It’s not easy deducing the recent shift of trap-oriented Southern rap from Dolby stereo action-movie bombast into weird, ominous electronics. When asked about their influences, current leaders like 808 Mafia and Mike Will Made-It tend to cite earlier contemporaries like Zaytoven and Drumma Boy or, if they’re feeling generous, pioneers like DJ Toomp. You can certainly chart a through-line from the swampy keyboard menace of 1997-era Three 6 Mafia and No Limit to Rae Sremmurd’s just-released SremmLife 2, the latter featuring a notable homage to early Triple Six via the Juicy J collaboration “Shake It Fast.”But where did Three 6 Mafia get its inspiration for horrorcore gems like “Where Da Killaz Hang”? That’s the premise for this speculative look into the electronic underpinnings of third-wave trap. We doubt that Metro Boomin, for example, sat around studying classic Aphex Twin tracks before he decided to layer haunted house-styled keyboard arrangements over his FL Studio drum patterns. Instead, we turn to the earliest corollary for his work on Future’s bleedy-eyed DS2: movie soundtracks, particularly when it comes to the electronic horror of John Carpenter, and the unsettling ambience of Tangerine Dream. We also think that the ongoing electro revival that sparked in the early 2000s may have a subconscious impact. Cumulatively, these sounds may be just mainstream electronica clichés, and pop culture moments symbolized by the famous scene in the recent cult classic Drive where the protagonist shifts his car over the gooey electro crush of Kavinsky’s “Nightcall.”There are a few more concrete examples to be found, too, once we take our heads out of the clouds. Fragments from 8-bit arcade games abound, especially the Street Fighter II soundtrack. Producers often rely on presets and sound libraries found in equipment like the Roland Integra-7 synthesizer. A Whosampled search reveals that Mike Will Made-It sampled Spain balladeer Camilo Sesto’s “Agua de Dos Rios” for his “Drinks On Us.” Of course, he wasn’t drawn by Sesto’s voice, but the alluring melody that kicks off the song. It seems that when it comes to this current iteration of trap music, producers will draw inspiration from wherever they can find it.
Photograph: Misha Vladimirskiy/FilterlessThundercat’s playing is instantly recognizable, and his warm, slap-happy space bass has rounded out the tracks of Flying Lotus, Kendrick Lamar and Erykah Badu. His 2015 to 2016 run -- including collaborations with Kendrick, Shabazz Palaces, and Kamasi Washington, as well as his own, excellent EP, The Beyond, Where The Giants Roam -- has been monumental. Here, he curates a playlist of his favorite basslines. Joe Henderson’s “A Shade of Jane” is sly and virtuosic modern-day post-bop jam, and you can hear the seedlings of Thundercat’s own bass style in “Spring Yard Zone,” which was originally the music for Sonic the Hedgehog video game. It’s a little hard to accept that the bassline for Spandau Ballet ranks among the all-time greats, but this is a generally enjoyable, sometimes revealing playlist.
Since 1989, Tim Burgess has been the frontman for Manchester rock chameleons The Charlatans UK. But in recent years, he’s enjoyed a second career as a globe-trotting DJ/label impresario/roving musicologist, recounting his adventures in twobooks. His latest album is Same Language, Different World, an electro-soul collaboration with one-time Arthur Russell associate Peter Gordon.“My playlist is made up of songs from the start of the day and the end of the night. Each morning, I post a Breakfast Banger on Twitter and some nights I can be found DJing—this playlist is the pick of those songs. But it might not be obvious which ones are from the day and which are from later. Enjoy!”—Tim Burgess
When describing his own “furniture music” -- an early 20th century, Dadist-inspired prototype of what is now called ambient music -- the avant garde classical composer Erik Satie offered what is still a pretty good working definition for ambient music, calling it, "a music...which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks at dinner, not dominating them, not imposing itself.”This isn’t what Tim Hecker is doing, though the Vancouver producer is considered a leading light of the genre. Since the 2001 release of his debut collection, Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again, Hecker has created music that is unbelievably heavy and visceral. The grinding feedback and high-pitched tones of “Whitecaps of White Noise 1” -- from his landmark 2006 album, Harmony in Ultraviolet -- bludgeon the senses, while the shimmering noise and twisted choral choir of “Castrati Stack,” from 2016’s Love Streams, effectively places the listener inside of a nightmare. True, like other ambient music, it doesn’t move the way music normally moves - phrases are chopped off and movements swerve, swell and then abruptly freeze, frequently disintegrating into planes of noise -- but just because something walks like a dog, it doesn’t always mean that it’s a dog.This much was obvious the last time I saw Hecker perform live. About 500 of us stood in the mildewy remains of an abandoned movie theater deep in San Francisco’s Mission District. Just prior to Hecker taking stage, the lights cut out, and we were suddenly placed in what was a near-total darkness. An opaque rumbling sound began to emanate from the large speakers to the side of the stage, and, soon, shards of enveloping industrial sounds snaked through the crowd. Occasionally, the thick black curtain that had been erected at the back of the theater, providing a cocoon of sorts, would ripple and crease, and the lights from the street would invade the space, revealing inert bodies strewn across the floor, lost in a noisey maze. It felt like a purge -- dominating and imposing, a type of “ambient” music that was anything other than ambient.You can see Tim Hecker perform live at the San Francisco MUTEK Festival, which takes place May 3 - May 6 at various venues. Advance tickets available here.
