Sometimes simply getting completely lost inside a song is all you really need. TOMC’s “Bake The House” ostensibly plays out like a dance track, with a shuffling beat guiding everything forward, but nobody would blame you if you missed it because of all the stuff stewing on top of it. Disoriented noises, dislocated human voices and samples of bubbles and appliance and, uh, elephants play out over the beat, creating a bit of floor-ready collage to lose yourself in. Listen above.
Category Archives: Music
Backwards And Backwards But Done Well: Upusen’s Signal
Is everything just going to be a loop backwards from now on? This isn’t about Upusen’s Signal specifically, though it does factor into the larger trend. Maybe it’s just Japan’s current obsession with all things ’90s — this movie is literally “do you remember gyaru fashion and Tamagothchi?” — or the Western world’s love of anything dappled in neon and a sense of yesteryear. Is this the new “get off my lawn,” where you look at nostalgia and bemoan that because it lacks innovation?
Well, as existential as that can make me, Local Visions deserves credit for just doing it better than anyone else in 2018. The music they’ve put out this year finds new angles on nostalgia, avoiding cliche in favor of finding sounds that evoke a melancholy warmness. Signal is the label’s Odyssey, a particularly fuzzy set of wordless synth numbers that probably works wonders set over warped footage of The Simpson’s. “Signal” sets off those comparisons right away with its synth night drive, growing in intensity but never losing that emotional pang. To Upusen’s credit, the whole album isn’t just one big Teddy Ruxpin’s hug, with “Poolside” being a particularly dizzying cut and the blunted whirl of “Float” operating in more dreamy territory. But by the time “Daydream Drive” comes around to end the note on a particularly triumphant blast of retro-wave synth-work, Upusen has shown they can do this backwards looking better than most. Get it here, or listen below.
Stare Right At It: DJ FFFTP’s The Sun
When you have a good idea, take it as far as you can. Oita’s DJ FFFTP closes out the summer with The Sun, which is technically a song served up a bunch of different ways. Fittingly, the trio of takes on it by FFFTP themselves follows the course of the day, opening with a “Sunrise Version” that greets the day with a swift beat but accompanied by bell chimes that make it all a little easier to move along with. “Afternoon Version” offers up some easy-breezy post-lunch vibes that make for the most laid-back cut here, while “Sundown” cranks it up the other way, making for a late-night delight. Get it here, or listen below.
New Le Makeup: “Couples”
Le Makeup contributed a new song to a compilation put together by the Berlin label Oxyorange. The whole comp is worth checking out, but the Osaka producer’s track for it offers a nice break from mostly thumpier material. “Couples” propels forward on guitar melodies, offering a nice pace but without ever really getting as chilly as the other songs across the release. Yet as the beat becomes more prominent and the main melody mutates, it also becomes clear that this is Le Makeup adjusting his older sound — one which would have fit nicely on this comp too — to the one he has embraced over the last year. Listen above, or get the comp here.
New Perfume: “Future Pop”
Four Disconnected Thoughts On “Future Pop,” The Song, By Perfume
1.) The hypothesis I’ve worked with over the last two years is — Yasutaka Nakata, after being way ahead of the curve in the late Aughts and influencing swaths of EDM and other corners of electronic music in the 2010s (I guess lo-fi house can’t be bundled in here), ended up trying to imitate a bunch of artists who actually got a lot of influence from him. It makes for a weird loop. But “Future Pop” is the one moment in Nakata’s 2018 output — well, I guess let’s see what that Kyary album next week brings — that shows him really zooming ahead once again. This is very much unlike Perfume music — or any Nakata-helmed J-pop — made in the past decade, anchored by an instrumental(-ish) chorus and playing around with an acoustic-centric verse that builds to a total electro explosion. He’s done this before, and done it well. But this is Nakata once again zooming out ahead, nailing the tension between speeds and finally getting how a wordless chorus can work down in 2018. This is the peak of Future Pop, and the strongest argument in favor of him making a successful pivot moving forward.
2.) I would argue the biggest shift from peak Perfume (2007 — 2014ish) to late-period Perfume is how comfortable the group has gotten with just letting their vocals hang out without any filtering. What felt like a huge reveal late on “Spice” now feels familiar on “Future Pop.” I don’t want to project on the digital masses here, but when people complain about Perfume’s musical changes in recent years, I feel this is the biggest departure making them feel uncomfortable, a move away from the digital submersion of the group’s breakthrough in favor of…well, regular singing on verses before they dive into an all-together-now style that still feels far from what they did do. I think this is the single element of Perfume’s music that is worthy of magnification over the last few years — Future Pop misses the mark because of this, more than anything else — but also it isn’t that big a deal on “Future Pop.”
3.) OK, this one is a maybe a little biased but…I swear, nobody anywhere is making mainstream pop music anywhere near this ecstatic and electronic. Forget J-pop, where Hoshino Gen discovering the MPC constitutes earth-shattering news. American music is pure misery, and even other markets pump out halftime pump-ups about how cool the artist making the song is. Music globally (in a “what people encounter when they aren’t seeking out music” kind of way) in 2018 kinda stinks, so the fact this still sounds so adventurous is worth celebration.
4.) Riffing off the above…next to nothing is excited about the future. Like, not about music, but anything, unless you are the Zozosuit billionaire flying to the moon in a few years to see what art in space would be like. Everything sucks in 2018, and if you think things are going to improve…gahhhhhhh! But god damn it, “Future Pop” the song and “Future Pop” the video actually make me feel like tomorrow might be OK, and that deserves some sort of recognition.