#Harrow is also up there I love the collage style

[laniemae]

[passionate-reply]

Great Albums is back for a third time! This week, we discuss Dazzle Ships, the avant-garde masterpiece that was so infamously weird, it almost “sank” the pop career of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Or did it? As usual, you can find a full transcript of the video under the break, if you’d like to read it instead.

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums. Today, I’ll be talking about an album that many would consider OMD’s best, and many would consider the last great album they ever made: 1983’s Dazzle Ships, their fourth studio LP. It has a reputation that precedes it, as a strange, experimental, and avant-garde album. And I can’t argue with that too much, when it has tracks that sound like "ABC Auto-Industry."

The most obvious thing one can say about Dazzle Ships is that it’s dense and rich with samples. You’ll hear found sounds ranging from a “Speak and Spell” toy to a radio broadcast from Czechoslovakia. It’s a magpie’s nest constructed of garbage and baubles, collage-like and conscientiously artificial. And OMD’s Paul Humphreys and Andy McCluskey managed to make it before sampling became easier and hence more widespread later in the 1980s, thanks to advancements in digital technology. In its own day, it was, famously, a huge flop, baffling even the critics, which makes it tempting to argue that the world simply wasn’t ready for it. Popular legend says that Humphreys and McCluskey were essentially forced to make increasingly soft, pop-oriented music for years afterward, usually at the hands of their label’s higher-ups.

Is that story really true? Well, I don’t know, and I’m not sure if anybody really does. But I think it’s important that we entertain some doubt. Regardless of its actual veracity, this legend is offering us a simplistic narrative of art and capital butting heads, and one that we see repeated all too often in music journalism. It’s a story that expects us to believe that experimental music is good by default, and the natural goal of music and all the people who make it--and, conversely, that accessible music is bad, and anyone who writes a song you can dance to is always after profit, never craft.

Ultimately, though, the most important reason why I’m asking you to leave this question at the gate is that it’s simply a less interesting way to think about art. What I think is truly ingenious about OMD is their ability to combine a pop sensibility with that bleeding-edge experimentation, and vice versa. I don’t think of Dazzle Ships as just an inscrutable, esoteric musical ready-made, but rather something capable of animating and enriching a bunch of otherwise mundane sounds. A word I might use for it is "challenging," because it isn't simply off-putting--it has a certain charm that invites you to stick around and work through it, and you don't feel like it's a waste of your time. I think the underlying pop DNA offered by Dazzle Ships is a big part of that.

In “Genetic Engineering,” the samples from that Speak & Spell are contrasted with a more traditional chorus, which rises above the chaos, stirring and anthemic. It’s a song full of friction, not only between these musical ideas, but in ideas about technology and our future. Like many great works of electronic music, especially earlier in its history, Dazzle Ships is deeply concerned with science and technology, and the ways they’ve structured our world. These guys wrote “Enola Gay” a few years earlier, sure, but there’s much more than Luddite, dystopian thinking here! Dazzle Ships walks a tightrope between romantic adoration of the promise of a better tomorrow, and the tempered uncertainty we’re forced to develop, when we witness the devastation our most horrifying inventions have wrought already. Something that helps sell the former is the motif of childhood: in addition to the Speak & Spell, “Genetic Engineering” also features a children’s toy piano, and prominently references “children” in its lyrics. And “Telegraph,” the album’s other single, sees fit to reference “Daddy.”

Touches like these, and the centering of not-so-new technologies like telegraphy and radio, carry us backward in time. Dazzle Ships has a sense of nostalgia for the technological explosion of the Midcentury, when household technologies were improving in ways that saved time and labour, and faith in “better living through science” was high. It’s not a wistful or introspective nostalgia, but rather one that taps into the bustling excitement of living through that era. That retro styling helps us situate ourselves in a childlike mindset: optimistic, but somewhat naive. Children are highly imaginative, and become enthralled with possibility, but don’t always understand every implication their actions have.

But, as I said, “Telegraph” and “Genetic Engineering” were the album’s singles; the typical track on *Dazzle Ships* sounds more like “ABC Auto-Industry.” The track listing is structured such that these more conventional songs are surrounded by briefer, and more abrasive, intrusions. They become signals in the noise, as though we’re listening to them on the radio--or ships, rising above some stormy seas. Several tracks, such as “International,” also feature a more dissonant intro, on top of that, crowding their main melodies inward.

Over the years, many critics have been quick to contrast Dazzle Ships with OMD’s other albums, but I actually think it has a lot in common with their preceding LP, 1981’s Architecture & Morality, and seems to me to flow naturally from the direction the band had already been going in. Architecture & Morality is a lively mix, with moody instrumentals like “Sealand,” guitar-driven numbers like “The New Stone Age,” and catchy, intuitive pop songs like “Souvenir.” Architecture and Morality proved to be their most successful album, when its title track sounds like this. I fail to see how it’s tremendously different than the title track of Dazzle Ships, which leads us on a harrowing sea chase, with radar pings quickly closing in.

That nautical theme is a great segue to discuss the album’s visual motif. Like all of OMD's first five albums, its sleeve was designed by Peter Saville, most famous for his stunning work for New Order. The cover and title were inspired by a painting Saville had seen, Edward Wadsworth’s *Dazzle Ships in Drydock at Liverpool,* which portrays WWI warships painted in striking, zebra-like geometric patterns. These sharply contrasting “razzle dazzle” designs weren’t “camouflage,” but rather served to confuse enemy forces’ attempts to track them, and predict their motions. Dazzle ships were killing machines that fought dirty...and they were also beautiful. It’s a potent, complex symbol, and it’s a natural fit for an album that’s also capricious, perplexing, and captivating in its uniquely modern terror. Saville’s sleeve design features both a die-cut design as well as a gatefold; peeking through the cover’s “portholes” reveals the interior, where we find a map of the world, divided by time zones. It’s yet another reminder of how technology has reshaped the planet, connecting the human race while also creating divisions.

Earlier, I argued that Dazzle Ships isn’t that different from OMD’s preceding LP, and I’d also suggest that their follow-ups to it aren’t all that different, either. It’s easy to see the influence of Dazzle Ships on their most recent work, made after reforming the group in the late 00s, and informed by the critical re-evaluation and cult acclaim of their alleged masterpiece. But even in the 80s, they basically continued the pattern of layering easy to love, “obvious single choice” tracks alongside more experimental, sample-heavy ones. Compare the title track of their sixth LP, 1985's *Crush.*

Even the greatest of pop hitmakers can't maintain a streak in the charts forever--it's not the nature of mainstream pop charts. Not even in the 1980s, when you could get away with quite a lot of electronic weirdness...at least for a while. Looking back and listening to "Maid of Orleans," it's almost hard to believe it was one of OMD's biggest hits. Is it really less weird than something like "Telegraph"? Perhaps they had simply reached the end of their imperial phase...whether they really had that stern talking-to or not.

