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.
Now available in North America 
Some nice selections today. I’m a fan of Jenny Hval and have her 2019 Practice Of Love LP on my shelf.
Techno has been my everyday listening for some time now. Have a SoundCloud account that I put on via the iPad each morning and I listen to a couple of hours of various (usually Berlin-based) DJ sets before I start my day. I sprung for Rrose x Polygonia – Dermatology, a 12″ which I think is going to arrive here tomorrow. Techno but it’s kind of a low-level psychedelia. Good Sunday morning listening, that’s the plan.
Hi Dennis,
I think I may have overexerted myself yesterday; didn’t eat until 7pm, and spent the day in the heat walking around the city. I went home and basically had a bit of a meltdown, in both mental and physical pain from hunger pangs. Woke up again today with the hunger issue and it took me about 3 hours to get up cause of it, but made sure to stuff myself so that I can feel a bit better. It’s crazy how ignoring the simple bodily functions can make you go temporarily crazy…
I’ve also been having some problems; basically I hate how many people I know, and how empathetic I can be. I tend to accidentally become a sibling or therapist like role for wayward people my age. I don’t hate being that or doing that for people, but I’m at this stage where so many people seem to see our friendship as more than what it is, so I need to basically just let some people know that I can’t be their saviour, or at least to the degree they want me to be. And some others have hurt friends of mine, and out of my own principles I can’t be disingenuous and pretend that that doesn’t affect our friendship… God it’s so exhausting having to know people. I wish I could just be a spirit or presence that observes instead of affects. I think ignoring social media will definitely help with some of that anyway though.
Despite all that melodrama and plight I seem to be facing, I think it’s good for the creative juices to experience some conflict. Make me reconsider how I feel, change my opinion, reaffirm my own self. I started reading that Ocean Vuong book and was thinking about my own relationship with my mother: we’re kind of best friends, yet I feel so inclined to write about terrible mothers and abuse out of this feeling that her hurting me or me hurting her would be the worst thing to ever happen. Like the world collapsing. And I’ve obviously hurt her before and she’s hurt me, and it’s that complexity of us hurting each other because we’re so alike fascinates me.
I get your Radiohead opinion, if it’s unpopular, it’s not wrong! Whilst I have nostalgia for In Rainbows, I don’t ever feel inclined to listen to it. I do have a fondness for Kid A and Amnesiac, however I think I sometimes I exaggerate that fondness into love. The rest of the albums like The King of Limbs, Hail to The Theif, etc, I just do not care for. At all. And I assume most people who love Radiohead are the same (frankly I feel most people who love Radiohead nowadays don’t even know that albums other than The Bends, Ok Computer, and In Rainbows exist!)
If you want a Doctor Who update, they’ve brought back a character from the 80s who has had 3 tv appearances, the latest being a 1993 crossover with the British Soap Eastenders; the actress playing the character is a bit of a British icon from her role in Eastenders (Anita Dobson) (and also being married to Brian May), so I’m eager to see if they make a slight reference to that infamous tv crossover that is a mess.
Quick update: I think I must have given myself some sort of food poisoning or upset my stomach because I’m basically confined to my room and the toilet, which is partly frustrating but somewhat freeing, as it’s forced me to stay home and write and linger in my feelings. I’ve been trying to cut down on smoking, which has been successful, though I still am struggling to quit entirely. I think I need to find a different form of nicotine intake, as i’m beginning to get past my oral fixation…
Dennis, Hahahaha. Yes, the unscorched booty. Though maybe he wanted to get a little freaky and get it scorched to hell. 😛
If only my office were like The Office. Actually, it wasn’t so bad. I mean, I definitely prefer working from home. I’d be happy never to go in again. But I did get to see some people I hadn’t seen and had some good laughs. Got some work done, too, but not as much as when I’m at home. Next day in is June 30. I’ll enjoy my time home. 😛
I think I told you already but I’m working on updating our division’s Style Guide. I’m working on the presentation for when it goes live now. This is something that, believe it or not, is really fun. I could do shit like this all day and on weekends. It’ll be good to have it finally completed and in effect.
