Genres

Emerging in 1920, the theremin is one of the earliest electronic instruments, a whining, pitch-bending box responsible for decades of squelches, squirts, and whirs. Invented by Russian physicist Léon Theremin, the instrument has remained indelible among composers of movie soundtracks and members of forward-thinking rock bands, beloved by everyone from Jimmy Page to Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory. Beyond its ghostly timbre, the theremin is notable for its mysterious method of producing sound: The player controls its volume and pitch by moving his or her hands in the air near two antennae, rarely touching the instrument at all.Originally naming his device the etherphone, Theremin thrilled audiences with concerts across Europe and New York, even teaming with the New York Philharmonic in 1928. Soon virtuosos of the instrument emerged, most notably Theremin’s student Clara Rockmore, who played Bach, Stravinsky, and Ravel pieces at a 1938 concert in New York’s Town Hall. Forward-thinking composers like Percy Grainger and Bohuslav Martinů wrote music for it. Its alien-whoop sound then became indelibly associated with ’50 sci-fi movies like The Thing from Another World and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Experimental-leaning psychedelic rock bands picked up the charge in the ’60s, including Lothar and The Hand People, a Denver band whose theremin was the titular Lothar. However, the most famous song with this sound, The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” was actually not played with a theremin at all: They utilized a more hands-on simulacrum called the Electro-Theremin.In the years that followed, the instrument found its way to arena rockers (Jimmy Page would often solo with it on stage), vintage-rock noisemakers (Jack White, Jon Spencer), retro-minded electronic experimentalists (Arling & Cameron), and newer virtuosos (Carolina Eyck, Lydia Kavina, Dorit Chrysler). Here’s a generations-crossing selection of theremin tunes that pull melodies out of thin air.

In the songs that bookend this playlist, which are separated by a decade, Prince cheekily reports, “I just can’t believe all the things people say/Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?” and David Bowie rhetorically inquires, “Oh, you pretty things, don’t you know you’re driving your mamas and papas insane?”

Each in his own way was reveling in the joys of androgyny. And each memorably presented a gender-amorphous image to the pop-culture mainstream, helping to further the cause of LGBTQ identity politics.

When Bowie sang “Oh! You Pretty Things” in 1971, there were lots of longhaired males on the rock scene but precious few actively courting an androgynous (or outright feminine) image as he would. By the ’80s, that had changed drastically. Especially in England, New Wave and synth-pop ushered in a raft of new celebrities who had no qualms about dancing down the middle of the gender-identity divide, delightedly tweaking sexual and social preconceptions in the process.

By the time Culture Club’s Boy George ascended to international superstardom in 1982-83, a sexually ambiguous image could be seen as actively advantageous to aspiring pop icons. And around the same time, Annie Lennox of Eurythmics and Grace Jones showed that women could flout gender convention as effectively as men.

Though trends would naturally come and go in the decades that followed, the lessons of ’80s pop androgyny were not lost. La Roux, Janelle Monáe, Antony and the Johnsons, LP, and others represented the increasing fluidity of gender identity in the new millennium, sometimes incorporating not only the images of the ’80s but also the musical innovations of artists like Prince and Eurythmics, becoming part of a pop-cultural continuum with plenty of room to move forward.

As evidenced by the diverse vibes of her spectacular first three albums, Angel Olsen has excellent taste. Her sense of sound and space is preternatural. This “Sounds of the Summer” playlist for Jagjaguwar offers a unique window into her thinking, collecting a mix of breezy tracks that have inspired her. “Starlight” by Pure X is a hazy beach jam featuring shiny, tremolo-soaked guitars, while the Rolling Stones’ classic “Moonlight Mile” gives a sense of the composed pensiveness that lazy vacation days necessitate. The playlist takes a romantic, serious turn with Donny Hathaway’s “I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know,” pointing toward the sentimental reflection that has always haunted Olsen’s music.

Time to set aside popular jams like Merriweather Post Pavilion and Tomboy and instead wander into the outer limits of the Animal Collective galaxy. It’s there that you’ll find some of the foursome’s most innovative solo stabs, side projects, and remixes. A personal fave is Jane, Noah Lennox’s short-lived band with Scott Mou. The duo’s Berserker album, from 2005, is nothing less than a pot of slowly bubbling brain juice. Nearly as absorbing are the string of records Dave Portner and Black Dice’s Eric Copeland released under their Terrestrial Tones moniker. Not surprisingly, this playlist contains lengthy stretches of psychedelic drift-n-moan, though don’t be surprised by the occasional mutant dance groove or blast of static. Unpredictability has always been the name of the game for Panda Bear, Avey Tare, Deakin, and Geologist.

For over three decades, Anthrax have been at the forefront of the thrash revolution, a campaign that continues on their most recent album, For All Kings. Here, guitarists Scott Ian and Jonathan Donais, and drummer Charlie Benante share their all-time favorite hard-rock and metal jams—plus the odd curveball—in these playlists created exclusively for The Dowsers.SCOTT IAN (GUITAR)Listen to his playlist above.CHARLIE BENANTE (DRUMS)

JONATHAN DONAIS (GUITAR)

This feature is part of our Thrash 101 online course that was produced in partnership with the good rocking folks at GimmeRadio, a free 24/7 metal radio station hosted by heavy-music experts like Megadeths Dave Mustaine and Lamb of Gods Randy Blythe. Check them out here and sign up for the Thrash 101 course here.