It's not so much that Dazzle Ships isn't weird, so much as it is foreseeable that a nerdy, left-of-center band like OMD would have come up with it. Dazzle Ships IS excellent--it’s a Great Album! But it's good enough that I think it deserves to be heard and valued on its own terms. The album is too goddamn good--too compelling, too spell-binding--to be reduced to "that one album the plebs were too dumb to really get." I'm not clearing the air because I think this album is overrated, but because I think it deserves better, deeper discourse than it gets. A truly great album is great whether it sells or it doesn't, right? My advice is to never let art intimidate you, no matter how obtuse people say it is. Send your ship on that plunge into the dark waters of the unknown--you might find something beautiful.

That said...my favourite track overall is “Radio Waves,” an irresistibly fun cut that could easily have become a third single. Since “Genetic Engineering” and “Telegraph” live on side one of the record, “Radio Waves” is really the only “reprieve” we get on side two, smack in its middle. It really stands out, in context--almost like the opposite of how a more conventional album might have one out-there track that catches you off guard. Aside from all of that, though, the song also stands perfectly well alone. I have a real soft spot for music about music, how it’s made and transmitted, and “Radio Waves” is simply one hell of a ride.

Thanks for reading!

[oscopelabs]

Personality Crisis: The Radical Fluidity of Todd Haynes’ ‘Velvet Goldmine’ by Judy Berman

[This month, Musings pays homage to Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen, a review anthology from the National Society of Film Critics that championed studio orphans from the ‘70s and ‘80s. In the days before the Internet, young cinephiles like myself relied on reference books and anthologies to lead us to film we might not have discovered otherwise. Released in 1990, Produced and Abandoned was a foundational piece of work, introducing me to such wonders as Cutter’s Way, Lost in America, High Tide, Choose Me, Housekeeping, and Fat City. (You can find the full list of entries here.) Over the next four weeks, Musings will offer its own selection of tarnished gems, in the hope they’ll get a second look. Or, more likely, a first. —Scott Tobias, editor.]

Like the glam rockers it gazes upon through the smoke-clouded lens of memory, Velvet Goldmine is most beautiful when it descends into chaos.

Stolen, the way great artists do, from Citizen Kane, the skeleton of Todd Haynes’ 1998 film is a chain of interlocking reminiscences of Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a David Bowie-like glam rocker who fakes his own onstage death in the mid-’70s. A decade later—in that most dystopic of years, 1984—his ex-wife Mandy (Toni Collette) and former manager Cecil (Michael Feast) relate their bitter tales of betrayal to a journalist (Christian Bale) whose assignment has him reluctantly reliving his own teenage sexual awakening under the influence of Brian’s music. Between the interviews, musical numbers, and onscreen epigrams, there’s also a mysterious female narrator who sometimes surfaces, like a teacher reading a subversive storybook, with dreamy exposition that reaches back a century to invoke glam’s patron saint, Oscar Wilde.

The film climaxes with a propulsive sequence of scenes that are exhilarating precisely because they merge all of these points of view, subjective and omniscient, into one collective fantasy. Brian and his new conquest, the Iggy Pop/Lou Reed composite Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), ride mini spaceships at a carnival to Reed’s “Satellite of Love.” Two random schoolgirls, their faces obscured, act out a love scene between a Curt doll and a Brian doll. In a posh hotel lobby, Brian’s entourage, styled like Old Hollywood starlets on the Weimar Germany set of a fin-de-siècle period film, recites pilfered sound bites about art. Then Brian and Curt are kissing on a circus stage, surrounded by old men in suits. They play Brian Eno’s “Baby’s on Fire” as Haynes cuts between the performance, an orgy in their hotel suite, and Bale’s hapless, young Arthur Stuart masturbating over a newspaper photo of Brian fellating Curt’s guitar. Stripped of narration—not to mention narrative—the film seems to be running on its own amorous fumes, its story fragmenting into a heap of glittering images as it hurtles from set piece to set piece.

Visual pleasure aside, it’s a perfect way of translating into cinematic language the argument that underlies Haynes’ script—that glam’s revelations about the radical fluidity of human identity go far beyond sex and gender. As the apotheosis of teen pop audiences’ thirst for outsize personae, fictional characters like Ziggy Stardust (who Velvet Goldmine further fictionalizes as Slade’s alter ego, Maxwell Demon) melded the symbiotic identities of artist and fan into a single, tantalizing vision of hedonism and transgression. Kids imitated idols they didn’t quite recognize as pure manifestations of their own inchoate desires. Musician and fan became each other’s mirror, and both could become entirely new people simply by changing costumes or names.

But it’s pretty much impossible to imagine Velvet Goldmine’s distributor and co-producer, Harvey Weinstein, appreciating this as he watched the film for the first time—or seeing anything in it, really, besides an expensive mess.

Haynes and his loyal producing partner, Killer Films head Christine Vachon, had already been through hell with Velvet Goldmine by the time they delivered a cut to Miramax. Bowie had refused Haynes’ repeated requests for permission to use six Ziggy-era songs in the film, claiming that he had a glam movie of his own in the works. And in a production diary that appears in her book Shooting to Kill, Vachon points out one unique challenge of making a film about queer male sexuality: “The MPAA seems to have a number of double standards. Naked females get R ratings, but pickle shots tend to get NC-17s. Our Miramax contract obligates us to an R.” She also mentions that an investor pulled $1 million of funding just weeks before filming.

The shoot was even more harrowing than the two veteran indie filmmakers could’ve predicted. As they fell behind schedule, a production executive started nagging Vachon to make cuts. “Todd is miserable,” she wrote in her diary the night before they wrapped. “He says that making movies this way is awful and he doesn’t want to do it.” In an interview that accompanies the published screenplay for Velvet Goldmine, Oren Moverman asks Haynes, “Was the making of the film joyful for you?” “I’m afraid not,” he replies. “We were trying very hard to cut scenes while shooting, knowing that we were behind and we didn’t have the money for the overloaded schedule. But there was hardly a scene we could cut without losing essential narrative information.” It’s remarkable that he managed to capture 123 usable minutes’ worth of meticulously art-directed ‘70s excess (and ‘80s bleakness) in just nine weeks, under so much external pressure, on a budget of $7 million.

When the film finally reached Harvey Scissorhands, after months of editing, Weinstein told Haynes it was too long and the structure didn’t work. “He made suggestions that I didn’t follow, and then he just buried it,” the director told Down and Dirty Pictures author Peter Biskind. What happened next comes straight from the Weinstein playbook: “Even afterward,” Haynes remembered, “they threw out a DVD, they didn’t ask for a director commentary, my name wasn’t on the cover of it, it was buried in the minuscule billing block. He can’t even do the really small things that don’t cost anything—he never shows any respect.” (That Haynes never found a distributor he preferred to Weinstein, with whom he reunited for I’m Not There and Carol, speaks volumes about the way Hollywood treats ambitious filmmakers.)