The productions of Montreal musician Tim Hecker move electronic music to unexpected places. His early work fused the dry, pulsating rhythms of techno with the bare minimalism of Brian Eno. Alongside other avante garde electronic artists and collaborators Ben Frost and Oneohtrix Point Never, Hecker has carved out a music vocabulary that mines the ethereal underpinnings of dark industrial spaces. Aaron from Beats has compiled a great playlist of his influences, which range from the modern classical of Philip Glass to shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine.
I add not a letter to the obituary that The Quietus published almost four years ago. These days I’m kinder towards Transformer and listen to Ecstasy a couple times a year (listen to the widescreen canvas given to “Big Sky” by Hal Willner).Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.
Since 1999, Carpark Records has been at the forefront of indie rock’s 21st-century evolution, releasing foundational early records from the likes of Beach House, Toro y Moi, Cloud Nothings, Dan Deacon, Speedy Ortiz, and many more. But this month, the label is looking back, by shining a light on two forgotten contenders in the early-’90s Chicago scene: Wendyfix and Remy (pictured above), both of whom featured Hyman himself on drums. With reissues of Wendyfix’s We Have the Cracks and Remy’s self-titled EP hitting stores this week, we asked Hyman to create a playlist that charts his transformation from aspiring 1990s indie rocker to founder of one of the most vanguard record labels of the 21st-century. I’ve been asked to chronicle my music listening habits from the early ’90s to the founding of Carpark in the late ’90s. I feel like I had three eras of music listening during this time.
In the fall of 1991, I moved to Chicago to go to college at Northwestern University. I was super-stoked to start DJing at their college-radio station, WNUR. The first week I got there, my friend Jon Solomon (who was also in wendyfix with me) told me we should get tickets to this Nirvana show. I’d never heard of them. But our radio station was playing the first single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a lot.
It was the first show I went to at college and, to this day, is still the craziest. It was at the Metro. Good thing we bought our tickets a week or so in advance, because there was a line all the way down Clark Street to Addison of people wanting to get in. There were so many people crammed in there that, when people were jumping, my body was literally lifted off the ground with them. I had to go to the back towards the end because I felt like there was not enough air to breathe. The show was a couple weeks before Nevermind came out. Soon after, our college-radio music director pulled the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” CD single from our library because it was getting too popular.
I was also a big Anglophile at the time and would pick up a copy of the NME or Melody Maker just about every week from our student book store. There was a pretty interesting feature about an artist called Aphex Twin that fall. I decided I wanted to hear what it sounded like. I went to Reckless and Dr. Wax but no one had it. Finally, I had to take the El all the way down to Lincoln Park to visit the Tower Records at Clark and Fullerton. They had the biggest “import” section in town then. Selected Ambient Works 85-92 was mine!
Towards the end of my freshman year, I remember reading a really interesting feature review in the NME about a new band called Stereolab. I still remember buying their debut full-length, Peng, at Reckless on Broadway right before I went home for the summer.
In my freshman year, I was keen to get involved as much as I could with independent music. I interned at Touch and Go Records most of that school year. By the time I took the El down to Sheridan and transferred to a bus that went down Irving Park past Western, it took almost an hour and a half to get there from Evanston. The office at that time was in an old industrial space, I believe. Dave Yow (The Jesus Lizard) and Britt Walford (Slint) seemed to be doing a lot of carpentry work there. I remember those dudes being really funny. One of the perks of interning was that I got free music. One day I was given an advance promo “cassette” of Polvo’s Cor-Crane Secret. It was a clear cassette with no paper art in a plastic case. Still have it somewhere….
