a different, historically concrete place. Like Young M.A. making “real” New York music with New York help, YG is making music synonymous with Los Angeles, specifically Compton, doing it with artists in arm’s reach physically (Slim 400, Nipsey Hussle) and in the industry (Lil Wayne, Drake, who both stick out like a Midwest cold sore). With West Coast walk-nice drive-slow funk, direct-line analog synth creeps, and swirls like it’s 1992, Still Brazy is an IV bag of bool, balm, bonfidence. –Monet Maker

Young Thug

Jeffery

[Atlantic/300 Entertainment]

Something about Young Thug saying there’s “no such thing as gender” maybe hinted at it (not to mention allegations that he was, in fact, changing his name to “No, My Name is Jeffery”), but I don’t think anyone was fully prepared for the drop of one of Young Thug’s wildest, most ambitious tapes of his career. Beyond looking like the most insane Tekken showdown of the new millennium, the mixtape again proves that Young Thug can turn any beat into a classic, a hydrodynamic form within the holding space around him. He’s like water in that way: formless, shapeless, spitting every line with an eternally unpredictable flow. “RiRi” and “Future Swag” are Thug at his radio finest, with trap hooks as tight as anything from his career so far, while bonus-track ender “Pick Up the Phone,” perhaps a bit polished next to cuts with dead gorillas for names, still shows Jeffery having fun with it. –Rob Arcand