After it failed to blow audiences away at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, Miramax effectively dumped Velvet Goldmine. It debuted on just 85 screens that November, ultimately grossing about $1 million stateside. Its ridiculous theatrical trailer might well be a glimpse at the movie Weinstein was expecting: a “magical trip back to the ‘70s” with 100% more murder mystery and 100% less gay sex.

Critics were just as ambivalent about the film as festival audiences. While forward-thinking reviewers wanted to love it for its visual beauty and openly queer aesthetic, many lamented that its plot was slight and its characters hollow. David Ansen of Newsweek complained that “Haynes is unwilling to get too close to his characters. Slade, in particular, is a blank”—failing to see that Brian is a cypher by design. Like the Barbie-doll Karen Carpenter of Haynes’ debut feature, Superstar, and the fragments of Bob Dylan diffused across I’m Not There, Velvet Goldmine’s Bowie is less a portrait of the real person than a screen on which fans project their own fantasies about him.

At The Nation, Stuart Klawans rightly identified Arthur, not Brian, as the film’s protagonist. But he also wondered why he grows up to be such an unhappy adult. “Why is Haynes so tough on Arthur?” Klawans wanted to know. “Why, through the character, is he so tough on himself? It’s apparent everywhere in Velvet Goldmine that Haynes, like Arthur, loves Glitter Rock. He, too, fell for a mass-marketed product, which was no more likely than Mr. Clean to carry out a world-transforming promise. But instead of honoring the truth of his enthusiasm, so that he might look back on its object with a smile and a sigh…Haynes does penance for being a sap.”

Others found the film’s collage of ideas and allusions cumbersome. “Velvet Goldmine is weighed down with self-important messages, but it’s also splashily opulent,” Stephanie Zacharek wrote at Salon. “It’s as if Todd Haynes had plunged his hand into a pile of clothes at a jumble sale and come out with a handful that was half velvet finery, half polyester rejectables.”

All of these reactions make sense, coming from adult critics who had probably seen the film just once, after reading months’ worth of reports about its troubled birth, in the sterile environment of a press screening. But what’s clear from a distance of nearly two decades, during which Velvet Goldmine has become a low-key cult classic, is that few films are so poorly suited to be judged on the basis of a single dispassionate viewing. If you’re looking for tight plotting and complex characters, you’re not going to find them in this mixtape of music videos, aphorisms, and waking dream sequences. There is no actual murder mystery, and Arthur’s investigation into Slade’s disappearance isn’t a source of suspense so much as an excuse to keep contrasting an incandescent past with a dull, gray present.

I’m lucky enough to have first encountered Velvet Goldmine under what turned out to be ideal circumstances: at age 15, on premium cable, late enough at night that it easily bypassed my rational mind en route to my adolescent subconscious. I had no idea how many details it cribbed from the biographies of Bowie and his contemporaries, or how much of the dialogue was quoted from their (and their heroes’) most memorable utterances. I bought the soundtrack without realizing that it put ‘70s originals side-by-side with contemporary covers and new songs by younger bands like Pulp and Shudder to Think in yet another glam pastiche. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to find the 1984 scenes unsatisfying because I got so instantly immersed in the ‘70s spectacles that they barely existed for me.

Not that the film only works on an emotional level. Haynes’ ideas about fandom, politics, sexuality, and identity become even more profound once you can see the organizing principle behind what might initially seem like a jumble of indulgent images. Like the death hoax Brian Slade uses to escape a fantasy life that’s grown too real for comfort, Velvet Goldmine’s loose plot is classic misdirection, obscuring a tight and purposeful structure that delays the resolution of the ‘80s storyline until it’s primed you to feel the loss of the liberated ‘70s viscerally. But you’ll never get that far into dissecting the film if you don’t fall in love with it at first viewing. And that’s easiest to do when you’re as impressionable as young Arthur, who watches Brian Slade flaunt his queerness in a televised press conference and imagines himself shouting to his parents, “That is me!”  

Revisit it as you grow older, though, and you might discover that the disillusioned 30-something characters now feel as rich as their idealistic former selves. Velvet Goldmine is often called a gay film, but that obscures the universal resonance of its queer coming-of-age narrative. Better to think of it as a bisexual film that uses non-binary sexuality as a metaphor for the boundless possibilities of youth—the promise of a future constrained only by the limits of one’s own ambitions and appetites. Its characters can’t achieve permanent liberation by “coming out”; to maintain lifestyles that match their desires, they would have to reject the monogamy that defines adulthood for most people. Particularly amid the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, which haunts the film’s dreary present on a purely subtextual level, it’s obvious why they (like the real glam rockers they’re modeled after) retreat from the liberated lives they staked out for themselves.

But you don’t need to buy in to the incendiary claim Brian makes at his press conference, that everyone is bisexual, to see how this storyline reflects the many kinds of disappointments that await most starry-eyed fans in adulthood. Klawans’ objection to Haynes’ treatment of Arthur feels naive because it assumes people should be able to peacefully coexist with their shattered dreams. Why shouldn’t he feel bitter about having joined a sexual revolution that didn’t, finally, set him free? “It gets better” for Arthur when he leaves his homophobic family to move in with a latter-day glam act in London, but sometime after he hooks up with an unmoored Curt Wild at a tribute concert called the Death of Glitter, “it” just gets boring as the world gets worse.

And the world really does sometimes get worse, though audiences in the relatively peaceful, prosperous late ‘90s might have forgotten about that. Watching Velvet Goldmine for perhaps the 25th time, two weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration, at the end of an era that has brought unprecedented freedom of sexual and gender expression, I was struck by how vividly Haynes captures a culture’s flight from progress, and how rare it is to see that kind of transition depicted on film. His argument about fluidity turns out to be even more potent when applied to societies than individuals (or, at least, it seems that way in 2017). Our capacity for transformation may be infinite, but that doesn’t mean those changes are always for the best.

[anonymousafterthoughts]

This week has been PACKED with edits for Five Glass Flowers and navigating round one of the Feedback Phase of #WriterInMotion.  First off, I was BLESSED to be paired with Jeff and Sara as Critique Partners for this round. They’re both writing Science Fiction as well and are familiar with some of the genre-specific elements I brought to my story.  So a massive THANK YOU to both of them for their invaluable insight, suggestions, and, of course, for trusting me with their work as well.

Market & Genre: Science Fiction, Literary lean, Dystopian

Word Count: 1,210

Loose Comparisons & Inspirations: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, Orange by Ichigo Takano, and Inception.

Trigger Warning: Five Glass Flowers is set in a world with assisted suicide and touches on mental health. This isn’t fleshed out entirely at the moment, but it’s pretty obvious in this draft. The completed version will also allude to a light rail bombing (so, warn future you maybe) but this isn’t touched on yet.

I read the feedback side-by-side and made lists based on areas of concern: 1) what did both CPs like? 2) What was unclear to them? 3) Did the haunted, dystopian vibes come through? 4) Was everything balanced?