Hi!!
Um, Jennifer? is seriously, seriously amazing. Please accept my undying gratitude for the introduction!
Yeah, I always forget that what thrills me usually doesn’t thrill most people… Either way, I really trust (and hope) that “Room Temperature” will find its loving and appreciative audience at the festival!
I’d love to join love, if he’ll have me. Love writing a musical based on his diaries, Od.
A passage in which children get doused in crocodile guts & you call it beautiful–we speak the same language my friend.
Revisited Last Tango in Paris last night after many years & boy has it aged poorly. Though I suspect it was never really any good to begin with. I think my affinity for Brando the man had clouded my memory of it. The stuff with the filmmaking boyfriend is awful; not only tonally off but simply dull. Brando & Schneider do have some decent moments together, but the whole conceit is so ridiculous I couldn’t take any of it seriously. For some reason I remembered Brando riffing freely within Bertolucci’s structure, but this time all I could see was the story’s operatic/melodramatic arc hedging him in–he can’t help but be corny & overblown if that’s all the material allows. Freudian psychoanalyzing is art’s enemy.
Re. Gig #173: I should really dig into some of the above, given how embarrassingly out of touch with contemporary music I am. I think the only recent stuff I’ve been listening to is Jozef van Wissem & The Kills.
Hey Dennis, how’ve you been? I tried to get a ticket for this show but I think the scalper ripped me off. Can you sneak me in the back or maybe we try that thing where you lick your hand stamp and then press the back of my hand against yours to make it transfer? hmm. Oh and was wondering: would you be up for doing an artist showcase day on here? Thinking out loud. I’ve been pulling together a series through Pup and Tiger called Soft Territories, partly to make things a bit more real, but also to explore what folks are working on right now. It could be a good excuse for me to finish something new too as a virtual thing in meantime to get it rolling. Might be nice to open it up to some locals and see what’s going on here too?? I can send over a blurb, let me know if you’d be into it!
On the music front I’ve found myself relistening to a lot of my prog CDs, but it’s mostly the mainstream stuff: Emerson Lake & Palmer, Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, and so on. I recently got the self-titled debut album by Gentle Giant, mainly because the cover art intrigued me.
I think next month I’m going to finally getting around to listening to Wagner’s THE RING opera. I got the box set for it for my birthday a few years ago, but it’s like 14 discs long, and all in German.
I’d heard Um, Jennifer? and bb trickz before, but they hit harder in this context. Youth Code really hit the spot.
For an industry-created version of hyperpop, which someone was discussing in the comments yesterday, check out Katzeye’s “Gnarly.” It’s so awful it’s almost fascinating, as if someone put together a group of Instagram influencers and fed them lyrics that almost sound like they’re dissing themselves.
There’s an AI trailer floating around for the apocryphal Forrest Gump 2, starring Tom Hanks and Timothee Chalamet.
Hi Dennis . I know virtually nothing when it comes to alternative/indie music, even though i could tell you in about 2 seconds how many symphonies Mozart, Mahler, or Brahms wrote . My favorite here was the Kuunatic. Lucy Railton makes her cello sound really spooky . The 2 guys in Um, Jennifer are cute together . And I liked the minimalism in Bill Orcutt’s Guitar Quartet. It reminded me of some of the film soundtracks of Philip Glass .
I have a green teddy bear that sounds similar to your dust gray pinata, in that I’ve had it ever since a friend won it for me at a ‘six flags’ theme park during high school. It goes everywhere with me. If you had had a chance to ask Walt the ultimate Disney question that time you saw him, I wonder what it would have been…..
Being around so many famous people over the years, I’m sure you’ve seen your share of annoying people attacking/bugging them for one reason or another. Cool that you’re still friends with one in particular. Being in public must be like constantly wearing a Goofy costme that one can’t take off , if that makes sense. When i did encounter celebrities at work, I always tried to act professional, but I could still tell that most did not like to be stared at or noticed. Although some were very polite to me. But all that’s a long time ago.