In my sophomore year, I started playing drums in a band with my friends Jon Solomon and Ted Pauly from WNUR. We were named Wendyfix after a local high-school tennis star. Jon was away most of my junior year, so we brought on Brian McGrath to take his place. There weren’t too many indie bands in Chicago doing the quiet/loud moody guitar thing then. I recently decided to digitally release all the tracks we ever recorded. “Ridge” was always one of my favorites.
In my junior year, I started playing drums in another band with more WNUR friends, Peter Schaefer and Matt Walters. Remy was more on the Pavement/Polvo/Archers of Loaf tip. “Coco Pebbles” was one of the few jams we recorded before I graduated and moved away.Here are some other tunes that played a big part in my collegiate life:Unrest, “Cherry Cream On”Spacemen 3, “Come Down Softly to My Soul” *Slint, “Washer”Faust, The Faust Tapes *Bedhead, “Bedside Table”The Incredible String Band, “You Get Brighter”Seefeel, “Imperial”Big Flame, “Every Conversation” *Boredoms, “Hey Bore Hey” ** = not available on Spotify
I graduated college in 1995 and moved to New York. One of the things I ended up doing there was working as the indie music buyer for Kim’s West, which was a record store/video rental place at Bleeker and West 10th street in the West Village.I wouldn’t have had this job had Other Music not opened that same year. I started at Kim’s West working as a video-rental person. But the music buyers at Kim’s Underground (also on Bleeker) opened Other Music and suddenly Kim’s Underground was in need of music buyers. So the music folks at Kim’s West went over to Kim’s Underground to get things organized. And I ended up filling in the indie-music buyer spot at Kim’s West.I listened to a bunch of dub, French ye-ye, drum ‘n’ bass, MPB, ’60s/’70s easy listening, and IDM during this time.I moved back to Chicago for a year from 1996 to 1997. I worked briefly at Reckless Records and spent a lot of time at Dusty Groove. After Chicago, I went to Glasgow, Scotland for a 12-month graduat- school program for Popular Music Studies.I slowly stopped listening to indie rock around this time. I thought it was a dying genre. All the new music I was consuming was slowly transitioning over to digital and electronic music. I had burnt out on indie rock.Prince Far I, “Plant Up”Autechre, “Clipper”Maurizio, “M07A”Alec Empire, “Bang Your Head”Caetano Veloso, “Tropicalia”The Congos, “Fisherman”France Gall, “Mes Premieres Varies Vacances” *Marcos Valle, “Mentira”Plug, “Drum ‘n’ Bass for Papa” *Roger Nichols and the Small Circle of Friends, “Love So Fine” *Rotary Connection, “If I sing My Song” *µ-Ziq, “Brace Yourself Jason* = not available on Spotify
I moved back to NYC at the end of 1998 and ended up working at my friend Rich’s record store Etherea in the East Village. All us record clerks there were pretty tight. Dance-music culture was our thing. Indie rock seemed passé. We had a weekly DJ/electronic music night and spent a lot of time listening to 12 inches at dance-music shop Temple Records a block away on Avenue B.Here’s some tunes I spun a lot during this era:Dopplereffekt, “Speak ‘n’ Spell” *Aril Brikha, “Groove la Chord”Giorgio Moroder, “From Here to Eternity”Eddy Grant, “Time Warp” *Frankie Knuckles, “Baby Wants to Ride”GAS, “Eins” *Jorge Ben, “Hermes Trimegisto Escreveu”Isan, “Clipper”Casino Versus Japan, “It’s Very Sunny”Lime, ”Angel Eyes”Moodymann, “Misled”Pepe Bradock, “The Charter” *Sparks, “Beat the Clock”Thomas Bangalter, “Turbo” *Throbbing Gristle, “Hot on the Heels of Love”Tones on Tail, “Lions”Tuxedomoon, “No Tears”Closer Musik, “One Two Three (No Gravity)”I was mostly buying techno, house, and electro 12 inches at this time. I was DJing a lot. Our night, Invisible Cities, put me in touch with a lot of the electronic artists that initially released music with us. Carpark was born! That means the end of this playlist. How Carpark moved away from exclusively electronic is a playlist for another time.* = not available on Spotify