Most of the suggestions were minor–a need for clarity here, an awkward sentence there–but the real joy was seeing how they interacted with and processed the content. It’s been a LONG TIME since I’ve written any sort of science fiction, so I was concerned it didn’t fit enough within the genre or that the story, given its literary lean, might be confusing in some way. However, Jeff and Sara both swept those worries out the door! I love how Jeff came across the title of this chapter (The Janus Project) and did his own little research about it. I’d deliberately picked JANUS because it’s the name of the Roman God of doorways, time, transitions, and endings. I enjoy embedding meaning everywhere, and was tickled when Jeff picked up on this right away.

I also appreciated his attention to detail, such as pointing out the awkwardness of Asra’s position in the opening line or prodding me to elaborate on how the tally on the hologlass was discreet. His style of critiquing is similar to mine: stream of consciousness, reader reaction, and the occasional quill stab for needed edits (only I think he’s nicer at that than me LOL).  Both Jeff and Sara has similar suggestions, which indicated certain things SANG and a few things SUNK, but I liked the consistency in feedback. For example, there’s a line where the narrator points out that priets “don’t usually help someone die” and both CPs countered that, technically, one could argue they DID. So I adjusted the sentence to flat out say suicide so that a line is drawn between guiding one to their natural death versus allowing something a priest wouldn’t normally condone.

Sara’s style was a little more sparse and less reader reaction, but her insight was so helpful to catching potential world-holes and unclear exposition. For example, I’d never explained the whole reason behind Asra having THREE Caseworkers during her year of mandatory therapy. At the time, I wondered if that kind of info was even needed and left it out because I didn’t want to drag the story down with too much setting/backstory. However, Sara’s feedback revealed how unclear that section of the scene was and the kinds of questions it raised. I really appreciated her attention to details like this, especially since I have a tendency to be either painfully vague or vomit details everywhere. Her feedback gave me an idea of where to balance hints and reveals. She was also great at catching some of those little typos that like to sneak in!

My biggest concern was the atmosphere. I was shooting for haunting, mysterious, and poignant. I didn’t want the disturbing aspects of the world to overshadow the inescapable strangeness colliding with Asra Aeilstrom’s life. I worked to deepen her own backstory (settling on a traumatic subway bombing) about where her affliction came from. The first two versions were too vague in doing this, I think. The atmosphere was there, but the characterization…wasn’t. So I guess that was, more or less, my second big concern. Sara and Jeff expressed wanting to know more about Oblivion and why Asra is seeking it, so I think, to an extent, I’ve achieved building her character, but will need to also add her backstory in throughout the next few revisions. Here’s the overall feedback received:

1.

The Janus Project

The causes of death on the state-issued certificates gently floated along the tinted hologlass walls. Asra stared up at them with permanent conviction, dark sunglasses lessening the glare of light:

Xu Heng, 32, Inconsolable sorrow after absorbing displaced emotions.

Torin Thallos, 17, An uncontrollable desire to be full.

Lucho Gálvez, 23, The belief that nothing–including oneself–exists.

Ella Walsh, 47, A longing for things that cannot be named.

Lorne Thale, 50, Fell Hopelessly In Love With Annihilation.

Ian Ito, 38, Hysterical fear of drowning in air.

Every forty seconds, the certificates flickered out of existence, new ones appeared, and this cycle repeated. A discreet tally sat in the bottom right corner of the glass, where the day’s successful journeys to Oblivion tick, tick, ticked like a 24-hour clock: 66, 000. 70,200. 82,350. 93,800. The clock never seemed to stop, even after it reset to zero.

“It’s a painless, peaceful process.”

The office door hissed open and the Caseworker shuffled in. He gave Asra a reassuring smile, gray eyes shining with plastic empathy through crooked frames.

“Are they all…have they chosen to…” Die.

Asra tore her gaze away from the hologlass, and settled it on the pamphlet in front of her. She’d read it countless times in her year of therapy after she made her decision.  It was a requirement to know all the available options, even if one couldn’t afford them. Or, in her case, want them. If she closed her eyes, she could recite the entire pamphlet word-for-word, and yet, she couldn’t even recall–

“They chose Oblivion.”

As if rehearsed to a habit, the Caseworker reached out to console her with a light squeeze of a gloved hand. This, too, Asra was familiar with; she’d had three Caseworkers before this—completely normal for those of her particular situation—but they all behaved the same: a pitying smile here, a kind hand there, voice never above what was considered appropriate for a funeral. Asra slipped her hands off the table and into her lap, trying not to look at the slash of scars across her fingers. The Caseworker said nothing as he pulled up her chart and settled into his seat. A clinical silence hung between them.

Somewhere down the hall, whimpering began. A tea kettle whistled. A cheerful voice called for the head psychiatrist over the speakers. Caseworkers walked down the halls as if they had all the time in the world. Maybe they did. The smell of something sterile clung to air. Fingers tapped against a tablet. The hologlass tick, tick, ticked with new certificates. Shifting in her chair—one of those hard, plastic ones bolted to the floor—Asra tried not to interact with her surrounds, to listen too closely, but restlessness prevailed.

Once again, her eyes scoured the room one last time: the glass box of an office (or counseling room, depending on who you asked), walls of frosted hologlass and floors of snowy quartz. Everything was bleached with the brightness of the UV lights overhead. Absently, she pushed the darkened shades she wore up the bridge of her nose and pulled the hood of her jacket over her forehead. The offices were always kept at a constant 59 degrees. She’d never thought to ask why.

At last, her gaze settled on the man across the desk. Like all Oblivion Caseworkers, or OCs as everyone generally called them, he wore the standard lapis lazuli tunic that covered him from neck to ankles. An inverted triangular insignia sat snug against his Adam’s apple, shifting every time he swallowed, which wasn’t often. The name tag on his chest said Julian, and she wondered, doubted, whether that was even his real name. The OCs all looked freakishly similar, almost like priests.

 Except priests didn’t usually help people commit suicide.

Asra cleared her throat. It was a harsh sound in the manufactured silence of the office. Those silver scars on her hands seemed to gleam in the lighting. “How long will it take?”

“Less than the time you’ve been suffering.” Julian’s smile grew softer, more pitiful. “The Janus Project prides itself on providing only the most compassionate state-issued Oblivion in the country. It will only take as long as you need it to. You’ll be transported to the doorway at –” he checked the location on his tablet “–the Howlan House. It’s as close to the site of the accident we can get you. Everything you need is already there, including the funeral materials, and alternative pathways, should you want them.”

           “I don’t.”

“It’s there if you do.”

“There’s no point to it.”

