Gig #150: Lately Mostly Songs: MXLX, Tyler Holmes, Max Nordile, Gressive, Nonconnah, Maxine Funke, Yuko Araki, Genghis Tron, Maraudeur, Witch Camp, Rivet, Guided by Voices, California Girls, Ai Aso, Heile

MXLX
Tyler Holmes
Max Nordile
Gressive
Nonconnah
Maxine Funke
Yuko Araki
Genghis Tron
Maraudeur
Witch Camp
Rivet
Guided by Voices
California Girls
Ai Aso
Heile

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MXLX Eye, Mote, Beam, etc.
‘There aren’t many musicians who you could compare to Matt Loveridge really and it is this writer’s belief that Loveridge is the closest this country has got to producing another Mike Patton. Lyrics arrive in snippets and fly around on the wind of the music. It always feels like it is the tone and sound of the words that are more important than what they are actually saying. An MXLX album sounds like the work of a ten-piece band and this is no different. A noise infected one-man Roxy Music with each disparate element allowed its moment to shine. Electronics contort and snake throughout with drums and drum machines marrying each other in a harmony that must be extremely difficult to achieve and with every song here running over six minutes plus there is plenty of time for dynamics and drama.’ — Simon Tucker

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Tyler Holmes Nightmare in Paradise
‘Nightmare in Paradise took almost two and a half years to make, evolving slowly from an initial solo-artist-with-keyboard concept (“Hole’s MTV Unplugged performance remixed by Tricky,” as Holmes puts it) into its fully fleshed-out, “electro-acoustic aquarium” final form. But the album is a specific response to a horrific incident—or rather, the traumas called up by that incident, which defined Holmes’ life for a period. When Holmes was finishing a tour in Puerto Rico with musician San Cha, a few hours before they were scheduled to fly out, a bandmate was shot in a bizarre and random incident on the street. Holmes and San Cha stayed with the victim through their painful, extended recovery in a San Juan hospital. The experience triggered long-suppressed PTSD in Holmes.’ — 48hills

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Max Nordile Show Biz
‘Max Nordile’s “Vying For The Dime” is a brief but comprehensive showcase of his sound: Harry Partch-like clutter & dings, but there’s something else going on here. In the past his work has been labeled as “junkyard” music, but here he sheds any Beefheart/mid-career Tom Waits comparisons and presents a life that’s very much amongst others. Like the muffled sounds of an upstairs neighbor or those brief moments when you walk into an open, but empty, store. It’s familiar, domestic, and eerily comforting.’ — Paisley Shirt Records

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Gressive Sever Ties
‘Gressive EP vehemently announces it’s arrival with the Insufficient Funds. SHALT weaves intense bass snarls and crescendos of mallet hits in the refrain, contrasted with an arpeggiated, grime-inflected B part. lloydfears’ vocals are urgent and enraged as he delivers lyrical nods to the late Mark Fisher, (“I can feel the future falling in”). It’s not hard to read lloyd’s lyrics on a more macroeconomic level than simple denial of nightclub admission; “Insufficient funds no way are you getting in. Card just declined no way are you getting in.” SHALT’s approach to interdependent sound design is on full display here, as lloydfears’ vocals seems to directly affect the instrumental, slicing through the beat’s outro like an electric saw.’ — Infinite Machine

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Nonconnah Summer Sparkler Dream Cartridge
‘The real lure of Nonconnah’s nonlinear approach is how many layers and ideas there are to uncover here. Historically, this sort of electroacoustic music can be proudly (and often wonderfully) didactic, tracing tiny variations on a single idea for an hour or more. Once they’ve dipped into a sound, for instance, Christian Fennesz, Claire M. Singer, and Francisco Lopez aren’t prone to jar you with something entirely unexpected; instead, they slowly shift the focus to reveal a new level of detail inherent in the sound. But Nonconnah work like magpies, webbing together their own idiosyncratic renditions of sounds they love.’ — Grayson Haver Currin