North Dakota singer-songwriter Tom Brosseau’s latest album, Treasures Untold, features a handful of orginals alongside renditions of classics from the Great American Folksong Book. Here, he takes us deeper into the roots of American music, while spotlighting some more modern interpretations thereof. “Lately I’ve been listening to the Peter Rowan catalogue, who Sara Watkins recommended to me in the early 2000s. ‘Panama Red’ appeared on both Rowans first solo album, Peter Rowan (1978), and before that in 1973 on the New Riders of the Purple Sage album The Adventures of Panama Red. I would say the ‘Panama Red’ here, recorded in 1994 at Telluride, finally found its true pulse. It displays the master musicianship, in both control and tone, of not only Peter Rowan, but also his band of A-list bluegrass players.“I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine, music historian Lou Curtiss. I phoned Lou about the omitted material from the Carter Family On Border Radio series. If there were any unreleased Carter Family recordings out there I wanted to know about it and Lou would be the person to talk to. Lou proceeded to tell me a story concerning the 16" transcription discs that eventually became On Border Radio, and how they were discovered in Baja, California, but so often when talking about music with Lou it’s like swinging from one limb to the next in an endless jungle. You go awhile; there doesnt have to be a real destination. Lou and I derailed from the Carter Family to the Phipps Family, a musical group you might say picked up where the Carter Family left off, in the 1940s. Thanks to Lou, who always gives me such great musical recommendations, I have become a Phipps fan. I hope you will too.“There’s an album of Harry McClintock entitled Haywire Mac. It’s educational and so much fun to listen to, recorded by Sam Eskin in 1953. It features McClintocks story-telling, his biographies on songs and people, and of course his singing. (McClintock composed many songs, most notably “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”, a staple of the Great American Folk Songbook.) One composition on Haywire that I really love is ‘Sweet Violets.’ It’s an example of what’s known as a mind rhyme. You’ll find a more risqué example of a mind rhyme on this playlist. You’ll know it when you get to it.“This playlist is comprised of songs that either I stumbled upon or were recommended to me. It’s perfect for a small gathering, like a dinner party. Or take it on a walk with you. It doesn’t matter how you come across music. All that matters is what touches the heart. Enjoy listening.Photo: Lizzi Brosseau
Whats This Playlist All About? As he prepares for the release of his new solo album, The Atlas Underground, the Nightwatchman, former Rage Against the Machine guitarist, and outspoken activist continues to fight for his rights through music. His genre-spanning list hits up all types of subversive anthems and calls to action from punk icons, pop freaks, and folk heroes.What You Get: To start, youll be treated with a good chunk of Morellos new album, including a grungy, hard-rocking cut with K. Flay and a sludgy, bass-y banger with Knife Party. He then gives shout-outs to his friends and collaborators, like Skrillex, Vic Mensa, A Perfect Circle, and System of a Down, before taking many left turns, including a little Jesus Christ Superstar, a club-ready 50 Cent, and a sassy Taylor Swift.Greatest Discovery: The woozy, dreamy, twang-touched "Song for Zula" from the criminally underrated PhosphorescentWhat About Rage? Theres one radical band conspicuously missing from this list: Morellos own Rage Against the Machine. A little "Killing in the Name" would round this out nicely, right?