The words broke the air as a hoarse whisper. She pulled the cuffs of her sweater over her hands, blinking furiously as spots clouded her vision. Alternative pathways, she wanted to scoff. As if she were a candidate for Transplant or Reboot. Asra waited for anxiety to wash over her, as the pamphlets had warned, but none came. She searched herself for pangs of regret or second thoughts, but as always, she felt nothing. Even as she touched the tablet the Caseworker slid across the table, she could sense neither the warmth of where his hands had been nor the coldness of the glass. Not even the weight of it registered. She caught an unfocused glimpse of her cheerless pale face and muted green eyes on the screen, though she couldn’t be sure it was her face anymore; it was diluted with their images–a jagged collage of features that belonged to other versions of herself living in alternate worlds. Other versions she had, unfortunately, collided with that harrowing day.

            And since then, she felt nothing of herself.

            Sensed nothing of this world.

            Remembered nothing of her life.

Nothing except November the 20th, but she didn’t want the memory.

“Given your…. situation…. we want you to be as comfortable as possible. When you’re ready for Oblivion, it will embrace you. You will find peace, Asra.” He sounded so sure, she had no choice, but to believe him. The Caseworker indicated to the tinted walls and nodded at the tablet. “Shall we announce it?”

She pulled the tablet closer and froze, a hollowness burrowing deep into her chest. Her thumb brushed the photo of a house in a twilight-kissed field, the black shadows of mountains hovering in the distance. She wondered if she would have once found it beautiful, the fireflies drifting up like falling stars caught in reverse, or what the breeze caressing the patches of weeds would have felt like. She couldn’t see the suspended railway of the old Muika train line over the water, but she knew it was there.

“It’s as close as we could get you to the Fragmentation Zone.”

A memory skipped across Asra’s mind–a kaleidoscope of twisted metal, the snap of bones against water, putrid smoke–before it faded back into the shoebox she’d buried it in.  She blinked, waiting for a voice of reason to echo, to say live, live, live. But nothing came. Nothing but a wetness sliding over her chilled cheeks, dropping in time with the relentless tick, tick, ticks of the walls, and onto the glass tomb housing her death certificate:

Asra Aeilstrom, 26, Fractured, Irreparable feeling of being out of place & time.

Five Glass Flowers Playlist

Writer In Motion | Round One of CP Revisions This week has been PACKED with edits for Five Glass Flowers and navigating round one of the Feedback Phase of #WriterInMotion. 

[tinymixtapes]

