No Pain In Pop

Demob Happy

Speaking to Mike Sniper recently, it was interesting to hear him attempt to define this home recording mo(ve)ment we currently seem to be passing through, as well as his and his label’s place within it. Captured Tracks, he said, isn’t a ‘Punk’ label, nor is it an ‘Indie’ label: rather it should be seen as an independent rock’n'roll label, a prism refracting through it bands like La La Vasquez and Girls At Dawn that may seem vaguely similar, but to busier ears have their obvious differences and personal tics. As for the term ‘lo-fi’ - “too easy”, according to Mike, firstly because it refers specifically to recording techniques not all of the bands involved employ and secondly because it’s already been claimed, by those DIY frustrateds back in the Eighties who’d tend to transpire from nowhere, sullen and staring from the covers of perfect debut 7″s that seemed to simultaneously exhaust any inclination to build a back catalogue. Those sleeves - previously lost to the ambiguity of record shop crates - are pored over now, of course, posted up at ‘blogs like id Reverberations and Pukekos for all to study and re-present in their own image, to mess with, to alter the genetic make-up of just slightly and so now we have this pack of confused, young new Centurians, DIY DNA tamperers, experimenting on themselves, manufacturing their own branch off of the family tree and with it, a kind of righteous authenticity. They may only be one step away from Black Tambourine’s Complete Recordings, but at least they definitely are that one step away, and so in some small way different, mutated, progressed. It’s not just DIY recording, it’s DIY selective breeding: new sub-species emerging every day in a manic fuck frenzy of Eugenic blank dogs. Graffiti Island are Afghan Hounds, Wavves an Alsatian, PENS Chihuahuas.

Something else to emerge from that conversation with Mike was the brilliantly subdued Beach Fossils - or rather my knowledge of Dustin Payseur’s Brooklyn niche, as I doubt even Mr Sniper has the talent-spotting skills to conjure bands fully-formed from the air of a transatlantic phonecall. ‘Vacation’ and ‘Daydream’ may well find a home with Captured Tracks and they drift in the same lax zones as most of Wavves‘ work, i.e. those soft-focus moments between the torturous rites of teenage passage, the holiday, the beach, the street. Beach Fossils are sharper, though - there’s little in the way of fuzz and the thing floats on, meandering to a contented close in carefree clarity.

Thanks to Mike Sniper for the tip.



MP3: Beach Fossils - Vacation



MP3: Beach Fossils - Daydream

Tags: beach fossils, dustin payseur, mike sniper

Swinging Jaw: Deep Shit

Watson has, he says, been “negotiating the cynical/bitter tightrope since 1987″.

Read chatter with Deep Shit knucklehead Tom Watson at the Viceland Music Blog.



MP3: Deep Shit - Other People’s Lives

Tags: deep sht

When the world breaks your wrists

Everything is the same, the fog says ‘We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,’ and the leaves say ‘We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that’s all, we come and go, grow and fall’ — Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say ‘We are mantransformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we’ll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season’ — The tree stumps say ‘We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by the wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth’ — Men say ‘We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realise everything is the same.’



MP3: Religious Girls - Delora



MP3: Religious Girls - White Mage

Tags: religious girls

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

MP3: Joker vs Tempa T - Gullybrook Hype

Tags: joker, tempa t, tim & barry

Sling It

Another name for your young beat collective: London’s Arthur Cayzer, AKA Pariah, whose tracks glide with a rare poise. ‘Detroit Falls’ confuses soulful Dilla bomp’n'clap with haunting dubplate textures and house roll to authoritative and addictive effect, while ‘Don’t Go’ is a crystal-eyed 2-step meditative for Cayzer’s beloved night bus. ‘Jelly Baby’ is different - all sloppy synths flaring up around your jowls, an itching, wobbling thing that fruits around amid the safety of hench bass-weight.

There’s something incredibly exciting about all this whateveritis - this constant spooling, globular mutation taking place out on the electronic hinterlands. And whateveritis wasn’t supposed to sound like a medical condition, but maybe that’s the best way to see it; as something gone awry in medicated minds, something lost or just absorbed differently in the initial awe at heroes like Dilla, MJ Cole, Parrish and Burial and the defect gets hammered out over and over again until it takes on traits of its own for others to see and send skewiff. We are all ears cupped and tilted at odd angles.

Anyway, Joy Orbison, 141, FaltyDL, sbtrkt, Floating Points and now, Pariah - heaven is a Zone 2 house party with this loose troop. Sling it, all summer.



MP3: Pariah - Detroit Falls (Mixdown)



MP3: Pariah - Don’t Go (Unmastered Demo)



MP3: Pariah - Jelly Baby (Demo)

Tags: arthur cayzer, pariah

Zephyr dries your wet heir

If these are: the y e a r s /of/ w e i r d o POP, senile and lost in bedrooms that float lone and adrift from mortar, of wet eyes surrounded by trinkets from Aunty and personality bubbles that are somehow yet to BURST, if this is: d e a t h of the pop(ular) chart, in place of ‘Top Tens’ scrawled not from sales figures or coin-in-pocket hand thrusting but from the extent of readily available memory cells (dependent upon: in-brain booze linger/the e m p t i n e s s of moments//enthusiasm) dialled like the digits of a (possibly defunct?) telephone s u p p o r t line: if this is: the breaking apart of EM P A TH Y into hardened stones to hurl the way of a hundred other hardened stoners: if this is: POP IDOl prog-bait (‘lo-fi’) F-I-Z-Z open-bracket-) ‘in eyebrows raised the way of inverted commas’ readthegapsbetweenletters proselytes* then Chaz Bundick is surely set to swim in lemonade forever.

Toro Y Moi is Bundick’s side-project and it sounds like Ariel Pink or Night Control jacking Air France’s Warm Jets and turning them Midas gold. Bundick is from Columbia, South Carolina, where he also plays with The Heist And The Accomplice. Sample line, coming through the F-I-Z-Z: “feel the night slit my throat”. Heavy snares. Squidgy, sullen, gut-jump synths. Messages into bottles and hurled out into space. Glug.



MP3: Toro Y Moi - Sad Sams



MP3: Toro Y Moi - 109

Tags: chaz bundick, toro y moi