Jenny Hval
Deerhoof
Um, Jennifer?
Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet
Youth Code
Deradoorian
Solar Yolk
Pink Must
Roger Clark Miller
KUUNATIC
Backxwash
Bb trickz
Lucy Railton

 

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Jenny Hval The artist is absent (89 second rewrite)
‘Amid the pandemic, and because of it, Norwegian avant-garde artist Jenny Hval considered less nefarious vapors. As live performances became a public health liability, Hval revived her teenage fascination with perfume, and christened her ninth album Iris Silver Mist after a beloved scent of the same name. The $320 fragrance from French company Serge Lutens, crafted in the mid-1990s by renowned nose Maurice Roucel, has been called “the powderiest, rootiest, most sinister iris imaginable,” as scent authority Luca Turin put it in his five-star review. For Hval, the perfume evokes the stages of its making: an alchemic transformation from plant matter to glorious vapor; a “flower that is a root that has died, been resurrected and finely grated,” as she has described it. The 13 songs indebted to this scent examine such grand states of flux: between present and past, tactile and intangible.’ — Madison Bloom

 

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Deerhoof Ha, Ha Ha, Ha, Haaa
‘After several years of one-off experiments—a rapid-fire covers album, a first-ever Japanese-language album, a solo record from Saunier—the group returns to what you might call straightforwardly Deerhoof territory on Noble and Godlike in Ruin. But put the emphasis on Deerhoof, not straightforward. This is one of the band’s most abrasive albums to date, with mangled, fractured grooves like “Sparrow Sparrow” and “Ha, Ha Ha Ha, Haaa” that simulate the experience of realizing your open tabs are playing multiple songs simultaneously.’ — Zach Schonfeld

 

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Um, Jennifer? Old Grimes
‘Um, Jennifer? Is a punk-tinged indie rock duo based in NYC. Fig and Eli met at a party in Brooklyn. Eli wanted to hook up with Fig’s friend. Now they make music together for nobody except the vengeful god, Jennifer. Jennifer thinks their music sucks.’ — Final Girls Records

 

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Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet live @ Tiny Desk Concert
‘”How loud can we be?” Bill Orcutt asked as his guitar quartet tuned their Telecasters and Jazzmasters for sound check. A wild deconstructionist whose catalog spans a splatter of hardcore punk, noise and electronic music, Orcutt has written and improvised on four-stringed guitars for four decades, culminating in the ecstatic minimalism of last year’s Music for Four Guitars, each part played and dubbed over by himself. At the Tiny Desk, however, Orcutt brought along a who’s who of forward-thinking guitarists to perform these rowdy, giddy and shreddy pieces: Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza and Shane Parish, who transcribed the original recordings. From a frenzied hoedown (“Or from behind”) and feedback-humming drone-pop (“In the rain”) to something resembling Henry Cow playing Norwegian black metal (“In profile”) and paradoxically Brutalist complexity (“Or head on”), each song is a short burst of finger-flicked frenzy.’ — Lars Gotrich

 

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YOUTH CODE No Consequence
‘This is Youth Code’s first release in four years, but it sounds like this is just the beginning of what may be a string of EP’s or the lead up to a full-length album. “No Consequence” offers a powerful look at their masterful meshing of exasperated vocals and industrial techno sounds.’ — New Noise

 

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Deradoorian Any Other World
‘Even for a self-professed “thinker” like herself, the sounds and observations on Angel Deradoorian’s new collection Ready for Heaven are a wealth of intentional audio poetry. Spanning Can-style repetition on “Any Other World” and “Golden Teachers” to the lush ’70s setting of “Set Me Free,” the record is mind-expansive by design. It would be easy to paint the album with a grim brush. But the songs are also intermittently joyous, with sinuous saxophone and Deradoorian’s voice testifying on near-soul workouts.’ — Ari Rosenschein

 

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Solar Yolk Reverse Midas Touch
‘Solar Yolk brings a stuccoed, particulate collage of field recordings, samples, and tape manipulations in spiraling layers of brooding, simmering tension. An uneasy nap, churning, a thing speaking under the land, confusion pressed through a fine sieve until it becomes acceptance, led docilely by the finger to become lost in unknown haze.’ — Structures Without Purpose

 

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Pink Must Karaoke of the Bends
‘Based on a long-standing artistic chemistry and shared love of genre-defying sounds, Pink Must started off as a remote grunge collaboration, with demos shared long-distance between New York and Texas. Over time, and especially since uniting in Brooklyn in 2023, the project evolved into its own animated soundspace, connecting raw imperfect textures with classic songwriting and a playful approach to both track instrumentation and lyrics.’ — Rush Hour

 

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Roger Clark Miller Dream Interpretation #17
‘Roger Miller is best known for being the guitarist in Mission of Burma, where he expanded the vocabulary of rock guitar playing by incorporating elements of free jazz and 20th Century classical music. His “Solo Electric Guitar Ensemble” expands the vocabulary in a new direction, with or without rock music. He began conceptualizing his “Dream Interpretations for Solo Electric Guitar Ensemble” in 2018. He currently uses a regular electric guitar and three lap-steel guitars on stands, two of them loaded with alligator clips or bolts, the other to a post-Glenn Branca full unison E. Using bass and tenor guitar strings, this melted his previous prepared piano ideas into more portable guitars, resulting in percussive grooves, bass-lines, and similarities to the Chinese Ch’in.’ — Cuneiform

 

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Kuunatic Disembodied Ternion
‘In addition to their core sonic palette of tribal drums, pulsing bass, atmospheric keyboards and grouped female vocals, the acclaimed Japanese psych-rock trio play an array of Japanese traditional instruments on their new album “Wheels of Ömon.” The result is a thrilling, kaleidoscopic album that brushes against tradition as it whirls into an other-wordly future.’ — Glitterbeat/tak:til