Feature: 2017: Second Quarter Favorites

Half of the year is over, and we have done absolutely nothing with our lives. Very pathetic. The good news is that we use our ears to listen to music, so to celebrate, the TMT staff has once again come together to share our favorite releases of the last three months (give or take), compiled in the best format known to humankind. This time around, we were outside the club (Jlin), in the Devil’s book (Sarah Shook & The Disarmers), and on Google Hangouts (Kendrick Lamar), broadcasting live using algorithm-free YouTube (Future City Love Stories). There was glittery slime (cupcakKe), naturalistic abstractions (Lieven Martens), and condensed chunks of cut-open human organs (Pharmakon), with a range that went from pop (Lorde), narkpop (GAS), and contorted pop (Laurel Halo) to rock-star rappers (Playboi Carti), airbrushed nightcrawlers (99jakes), and mutilated tunes on the DAW floor (Khaki Blazer). Check the full list below, and as always, please take note of the shortlist, as these particular releases either weren’t heard enough yet to make the list or just fell short for various reasons. All worth a listen. Shortlist: The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the end of time: Stage 2, Upgrayedd Smurphy’s HYPNOSYS, Actress’s AZD, Slowdive’s Slowdive, $3.33’s DRAFT, Perfume Genius’s No Shape, Peace Forever Eternal’s Nextcentury, Cloud Rat & Moloch’s split, Babyfather’s Cypher, Russian Tsarlag’s Gel Stations Past, Ducktails’s Daffy Duck In Hollywood, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s On The Echoing Green, Elysia Crampton’s Spots y Escupitajo, RITCHRD’s GREATEST HITS, and Tara Jane O’Neil’s self-titled album. --- Laurel Halo Dust [Hyperdub] Dust’s single “Jelly” was a surprising teaser for fans of Laurel Halo, soberly announcing her return to vocal music with a big result. As the song resembles and contorts pop product, it’s vocoder — emblematic of 2012’s viscous and spacey Quarantine — serves the punctuated delivery of a funky Parliament-esque hook (“You don’t meet my standards for a friend…”), while collaborators Klein and Lafawndah deliver the remainder. The far-reaching influences found on “Jelly” came to be representative of Dust at large, an album that moves through its vibrant landscape of sounds and grooves in a way new to the artist behind it. “Moontalk” delivers a second blast of lopsided feel-good pop, Sam Hilmer’s saxophone rips on “Arschkriecher,” Michael Salu takes the stage on “Who Won?,” and the album ultimately subsides, taking space to explore old territory with the help of composer Eli Keszler. Dust is an exciting and adventurous release that couldn’t be more matter-of-fact. –Ben Levinson --- Playboi Carti Playboi Carti [Interscope] “I’m a rockstar” asserts Lil Uzi Vert in the intro to “wokeuplikethis,” the collaborative lead single off of Playboi Carti’s self-titled debut. Given the Atlanta native’s penchant for distorted, guitar-like synths and driving rhythms that often exceed 160 BPM, it wouldn’t be a stretch for us to extend the title to Carti, too. While “wokeuplikethis” is undeniably a track indebted to early rock & roll’s chugging groove — although one could even deem it pop-punk, taking its sparkly lead melodies and raspy, slacker vocals into consideration — Playboi Carti is evidence that its creator is something even greater. He’s sedimentary rock, a walking pastiche, the zeitgeist. He culls the best of 2016’s SoundCloud wave — its gravelly basslines, its chiming riffs — and blends it with well-curated bits of other subcultural ephemera. The transcendent beatswitch midway through “Location” integrates Macintosh Plus’s sloppily chopped aesthetic. “New Choppa,” featuring A$AP Rocky, delves into its own dark interpretation of chiptune. “Lame Niggaz” feels like a barebones deconstruction of PC Music’s unbridled optimism. Cash Carti’s everything that’s cool. He’s everything that’s ever been cool. –Jude Noel --- GAS Narkopop [Kompakt] Whatever happened to program music? We tend to think of the entire instrumental-pop umbrella, typically cast over both ambient and techno, as purely abstract. Wolfgang Voigt’s marriage of the two styles as GAS has especially been painted as a project concerning itself with the musical absolute. And yet, when you put your ear to the impenetrably thick walls built around Narkopop’s heartbeat-like low-end and contemplate the album’s wandering melodies and swift, unpredictably-resolving chord progressions, it’s hard to shake the feeling that there’s a story there. Not just the depiction of emotions or a mood, not just the aural rendering of “a nightclub in a forest,” but a plot, a character, and a conversation (or their multitude). Is it the movement of people through the European continent in its war-ridden past (or equally foreboding present)? Or is it more of a personal strife, the tale of a human struggling and succeeding, to various degrees, at finding solace? He would likely respond that there is none, but my question stands: What’s the story, Wolfgang? –Patryk Mrozek Narkopop by GASNarkopop by GAS --- Khaki Blazer Didn’t Have to Cut [Hausu Mountain] Pat Modugno when donning his Khaki Blazer is most known for his juddering, hypercaffeinated cut-ups and off-the-grid percussive discursions (scope the contemporaneous Speed Rack Willy), but on Didn’t Have to Cut, he seems to be taking our boy Gotye’s words to heart. Not only do we choose when and where to cut, but we could also decide not to do it at all. Modugno, thinking of all those tunes left mutilated on the DAW floor, must’ve had a change of heart, a turn away from the neo-dadaist massacres he seemed to so gleefully perpetuate. He still collages with the best of ‘em, but Didn’t Have to Cut gives each sound a little more room, a little more time to express itself. From the complete wheezer of “Comfortably Grey” to the slow-tone torture of “Saturn Rings” to the sheer psychic insinuation of “Hold Your Breath and Count,” everyone swarms and squiggles and sighs and squawks a little more thoughtfully. Still, the crowning achievement is the strung-out electric allolalia of “Death Bedhead,” featuring some famous singer I used to know. Didn’t Have to Cut is perhaps the most truly strange thing of 2017 so far, a melted, lopsided chimera roaring, bleating, and hissing its way into our hearts. –Cynocephalus Didn't Have To Cut by Khaki BlazerDidn't Have To Cut by Khaki Blazer --- Félicia Atkinson Hand In Hand [Shelter Press] Hand in hand, I’m watching the places where fingers tip into edges where I end. The fingernail barriers blood vessel and lymph and nerve from the wilderness. The fingernail keeps the self-stuff safe. Keratogenous upkeep is self-atomizing with clipper and file, a breaking for building to remind us that split bone is trauma but broken nail is health. All sounds are found in the breaking. All found breaks are Hand in Hand, the discarded sounds we shed to be. Voice is a buzz a bass a kiss a house a dance a poem. It sounds in slivers, these uncovered discards, this mode of droned bone jutting into distal digits. Dis-uncovery is wiping it away while rubbing it in. It’s in us. Félicia splints (our) nervous material like steel kissing keratin. Slip pinches hangnails. Bones break flesh, in-grown you. Infections are plausible. Fungi whine in crevices. In clips. Is imperfect. She skitters. We whisper. Listen. I’m following you. Take care. –Frank Falisi Hand In Hand by Félicia AtkinsonHand In Hand by Félicia Atkinson [pagebreak] Ryuichi Sakamoto async [Milan] When Ryuichi Sakamoto was diagnosed with throat cancer, no one knew how long he had to live. After around 40 years with Yellow Magic Orchestra — as well as many years as a solo composer — Sakamoto didn’t know if it’d be possible to ever make music again. “My faith in ‘health’ was crushed… I could have lost my voice, so I feel very lucky that I didn’t,” he shared with The New York Times. But with time, the 65-year-old composer slowly returned to the piano to give us async, 14 tracks of sobering reflection that meditate on the underlying grief at the heart of his health. Pooling influence from Andrei Tarkovsky and the piano meditations of Claude Debussy, async is about as uncomfortably intimate as instrumental music can be. Tracks like “walker” and “disintegration” feel of a certain post-Cagean tradition yet bask in a crushing fragility that borrows more from the emotive terrain of film composition than it does from art world experimentalism. “Ff,” “stakra,” and “ZURE” offer warm synths with a harrowing sparseness, while “fullmoon” includes a quote from Paul Bowles, one that’s light, yet aching in their harrowing detail. For all of its baggage in personal narrative, async continues much of what makes Sakamoto’s film work breathtaking with a handful of rich pieces at the height of the emotional spectrum. –Rob Arcand --- Jlin Black Origami [Planet Mu] The outward expansion of footwork has yielded many meta-narratives, all inextricably bound by a sense of propulsive energy — be it a frantic release schedule, marked by a saturation of physical releases and SoundCloud drops, or the will to stretch and mutate the methodological