Thank you for checking out the 13th installment of our Thrash 101 program, produced in conjunction with GimmeRadio, your free 24/7 radio station hosted by heavy-music experts and artists such as The Dillinger Escape Plans Ben Weinman and Death Angels Will Carroll. Listen for free here.For over three decades, Anthrax have been at the forefront of the thrash revolution, a campaign that continues on their most recent album, For All Kings. Here, guitarists Scott Ian and Jonathan Donais, and drummer Charlie Benante share their all-time favorite hard-rock and metal jams—plus the odd curveball—in these playlists created exclusively for The Dowsers.SCOTT IAN (GUITAR)Listen to his playlist above.CHARLIE BENANTE (DRUMS)

JONATHAN DONAIS (GUITAR)

There’s a reason why Reddit users frantically threw together a playlist of the tracks that Aphex Twin spun during London’s Field Day just hours after the set ended. The U.K. producer named Richard James remains one of electronic music’s most cherished and mysterious figures. Part of this is due to his elusive persona, but there’s something inherently uncanny about the music he makes, whether the primeval futurism of 1992’s groundbreaking Selected Ambient Works 85-92, or the (relatively) more tuneful IDM classics such as “Windowlicker.” It’s easy enough to pick out precedents — a little bit of post-electronic jazz there, a touch of Eno’s ambient experiments here — but the final product remains opaque and uniquely his own. This singularity of sound and vision is one of the reasons that he’s developed the sort of fervent fan base that tracks his every movement.This playlist of songs is essential listening for those fans. The austere corporal march of Kamxilo’s “Splxcity” approximates a type of musical brutalism, and transitions nicely into the deconstructed synth stabs of “WARSZAMA” from Chino Amobi, the Virginia noise artist and co-founder of NON Records. The jarring, introductory portion of the set reaches an apex (of sorts) with the grinding gears of Shapednoise’s “Witness of a Heart Attack Death” before settling into a stretch of slightly disjointed electro funk that mirrors James’ own aesthetic. The set ends with a 90’s nostalgia trip: Underground Resistance’s “Nannytown”; a choice track from Squarepusher’s excellent ‘99 album, Selection Sixteen; and Alec Empire’s screeching Suicide-homage, “Everything Starts with a Fuck.”Still, listening to a playlist comprising tracks exclusively from the DJ set is an odd experience. As an unmixed, dangling historical artifact, experienced within the confines of headphones or home speakers, it’s not how or where James wanted the music to be heard. Conscious of this, your mind fills in some of the blanks: the 3D mapped light instillation; the entrances and exits of the segways; the sweat and flesh of the festival crowd. It’s an incomplete experience, but it’s also interactive, and feels less like you’re staring through a tiny peephole at a much larger world, and more like you’re parsing an ancient, oblique text. And you come away with that reading having heard, and discovered, some amazing music.

Arcade Fire’s two guiding principles of late can be boiled down to “we are cool and clever” and “the world is bad.” Their new Spotify mix, currently titled “Infinite Playlist — Start Making Money,” integrates these two ideas pretty thoroughly. With this new feature—surely to be received as a marketing ploy of some sort—the band wants us to know how cool they are by recommending some cool music that they like, but they also want to give us “everything now” in a form that we cannot possibly consume or comprehend: a playlist of (almost) “infinite content.”For one, Arcade Fire keep changing the title of this playlist. At one point it was called “Infinite Playlist — Greatest Hits of 2004” (even though its songs weren’t from that year). At another point it was “Songs For Reading The Morning Paper,” and then “Infinite Playlist — Disco Is Not A Bad Word.” Perhaps by the time you read this, a new tweet from the band will have signified yet another title—or maybe they will have deleted the playlist entirely. Either way, this 541-track-long (at the time of this article’s publication) playlist contains entire albums by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kate Bush, The Modern Lovers, Aphex Twin, Lou Reed, Charles Mingus, Wu-Tang Clan, Arthur Russell, and more (i.e., Very Cool musicians who make Very Cool music). Perhaps the keys to unraveling all the secrets of Arcade Fire’s latest album Everything Now—and also, maybe, our own society—can be found in this playlist, and I hope that whatever person has 36 hours to spare won’t hesitate to let us know what those secrets are. The problem is, much like their recent album, Arcade Fire buries any potentially nuanced point about our culture and its discontents under a suffocating blanket of irony and distance. Arcade Fire are indeed very cool and smart. Setting Metallica’s Master of Puppets between Neil Young’s Live Rust and The Louvin Brothers’ Satan Is Real is truly a masterful postmodern playlist move, and hopefully one that will allow us to simultaneously extrapolate important comments about our culture and critique ourselves as listeners in a meaningful way. Except that it probably won’t, because Arcade Fire get the wires crossed again, setting out to critique our culture’s “infinite content” by submitting an unlistenable playlist. In the end, Arcade Fire do the music a disservice by keeping the focus on Arcade Fire and overwhelming the good ideas that the playlist contains.

Few regional rap stars have been as consistently compelling as New Orleans street legend Lil Boosie. Theres a certain tension and menace in his hard-as-nails street narratives and wiry, astringent voice that is only amplified in his stretched out NoLa syllables. Hes got at least one street classic (lets assume that "street" persists as a qualifier for everything Boosie touches) and his 2015 album Touch Down 2 Cause Blood - his first since being released from prison on a murder rap - has harrowing confessional narratives mixed in with the usual braggadocio. Mosi provides a good overview of the mans career.

When it comes to excavating history in the traditionally under-reported world of avant-garde music, Andy Beta is one of America’s most probing critics. As part of the Pitchfork Essentials series, he put together “Astral Traveling,” a hybrid sociocultural survey and annotated playlist charting the evolution of spiritual jazz in the ’60s and ’70s. Beta—who also has logged considerable time as a deejay—pulls off what is a tricky balancing act. Through words, he successfully weaves selections from John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Sonny Sharrock, et al., into a cogent historical narrative. At the same time, he ensures that his playlist—as a listening experience in its own right—heaves, swells, and testifies with a sense ecstatic ritual that honors spiritual jazz’s sacred ethos. That’s elegant curation.