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Maxine Funke Homage
‘Funke has released an acclaimed run of low-key DIY folk records on labels like Feeding Tube, Next Best Way and Epic Sweep, and this latest is possibly her most resolved to date. Minimal but never icy, Funke’s songwriting is tender and focused, but her voice is the key here, as she uses delicate tones to illustrate an internal world brimming with love and loss. Using just guitar and voice, Funke meditates on themes using dreamlike imagery and tangled poetry – they seem simple, but take countless listens to unpick. There’s euphoria, anxiety, romance and pain hidden beneath her wavering words, and it’s a pleasure to hear something so uncluttered and free from posturing.’ — Boomkat

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Yuko Araki Moonstroke in the Mountain
‘This flow is dense and irregular, like a nightmare or a vivid dream, articulating nonsense into entire worlds of meaning storming our brains at night for hours on end. Those strange constructs of unresolved contradictions and opposed feelings are the core of this album’s psychedelic approach, a glimpse within the wayward thought-processes of an everyday life whose primary connections to life are a thousand systems of exploitation of nature, whose referents of wonder are both the seemingly mechanical flapping of insect wings and the supernova we can only see thousands of years after the fact. The vitality of this connection between mind and world is fraught with aggression, with a fierce struggle to bring the gripping screams of that outside into the realm of intelligibility.’ — David Murrieta Flores

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Genghis Tron Pyrocene
‘Formed in college by Jordan and Sochynsky, GENGHIS TRON concocted a dizzying, yet compelling mix of grind, metal, and electronic music that defied both genre and rational explanation. Their drummer was a machine. Both Jordan and Sochynsky did the programming before adding dense layers of frantic guitars and lush synthesizers. They dropped the ‘Cloak Of Love‘ EP in 2005. Produced by über-guitarist Colin Marston of Krallice and Behold… The Arctopus, it was glitchy electronica, grind, and other disparate genres run through a blender in the most satisfying – and occasionally polarizing – way. And then? In late 2010, GENGHIS TRON went on hiatus. Now, the hiatus is over.’ — Riff Relevant

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Maraudeur Face/Figure
‘MARAUDEUR returns with their first new music following their killer 2017 LP, with the group since relocated from Geneva to Leipzig—the new wave of Swiss wave, or Neue Deutsche Welle twice removed (borders are just social constructs). Vocals in alternating German, English, and French, all generally delivered with the detachment of announcements repeated in a subway terminal, backed by BUSH TETRAS/ESG-descended rhythms via clockwork-ticking drums, elliptical bass grooves, and judicious stabs of single-note razor wire guitar, with those carefully plotted sonic angles then warped under a constant buzz and warble of primitive synth.’ — Erika Elizabeth

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Witch Camp Hatred Drove Me From My home
‘Produced by author Ian Brennan in collaboration with his wife, Italian-Rwandan filmmaker, author, and photographer, Marilena Umuhoza Delli, I’ve Forgotten Now Who I Used to Be collects extraordinary field recordings made at Ghana’s infamous “witch camps” – settlements where women accused of witchcraft can find safety and community; the women persecuted as witches are often plagued by mental health issues and physical ailments, while others are shunned and ostracized as a ruse to steal their land after their husband’s passing.’ — Six Degrees Records

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Rivet Mag Mich
‘Swedish producer and electronic enthusiast Rivet (Mika Hallbäck Vuorenpää, Malmö) joins the Editions Mego fold with a dynamic and diverse album that pivots between the punctuated pop of Ivan Pavlov’s COH project, the chromatic slink of Chris and Cosey whilst also bearing a degree of fruit birthed from Hallbäck’s home country Sweden in skewered pop such as The Knife. This is electronic music born from the worship of machines and the spirit of punk, mood music brooding with sophistication and subversive twists all underscored with a deep industrial pulse. Are these songs? Are these lyrics? Words melt as beat perpetually takes us deeper into flight. Interpretation is flung open as the audience are invited to gauge what on earth is going on here.’ — Editions Mego

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Guided By Voices Free Agents
‘The 33rd Guided By Voices album, Earth Man Blues, is a magical cinematic rock album, full of dramatic and surreal twists and turns. Lyrics and liner notes trace the growth of young Harold Admore Harold through a coming of age and a reckoning with darkness. Vivid scenes appear: snapshots of youth, fantastical nightmares, unknown worlds.’ — Rockathon