lexicon for the circle beyond. Never created, never destroyed; Jlin taps into the latter impulse once again with Black Origami, a renegotiation of the truncated vision of footwork posited by Dark Energy. Between percussive modes via India and Africa, and the divergent compositional methods of Basinski, Herndon, and Fawkes, these dark energies are (as the title suggests) continuously folded and refolded, enveloped and developed, resulting in one of the densest and most challenging sets of footwork yet. Wordless coos (“Enigma,” “Calcination”) pierce the void; meanwhile, “1%” quite literally dials up the madness, interjecting samples amongst characteristically throttling drum hits and transmuting bass. Make no mistake, Jlin is operating way outside the club here. Questions of identity and psychogeography aside, the pull of Black Origami lies in the physicality of its Delphic complexity — a kind of corporeal braindance — so consider it a sizable gauntlet to body music hereafter. Oh, and good luck dancing to the next one. –Soe Jherwood Black Origami by JlinBlack Origami by Jlin --- Future City Love Stories Future City Love Stories [BLCR Laboratories] The BLCR Laboratories debut of Future City Love Stories (a.k.a. Dream Catalogue CEO, a.k.a. HKE, a.k.a. [every last a.k.a. imaginable]) finds spectacular foundations for the self-titled release’s existence on the audible milieu of atmosphere. There is no “real” rhythm or reason unfolding within the chapters of Future City Love Stories, just architectural patterns. Existence as lingering footsteps in the background. Haunting echoes vibrating throughout empty alleys and alcoves. The sound of rain down the road turns out to be televisions left on static in a storefront window. Explanations withdrawn with, “Neverminds.” A voice intentionally lost in translation. Blurring lights that even up close hum a glow of aura. Dumpster fires. Pockets of wafting smells entangle the senses. Enough narrative imagination in ethereal splendor for listeners to create their very own Future City Love Stories. Come out and play forever. –C Monster Future City Love Stories by Future City Love StoriesFuture City Love Stories by Future City Love Stories --- Sarah Shook & The Disarmers Sidelong [Bloodshot] “What kind of music do you usually have here?” Country AND western, honky AND tonk, punk AND queer… wait, what? Sarah Shook plays smoky raw alt-country that contrasts a subtle defiance of gender stereotypes with a proud and triumphant embodiment of another trope, the country legend on a path to hell paved with bad intentions and slippery with moonshine. Country may be the music of pain, but if you need something to rile you up, the driving outlaw rhythms here’ll get the job done too. Shook’s voice is an extraordinary instrument — rough-edged and velvety by turn, with a rattling quiver and a broken lilt that’ll break your heart right along with it. Sidelong inscribes her name, alongside Lydia Loveless and Hank Williams III, in the Devil’s book. –Rowan Savage Sidelong by Sarah Shook & the DisarmersSidelong by Sarah Shook & the Disarmers --- Arca Arca [XL] Electronic music has an odd relationship with vocals. They’re polarized along the spectrum of directness, either fully obscured or so loaded with emotional cues as to seem heavy-handed. The notion of the electronic singer-songwriter is nearly extinct, word to James Blake. Arca found a way to bridge that gap, speaking both through his production and his own voice, and transmitting gripping affect on two levels: the pure sound of his voice, a universal language, and the massive (but nuanced) emotional conveyance of the lyrics themselves, sung in his native Spanish. Whether you speak the language or not, Arca seizes control, making himself clearer to the listener than ever before. –Corrigan B --- Lieven Martens Gardens, Fire and Wine (A Compilation) [Edições CN] Quietly, he picks out postcards under a bright moon. The street murmurs, the water laps. Slowly, softly, a certain psychedelia seeps in, of the visitor, in transit, appearing, displacement. And the words come, briefly. In summary. To try to speak to transitory and totalizing experiences. Swaths of moments, and to honor them, particularly. Moods, tones, warped glimpses. A gesture. Plus all that’s ungraspable, well-traveled. I picked this one out just for you. Wish you were here. Signed Lieven Martens, who equates the seven soundscapes on Gardens, Fire and Wine (A Compilation) with a set of seven postcards. They go around the world; it’s a miracle. Delivery, like a whisper. Words laid bare for you, again, actually, as many of these tracks were previously released on 7-inches and cassettes between 2012-15. Compiled, they span from documents of live performances to naturalistic abstractions. But, again, in the wonderful words of Martens, they’re not quite that. More, “a series of images, not reissues yet self-captured.” Words touched heart. Simply. What did he write? He wrote of all sorts of good soil. Thank the glaciers, the volcanoes. –Cookcook Gardens, Fire and Wine (A Compilation) by Lieven MartensGardens, Fire and Wine (A Compilation) by Lieven Martens [pagebreak] cupcakKe Queen Elizabitch [Self-Released] Saying that this [title with a strong female lead] is anything like MC Lyte or Lil Kim would be as lazy and as sexist as it is glaringly false. Elizabeth Harris (nope, not this one) is a motherfucking kraken on Queen Elizabitch, spitting glittery slime from her furry pink tentacles until you submit. Straight up, Queen Elizabitch is filthy as fuck, hilarious as Hell, and hard as a dick while she’s rapping. Put squarely, this shit is BOLD, and it’s not lost on us that being a female MC in this context requires an impossible balance between class and crass. I can’t deny that cupcakKe’s notorious guttermouth is what pulled me in, but in all honesty, what has kept me coming back is her unmatched consistency in a game dominated by warbling cocks. This shit slays on a Blueprint level. That it would probably still slay on a Kingdom Come level is a reflection of her unsolicited ferocity. However we heard it, I’m glad we listened. –Jackson Scott --- Chino Amobi PARADISO [UNO NYC/NON] Tiny Mix Tapes has been covering Chino Amobi since at least 2012, when he was known as Diamond Black Hearted Boy. As it turns out, 2012 also was the year yours truly started writing for TMT — and my last name really is Diamond, by the way; it’s not a moniker like C Monster. Fun fact: C got me this gig. He was listening to Chino back when Chino was Diamond Black Hearted Boy. I faintly remember him telling me about Diamond Black Hearted Boy, and my reply being something like,”’Diamond Hard Blue Apples of the Moon?’ Dope song, bro.” He definitely told me about Chino Amobi later too, but I just thought he was talking about the guy from The Deftones. The point is, not all of us TMTers are in-the-know experimental music scholars with master’s degrees, and some of us who are are secretly borderline illiterate, but most all of us thoroughly enjoy Chino Amobi’s PARADISO and its arcane references, sudden outbursts, and the way those elements play off of one another, like close friends with similar interests and backgrounds but little else in common. Cages this weekend? –Samuel Diamond PARADISO by Chino AmobiPARADISO by Chino Amobi --- Richard Dawson Peasant [Weird World] The curtain rises; before us, a paddock of aged grass, overcast with swelling clouds, while somewhere nearby, there lays a whimpering collie “under a whining bush… seized by a fit.” A house sits in the corner of the enclosure, steam escaping through the windows — inside, there keeps “a cauldron of pummeled gall-nuts afloat in urine/ add river-water thrice-boiled with a bloodstone.” On the wall, a painting has begun to drip from the humidity, its seaside pastoral molting into something almost unrecognizable, as if suddenly one can see “in the face of the cliff/ a ghastly doorway.” Beyond the doorway lies a kingdom of gold, a place where “a child can be bought for a year’s worth of grain,” and “fortune wags its tongue along the walkways of the bathhouse.” Innocents lay lifeless on the street corner, and as the music of war begins to stir once again, somewhere far away, “the rolling fields grow dark as the grave/ and I am fleeing for my life.” –SZG --- Pharmakon Contact [Sacred Bones] Shortly before the release of Contact, Pharmakon played a memorial show for those who lost their lives in the Oakland Ghost Ship fire. The show was also a fundraiser for the Trans Assistance Project in honor of Feral Pines, a transwoman who was among those who died. I didn’t know Feral personally, but many of the people I went to the show with did. Pharmakon played a short set, a single song off Contact. A great chunk of the audience cried. Contact is an industrial-noise record, a condensed chunk of materialized, cut-open human organs, a manifestation of pain and fury and sadness. Terribly abrasive, yes, but it reminds us that such horror-totems are also a locus for contact. There’s a great deal of space in this record, gaps between aural saturation, pockets to curl up and gather and weep in between sheets of oblivion. We