The Music Box.
Entries about the music I like.
Angel Olsen – Aisles EP
Listening to Angel Olsen’s Aisles has me thinking about the stories we tell ourselves and each other. Something about these slow-burning covers of 80s hits like Safety Dance and Forever Young makes me jostle with the why-are-we-here and why-do-we-do-the-things-we-do variety of questions. Or maybe I was contemplative to begin with and just happen to be listening to Aisles.
Magdalena Bay – Mercurial World
At some point in the history of the now-old internet, the late night drive entered the collective consciousness. Its soundtrack: a long list of waves including chillwave, retrowave, vaporwave and simpsonswave. Why are our daydreams filled with ill-defined late night drives? And why do albums like Magdalena Bay’s Mercurial World remind us of these drives we’ve never had?
Culture // Music of the Week / Aug 22, 2021
This week's playlist is about culture. Culture isn’t the language you speak. Culture is holding the door open for the person walking behind you when there’s nobody on the other side to prostrate over your generosity. Culture is living within your means. Culture is attempting to buy respect or love or loyalty when you can’t be arsed to earn it.
Slow & Steady // Music of the Week / WS 17-May-21
This week’s playlist has served as a soundtrack to my efforts to count my blessings, name them one by one, and stay the course, to just keep going: be it with Stranger Fiction, with work, or with life. It starts with the nightchill downtempo of A Forest Mighty Black’s Duo Trippin’ and ends with Kendrick Lamar telling you 'we’re going to be all right.'
A Forest Mighty Black – Mellowdramatic
I’ve spent the better part of the last month listening to the best album of nineties trip-hop I’ve heard from mainland Europe: Mellowdramatic by Freiburg’s A Forest Mighty Black. Its pitch is simple: it does something easy masterfully. Boom-bap inspired beats serve as a backdrop to light electric piano noodling and slow-moving basslines that engulf the album’s tracks.
Hope • Reset // Music of the Week / WS 21-Mar-21
It’s hard for me to talk about the last two weeks from a musical perspective because so much has happened in my life outside of music. I’ve alluded to the personal and professional changes in my life, so I won’t go into the tacticals here. I will, however, take this time to reflect on what those changes have meant for me emotionally and psychologically.
Everything & 1 Half // Music of the Week / WS 7 Mar 2021
It’s all been a little everything and a half last week. Musically, I deviated from the previous three weeks of punk, and explored the many worlds of electronic music. I’m likely to occupy this space for a while longer. In fact, but for Chumbawumba’s Tubthumping, you’re going to find virtually no obvious references to punk and its offshoots in this week’s playlist.
Heartbreak // Music of the Week / WS 14-Feb
My theme for this week's Music of the Week playlist is heartbreak. Not everything I heard was related to heartbreak – in fact most of it wasn’t – but the crumbling of a long-term relationship in the week before Valentine’s Day would inform at least some of the music one listens to, and that happened. Here's a playlist featuring Schneider TM, Kylie Minogue, Phosphorescent, Rashmeet Kaur, etc.
Bicep – Isles
Combining elements of traditional house, 90s dance music, UK garage and reverby IDM with samples of music from around the world (Including Jab Andhera Hota Hai from the 1973 Bollywood film Raja Rani on Sundial), Isles is something most of Bicep’s previous music wasn’t: dance music for headphones on unkempt scalps and chairs under fat arses.
Various Artists — Uneven Paths, Deviant Pop From Europe 1980-1991
A set of experimental recordings from lesser-known European artists of the 80s that pose the question, what if this is what pop music from the 80s sounded like? What if it sounded like an understated drum machine, echoing guitars, and a bossa nova groove? What if it was African tribalism through a pop lens? What if it sounded like lush reverb-pop? Or infectious leftfield dance?
Kelly Lee Owens — Inner Song
There’s two things Kelly Lee Owens’s Inner Song gets on point, leading it to ace the distractingly good test(TM) for good music in the Age Of Distraction. One is the textures of its instruments and how they evolve, the second is the answers it gives for the age-old question of popular music: how to write a good hook? These are remarkably difficult things to do, especially for an album of minimal electronica.
Portishead — Dummy
The story of Portishead’s Dummy usually fits snugly into pop music historians' retelling of nineties electronica. A Bristol-based band obsessed with dub, pads, and hip hop breakbeats releases an idiosyncratic debut album in 1994: it’s the natural progression of UK electronic music after Massive Attack's Blue Lines, establishing Bristol as the global capital of trip hop.
DJ Python — Mas Amable
True to its name, Brian Piñeyro’s second full-length under his DJ Python moniker is a calm, tropical, reggaeton-infused minimal house record. Combining the reggaeton that was ubiquitous in his time living in Miami with deep-house, the New York-based DJ’s latest work pushes the confines of a genre of his own creation — deep reggaeton.
The Avalanches — We Will Always Love You
It’s important to contextualise any Avalanches release with the story of how seminal their debut release, Since I Left You is. When it was released in 2000, the album was unlike anything anyone had ever heard before. It was dance-pop built out of a crate-digger’s dream. Their third album, We Will Always Love You is a sunshine-happy record of psychedelic electronica.
Gorillaz — Song Machine, Season One, Strange Timez
On my first listen of this album, I was reminded of the story of my seeking out the first Gorillaz cassette in Dubai. I had been watching the Gorillaz’ music videos on MTV for months, thinking, this is the future of storytelling. Blur’s frontman creates a band of cartoon characters with elaborate backstories. What a cutting-edge way to explore the art of storytelling.
Boards of Canada — Geogaddi
Boards of Canada are among the best at what they do, which is making smoky downtempo electronica. Geogaddi is widely considered their second best album, which is saying a lot, considering their best is widely considered to be Music Has The Right Children, often spoken of in glowing terms in relation not only to electronic music, but also to all of western popular music. But there’s something about the range of Geogaddi that makes it my favourite Boards Of Canada album.
Jon Hopkins — Immunity
Usually when you can't finish an album it's indicative of its failings. But in rare cases, it's indicative of a greatness that compels you to behave like some sort of character from a movie: hold your head in your hands, sink to your knees, stare at the sky, shake your head in disbelief, whisper wow through teary eyes. That's what happens with Immunity.
Burial — Untrue
If you, like me, see the city night as a human emotion, no work of art better encapsulates it than Burial's Untrue. Musically, it's easy to name its constituent parts: part UK garage, part broken beats, part glitchy atmosphere, part time-stretched vocal samples, part reverb-drenched masters. But there's something magical that makes it a lot greater than the sum of its parts.
Lifafa — Jaago
Some time in 2014, my friend and I were partaking in that quintessentially Bombay concept of a sharing table at that quintessentially Bombay institution, Janta, when we were joined by the lead singer of what was then, and is now, my favourite Indian band, someone we assumed was a girlfriend, and someone we assumed was a girl friend. Bombay doesn't allow known faces private conversations.
Clams Casino - Instrumental Relics
A new compilation of old favourites by vaporous hippity-hop producer behind the first albums of Lil B and A$AP Rock. Nostalgia-filled listening session of smoky parties with old friends. Vibe-heavy instrumentals 👌👌👌