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California Girls Body Work
‘Canberra-born, Sydney-based Gus McGrath’s latest album, ‘Beat Boy’, is anxiety writ large. Ditching the analogue synthesiser and ’90s sequencer for Ableton has brought both pop vision and a modern harshness to California Girls’ music. Auto-Tune occasionally softens the pounding electronics and McGrath’s frightening baritone-monotone, but it’s all still far from chart-friendly. McGrath says he’s relishing the space to try and “fail” at making pop music. “I’m excited by the idea of pop music, but between not really having the proper production skills and the desire, I can’t make straightforward pop music,” he explains. “I like this idea that through technology [like Auto-Tune] I can make my voice more conventionally better but then, in doing that, I’m highlighting the problems with it.”’ — NME

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Ai Aso I’ll Do It My Way
‘Tokyo’s Ai Aso is a Japanese psychedelic pop singer-songwriter whose work has a whisper-thin acid-folk quality to it. She started performing as a solo singer around 2000. Her solo work, infrequent collaborations with White Heaven members You Ishihara and Michio Kurihara, Yurayura Teikoku, and Boris bring a level of fragility and hypnotism to the stage, recalling lost memories, small flavors of Coil, and serial playing on the verge of evaporation.’ — Soundohm

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Hiele Brain
‘Hiele, who also runs Antwerp bar and music venue Table Dance with his partner Michelle Woods, started experimenting with analogue synthesizers and drum machines whilst studying double bass at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp. The musician released three albums in 2020, all made up of material accrued over a five year period at Stockholm’s EMS and his own home recording space De Ziltige Olijf. This featured track “Brain”, with visuals by Gerard Herman, is taken from Hiele’s latest album Sings.’ — The Wire

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p.s. Hey. ** Montse, Montse!! By sheer accident I managed to catch your late comment from yesterday! Hey, my pal! I miss you!!! How are you? I’m okay. I’m counting the seconds until our restrictions start getting lifted on the 19th. It’s been exhausting, as you can well understand. But I’m good. And you, and Xet? It would be so great to see you! As soon as traveling and life are a little normal again, let’s figure out a meeting ground. Big, big love to you! ** Dominik, Hi, D! Awesome SCAB poem yesterday! Thank you for the nourishment. Yeah, I guess I should have given my yesterday love the ability and requirement of sending a GPS signal of his movements to you so you either wouldn’t accidentally walk on a soon-to-crumble sidewalk else or would be sure to be wearing swimming clothes. Oh, thank your love for the generous gift. Mm, maybe I’d like the second one from the bottom. Love making Alexander McQueen’s heirs either (1) make you the line’s head designer, or (2) funnelling all the line’s profits into your bank account, and not in Bitcoin either, I’m talking in cold, hard cash. It’s your decision, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Glad you liked them. ** Misanthrope, Cool, thanks, although a bunch of that thanks goes to Bill, without whom … Jesus, George. What do I know about the real situation, but is it not maybe time to become a serious hard ass and give him an ultimatum? I don’t know … get off drugs, go to work, stop lying, or he’ll be thrown out on the street? Drastic, for sure, but it sounds like you’ve done everything reasonably possible without him showing you any respect in  return. Clearly he needs some kind of shock to his system. I don’t know. Man, I’m so sorry. But it really sounds like he’s pushing it way too far. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, T. I actually did check to see if G&G has ever made work in stained glass, but no. They just coopt the form’s thing. I’m happy you’re enjoying the Adrian Dannatt. It’s a lovely surprise, yes? ** Bill, Great, I’m certainly happy that you like it since, you know, you’re its … godfather? Its Zeus? Whew. I was quite surprised to find so much good stuff. So thank you too for the education, pal. ** Jack Skelley, Hey, Jackie, Dressed In Cobras! (Dan Bejar in the house!) Catching up! Oh, wow, cool about the first Haunted Video. The Hammer should really do a video or thing with Zion and the Twisted kids. Do you know if they are? If they don’t, they suck. Did you just toss me a Thunderclap Newman quote? Good on you, sir! ** Okay. I made you another gig of new music that I’m into and recommend. I have to say, I think this one is especially good. So give it a shot, eh? Thank you. See you tomorrow.