can gather around a shared wound. We can hold hands. Contact is an assault and an opening-up. –Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli Contact by PharmakonContact by Pharmakon --- 99jakes Birthday Party (Not Our Birthday) [Self-Released] “You would cry too if it happened to you.” INT. MOTEL ROOM — NIGHT. SALEM and GFOTY moved into a vacancy together at the edge of town, a few miles past the last gas station but before you get to the cornfields. It always looks red in their room, because they keep a neon sign glowing all through the clear-blue night. We’re throwing a birthday party for their overdue baby, and we just had to book 99jakes, the holy sacrilegious DJ broadcasting live from the forest using algorithm-free YouTube. The party is for jakes only, sorry, but you’re a jake. You might’ve RSVPd “Going” on Facebook high as fuck at 2:35 AM, but you were not ready for this party. Airbrushed nightcrawlers are scurrying on the walls, moms and ravers are talking Yu-Gi-Oh!, and one of the jakes keeps trying to start a food fight with this cardboard cutout of Magneto. Another jake is genuinely sobbing about their weekly horoscope. It’s a new moon and the party is over, but after the afterparty, we’re playing 7th Guest. For keeps. Watch it, dude. –Pat Beane --- Aaron Dilloway The Gag File [Dais] Cigarette butts litter the floor. Empty beer bottles are strewn across the room. The walls in the house are that dark-brown, stained-wood paneling of which the 70s were so fond. The carpet might as well be orange if it actually isn’t. Remnants of paraphernalia are on a glass-top table in front of a couch. There’s a stale smell in the air. A low thud lopes along in the background. You can vaguely make out that music is playing, but you don’t know what it is… there’s mostly muddy bass frequencies. Random conversations are taking place in this room, but you’re not really a part of any of them. You’re just observing. Down a hallway and through a bedroom door is a familiar smile. A kind of vaguely eerie, expressionless smile that you pull a string to animate. While pulling the string, a busted speaker inside of it creaks to life, announcing “kill away” with a cackle. You ghost this scene immediately. –Joe Davenport The Gag File by Aaron DillowayThe Gag File by Aaron Dilloway [pagebreak] Chief Keef Thot Breaker [Glo Gang] When I reviewed Two Zero One Seven in January, I felt obligated to excavate a rough sketch of Chief Keef’s disperse, ephemeral, and notoriously leaky catalogue, ending with the question of whether Thot Breaker (which had already been suspended in the limbo of hypothetical Keef releases since 2015) would ever come out. So in a surprise befitting Sosa’s winking demeanor, it makes a kind of cosmic sense that Thot Breaker would not only be released, but also that it would be an actual album, delicately mastered and thoughtfully sequenced, showcasing the evolution of Keith Cozart’s blossoming vision as a full-throated producer of singular and ambitious pop music. And the music is what shines: falsetto, autotune harmonies hang in the nausea of drum-barren and baroque lean-scapes, where the absurd poignancy of Keef’s lyricism glimmers, finally equilibrated to the left-field intuitions of his own production style (aided here by resident team Young Chop and CBMix, as well as a lone Mike WiLL Made-It spot). Standouts like “Alone (Intro),” the drumless ballad “Slow Dance,” stadium-dubstep barnstormer “Whoa,” and the inevitable lean-sipping ode “Drank Head” are legitimate ruptures in the Keef canon and, if we are to take the artist at face value (which we should), aesthetics more generally — they only require the audience to unsee a false history, and to accept the psychedelic, finessed vulnerability being offered on Thot Breaker. –Nick Henderson --- Nkisi Kill [MW] The only voice you hear on Kill bellows at the beginning of “Can You See Me,” asking with force, “Can you hear me? Do you know who I am? Can you see me? I live in the dark.” Brief and deliberate, the first official record by Nkisi, a co-founder of the explosively influential NON collective, somehow gets right up in its listener’s face while retaining its basic anonymity. The title track opens the record in a rolling, percussive euphoria, giving way to a kind of double-bridge in which manic beeping morphs into a dramatic trance arp. There are more shades of trance in the emotional denouement of “Parched Lips,” while both “Can You See Me” and “MWANA” rely on their nervous, nonlinear ascent toward climax. These are unique, collage-like tracks that still fit well within the massive, oddly shaped space Nkisi and associates have carved for themselves, blending a familiarly frenetic swing of snares into conversation with some evocative and incidental techniques of composition. Living in the dark, Kill offers a few scattered rays of light. –Will Neibergall --- Lorde Melodrama [Republic] Lorde is one of those ultimate artists who has achieved both top-level mainstream cred and top-level indie cred. You really can’t dislike her from any angle or you risk being seen as uncool, a fate truly worse than death. This is because, in contrast to most other pop today (most of which is pure garbage), her music is emotionally intuitive and refreshingly honest, with interesting insights into her social life and her love life. The production is airy, crisp, and occasionally sparse, giving the feeling that each sound and gesture was thoroughly considered and chosen for good reasons. These are true reflections of a partier, singing about the feelings that drive her to party and the feelings she’s left with when the party ends. That’s where Lorde transcends most pop music today: where most music regresses into trite politics or benign observations about life, her music is fairly particular and contains powerful ruminations that all people can relate to, because partying rules. Life is about the balance of partying and being sad. --- Ace Mo Black Populous [Bootleg Tapes] In any true Catholic family, there are over four aunts or uncles and subsequently dozens of first and second cousins who get placed in three categories: often, sometimes, and who? The “oftens” are there every holiday whose birthdays you’re dragged to; the “sometimes” are out-of-state cousins who you see enough to consistently dislike and/or smoke weed with in the alleyway; and the “whos?” are the reason why you address everyone as “bud” or “friend.” Ace Mo and the entirety of Bootleg Tapes have quickly risen from a “who?” to the highest ground of “often”: the sitcom best-friend cousin, transcending the ranks into a must-see, need-to-chill-with cousin. Can there be a brightest-star, favorite cousin within Bootleg Tapes? We refuse to answer that. But damn: as of this writing, he is the face off/banner kid of their Bandcamp, and Black Populous is bringing in a whole new appreciation for the label. So, what we’re saying is, Ace Mo, I have the dro, and we’re eating heavy always; see you at the next major holiday, and an AFX-style-remix-fanboy thanks to you. –Monet Maker Black Populous by AceMoBlack Populous by AceMo --- Medslaus Poorboy Self-Released If the most boring drums a rap producer can program go boom boom bap boom boom boom bap, then the second most boring drums a rap producer can program go ticka ticka ticka ticka ticka ticka ticka ticka ticka and the third most boring go ticka ticka boom bap ticka ticka ticka ticka bap, and so on. If I’m oversimplifying, I apologize — the point is: Slauson Malone doesn’t make beats you’ve heard before, and on the occasion that he employs a familiar sample, like on “Follies (P.M.W.),” the sumbitch gets turned out. Melodics become riddims and vice versa such that no two tracks ever sound the same. As for Slauson’s vocal counterpart, the first time I heard Medhane, I thought he was alright but steadily overshadowed by his producer. Post-Poorboy, I’m starting to think that’d be like saying Guru was overshadowed by Premier. And this is after just their second project together!? If these kids get any better, you’re all going to be out of a job. Chief Keef’s going to need to take a civil service exam or some shit. Rappaz rn dainja and beats are obsolete. Go ahead with that. –Samuel Diamond --- Kendrick Lamar DAMN. [Top Dawg] Okay, so you’re not AIM buddies with Kendrick Lamar, but… doesn’t it feel like you kinda could be? The most over-the-top thing about DAMN. wasn’t that it sounded like the work of some untouchable megastar off on his own trip; it was the feeling that an easygoing, all-around “nice dude” who lives down the hall from you cobbled this shit together on his PC in the lonely-but-spacious hours between night shifts and day jobs. The shots fired on DAMN. didn’t feel so much “shockingly revolutionary” as they did “shockingly relatable.” It pretty much felt like Lamar was sending you a MediaFire link containing the mundane, silly, scared, honest fruits of a secret-hobby on Google Hangouts and then insecurely asking you what you thought of it right on the spot. Then, he anxiously watched the screen as you typed back your near-speechless, one-word response: “DAMN.” –Dan Smart http://j.mp/2tn2dfT