 

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Backxwash Wake Up
‘The combination of Zambian-Canadian rapper Backxwash’s music – horror rap, industrial beats and chopped-up samples of black metal bands – with a barrage of images of Angela Davis, Malcolm X and Nina Simone, makes for a true aural exorcism. Her stage presence is just as striking, with corpse paint serving as both a stylish and sincere tribute to black metal.’ — BRDCST

 

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Bb trickz Superchú!
‘If you haven’t heard the name Bb trickz, it’s likely that you’ll have heard her voice if you were in any way immersed in the Charli xcx Brat mania of 2024. Bb jumped on the remix of ‘Club Classics’ with the addition of her lines in Spanish amplifying the track’s energy and audaciousness. Having only been releasing music for a few years now, Bb raps with the confidence of someone that has been embedded in the scene for much longer. 80’z, despite its brevity, feels like a declaration, not necessarily of her arrival, but of her intention to take her Spanish-language rap far beyond the limits of TikTok’s unpredictable algorithm.’ — Arusa Qureshi

 

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Lucy Railton Phase III
‘Railton’s exploratory practice of harmonic perception emerges from a focus on the physical qualities of intervallic and chordal sounds, their textural qualities, degrees of friction, and inner pulsations. Composing in the moment guided by resonances within the cello’s body, her own, and their shared vibrational space, Railton moves through Blue Veil by giving sounds what they ask for: sounds of pure texture manifesting as a move through temporal transparency, sounds of rough texture marking regions of dimensionally dense space.’ — Ideologic Organ

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Steeqhen, Hi. Um, I don’t know why a good number of them are horror movie characters other than obviously wanting to kill them by proxy and the general desire to get rid of the corny aspect of the piñata. Well, yeah, in ‘Permanent Green Light’ there’s a character who collects piñatas but doesn’t want to smash them inexplicably. They were all piñatas, yes. My day is probably a bunch of film stuff, as usual. I avoid fighting-centric video games like the plague. I like ‘OK Computer’ but most of what they did after that sounds like adventurous art rock for middle brows to me. Unpopular opinion. Document your room with a VR Recorder maybe? ** Dominik, Hi!!! I suspect the script needs another draft or two, but we’re getting there, assuming Zac agrees, of course. I think we’ll probably be in States for two weeks at the most this time. ‘Permanent Green Light’ played at some queer festivals, and it did not get an enthusiastic reception, but ‘RT’ is a little queerer than ‘PGL’, so there’s hope. Love giving the escorts, or at least one of them, some extra shelf life is lovely of him. Love head banging to Youth Code, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, The world without Yuck ‘n Yum is a poorer world on so many fronts. My ugh re: Timothee Chalamet prevents me from watching him imitate Bob Dylan, but you’re hardly the only respectable person I know who enjoyed watching him do that. ** julian, Hey. Oh, hm, I guess it’s kind of a case-by-case thing with autofiction. An inventive use of the form, using it as a kind of puzzle and challenge to the reader and the author themself rather than just creating a thin prose veil to be personal behind, etc. Edouard Leve’s ‘Autoportrait’ is a great example of what autofiction can be, for instance. That makes sense, the Dorothy thing, yes, and the characters as actors too, there you go: there’s an interesting approach. You get it. That’s exciting. Can you say even more? Well, Jamie asked us to do something that wasn’t typically Xiu Xiu-like with the video, and we had free reign, and he seemed to have enjoyed starring in it, but I think he hadn’t cleared the not-Xiu-Xiu-like thing with the record company, and, frankly, he also got cold feet once it was done, and he didn’t stand up for us with the record company, and it all ended kind of unpleasantly. Complicated guy, like I said. ** PancakeIan, I have a piñata sitting on top of the bookshelf next to my desk that’s so long un-destroyed that it has turned dust gray. Walt only had two kids with him, so I think he would have noticed, but then he might have welcomed me like a long lost grandson. I’ll never know. I’m longtime friends with a famous actor, and even when he was still just starting to get famous, we would go out to see concerts or go bowling or have dinner, and people were constantly staring at him and trying to talk to him, and he was surly with them, but seeing what he had to go through just to hang out with friends and have fun, I couldn’t blame him. Btw, he’s asked me not to namecheck him here, so I can’t. I’ll look for the book online then, that’s fine. I remember those boys sitting with Kristofferson and about to eat him at the end of the ‘TSWFGWTS’ movie, for sure. ** Måns BT, Hi, Måns! Tim would be drooling all over the place, yes. I’m game to just release the Xiu Xiu video online, but Zac still has hard feeling about the experience and doesn’t want to, so far at least. The cabin experience sounds fun and crowded. I’m good, still mostly working to get the film out and about and, yes, writing next one. It going well, I think. I’m excited. Oh, yes, you can watch the screener, just keep the link top secret, of course. Gosh, I hope you like it. xo. ** Carsten, Hi. What a beautiful passage, my friend! ** HaRpEr //, I do wonder what the people who put on Eurovision think it is. I mean how knowing are they about its ridiculousness. Do they really think they’re birthing the next huge superstar? I mean it’s been a long, long time since they spat out an ABBA or Celine Dion or even a Bucks Fizz. It is really interesting and weird how charismatic that kind of pop techno form is. Great if you can get to the bottom and literalize that. There were plans years ago to reissue ‘Shy’, and it was even announced, and it never happened, and I don’t know why. I don’t know why Semiotext(e), for instance, hasn’t put it out. Hm. I’ll ask Dodie the next time I talk to her. ** Okay. I made you guys another gig of some music I’ve been listening to lately and liking, so I guess see if there’s any crossover with your likes. See you tomorrow.