I’m impressed that you actually know that ‘Sailor Who Fell From Grace’ film. I just stumbled upon it one time on TV, a while back. FYI, the novel ends with the exact same scene ; with the boys drugging the sailor and preparing to have their way with him. Creepy creepy .
Hey Dennis!
I just watched ’RT’… and wow! I absolutely adored it, it might very well be even better than ’PGL’, which is a clear 10/10 for me. Watched it in darkness in my living room (totally top secret and alone, of course), volume all the way up, and I was just in awe of all of it. Fell in love with all the characters and their performance, Extra was of course a favorite, as well as the flamboyantly strict dad. I need to watch ’The Masturbators Heart’ to see more of Ange Dargent, kind of got a totally straight crush on him. So excited to watch ’RT’ again on the big screen again and with a crowd, and most especially being able to meet you and Zac of course. God, it feels like I’m living some fucked up dream and I’m totally loving it.
Sorry to hear about the complicated Xiu Xiu shoot! Let’s hope the MV sees the light of day some time in the future, I’m sure it’s great. Which song was it for?
Great to hear that your creativity seems to be stimulated with you writing the next film. Very excited to see what it’s all about, I think your cinematic future looks very bright, just look at how much you guys have developed with only 3 movies! And all of them are great.
xo, Måns
R.I.P. Alice Notley, so sad. I was literally just getting into her. I’m going to spend this week exploring her stuff further.
Well, ABBA is an anomaly as far as Eurovision goes. For one thing it was the 70s. Number two it’s fucking ABBA. And number three, they have a kind of transcendent innocent schlockiness that’s highly conceptual. You watch these performers on Eurovision and wonder if they actually think what they’re participating in is a good avenue if they want any lasting success. You have to wonder if they are blissfully unaware of their schlockiness or not. Obviously, it’s important to mention that ABBA’s innocence is so so great because it conceals an extreme darkness; they have that kind of dead-inside animatronic quality where it’s like they’ve been mechanically programmed to be happy when they’re actually not. As I say, very conceptual, and it was a lucky coincidence that they fit in so well with Eurovision’s aesthetic. But yeah, they’re fucking ABBA, they transcend the venue.
Great that you’re enjoying ‘Um, Jennifer’. I’m inducted into their cult now. I think ‘Cut Me Open’ is my favourite. Very glad that others here seem to be liking them. What I’ve been listening to is all over the place as always so I’ll just list some favourite albums from this year: ‘hexed!’ by aya, ‘City of Clowns’ by Marie Davidson, ‘You Are Always On My Mind’ by OHYUNG, ‘Choke Enough’ by Oklou, and of course ‘Revengeseekerz’ by Jane Remover. I’ve also been listening to ‘45 Pounds’ by YHWH Nailgun today. I’m liking it a lot. I think you may do as well if you haven’t heard it yet. I’m noticing as I write this out that a lot of artists have silly unpronounceable names at the moment. I dig it though.
Some exciting music coming out soon, too. Sparks (well, duh), Stereolab, and Yeule is really highly anticipated for me.
I haven’t read Autoportrait, but now it’s definitely on my list. Do you ever get overwhelmed by how many books there are in the world and the fact that you’ll never get to read all the good ones? Doesn’t help that most books are really bad. There’s a lot more I could say about the whole Wizard of Oz/actor analogy. I guess it’s kind of like a dream where there’s a mix of the things I want to happen and things I’m scared of happening. I have to take the people and flatten them into the archetypes they represent in my head and then imagine what those archetypes would do when divorced from the actual person. Usually they’re people I know in real life, but sometimes they’re pop culture figures, too. I want to write a story where the main character is a teenage boy who’s best friends with Madonna. I also have considered starting a story by proclaiming that the whole thing is a play or movie and listing all the characters and the actors who play them, like opening credits or a program. Unfortunate to hear about the Xiu Xiu video. Can you disclose what song the video was for?