For the past three years, I’ve been impressing people—hell, impressing myself—with the fact that I’ve been to Tom Petty’s house. I’d gone to Malibu to interview him for UNCUT magazine about Hypnotic Eye. Admirably raucous and rancorous, it proved to be his final studio album with the Heartbreakers, the band that he fronted for the better part of 40 years. So that album’s mostly what we talked about in a room next to his studio, which he’d built next to the rambling, Spanish-style, and thoroughly unpretentious home he bought after an arsonist set fire to his place in Encino in 1987. This one nearly burned down too, thanks to the massive wildfires in the area in 2007—as we chatted before sitting down, he pointed out the window to the spot a little higher up the hill where the fires stopped short of his property and the Pacific Coast Highway just below. The house is where he was found unconscious and not breathing after his cardiac arrest early Monday morning. I remember the room in the studio as homey—I could imagine Bob Dylan here with his boots up on the sofa, checking out the tasteful black-and-white framed photos on the walls. (Tom was onstage with his hero Roger McGuinn in one; with his fellow Wilbury Roy Orbison in another.) Petty served us coffee from a big stainless steel urn into oversized southwestern-style mugs that I imagined he washed himself because he didn’t want the pottery to get fucked up in the dishwasher. Throughout the interview, he puffed on a vape pen before rewarding himself at the end with a genuine smoke from a pack of American Spirit. Sporting a big bushy beard along with his usual straggly blond hair, Petty had the tanned and weathered face of an old Florida beach bum, but his bright blue eyes made him look younger by 15 years. He was friendly and a little crotchety—in other words, he was as cool as you could’ve hoped. We were supposed to have an hour but he gave me two. Then he walked me back to the front of the house and got on with his day.So that’s the scene I’ve been replaying in my head since I heard the news. Somehow, our afternoon together—and its complete lack of the audience-with-a-rock-star bullshit you might expect—speaks to the Everyguy/no-bullshit/scrappy-kid-from-Gainesville thing that Petty always exuded. He was a man of the people in a way that Dylan and Springsteen couldn’t be, because they just seemed too oversized, too mythic, too huge from the get-go. Like the characters he tended to write about, Petty was always somewhere between underdog and self-made outcast. Yet the chip on his shoulder was the rare and beautiful kind that seemed to make him more empathetic to people rather than less so. Anyway, that’s what I hear in the songs that I go back to most—some are hits and others are deeper in albums that didn’t quite get as much love as they should’ve (like the Heartbreakers’ final two albums, Mojo and Hypnotic Eye). Petty’s pair of albums with the reconstituted version of his proto-Heartbreakers band Mudcrutch proved that the man never lost his songwriting chops even if the snarling, punk-ass Petty of 1978’s You’re Gonna Get It and 1979’s sublime Dawn the Torpedoes was always gonna be hard to outdo.When we spoke, Petty talked about his plans to do an expanded version of his Rick Rubin-produced solo masterpiece Wildflowers from 1994. He didn’t get a chance to realize that ambition but in 2015, he did a preview of sorts by putting out a previously unreleased song from the sessions called “Somewhere Under Heaven.” A deceptively simple vignette that movingly portrays the bond between a “working-man” dad and the daughter who’s too young to know how bad the world can be, it’s arguably as fine as anything he ever wrote. In the last verse, the father has this to say to his little girl: “One day you’re gonna fall in love/ One day you’re gonna pay the rent/ Hold on to what love you find/ You’re gonna need all you can get.” Feels like good advice right now for all kinds of reasons.
The ’90s have never sounded better than they do right now—especially for modern-day indie rockers. There’s no shortage of bands banging around these days whose sound suggests formative phases spent soaking up vintage ’90s indie rock. Not that the neo-’90s sound is itself a new thing. As soon as the era was far enough away in the rearview mirror to allow for nostalgia to set in (i.e., the second half of the 2000s), there were already some young artists out there onboarding ’90s alt-rock influences. But more recently, there’s been a bumper crop of bands that betray a soft spot for a time when MTV still played music videos and streaming was just something that happened in a restroom. In this context, the literate, lo-fi approach of Pavement has emerged as a particularly strong strand of the ’90s indie tapestry, and it isn’t hard to hear echoes of their sound in the work of more recent arrivals like Kiwi jr. or Teenage Cool Kids. Cherry Glazerr frontwoman Clementine Creevy seems to have a feeling for the kind of big, dirty guitar riffs that made Pacific Northwestern bands the kings of the alt-rock heap once upon a time. The world-weary, wise-guy angularity of Car Seat Headrest can bring to mind the lurching, loose-limbed attack of Railroad Jerk. And laconic, storytelling types like Nap Eyes stand to prove that there’s still a bright future ahead for those who mourn the passing of Silver Jews main man David Berman. But perhaps the best thing about a face-off between the modern indie bands evoking ’90s forebears and the old-school artists themselves is the fact that in this kind of competition, everybody wins.
It may be that 2019 was the best year for ’90s metal since, well, 1999. Bands from the decade of Judgment Night re-emerged with new creative twists and tweaks: Tool stretched out into polyrhythmic madness, Korn bludgeoned with more extreme and raw despair, Slipknot added a new drummer (Max Weinberg’s kid!) who gave them a new groove, and Rammstein wrote an anti-fascism anthem that caused controversy in Germany (and hit No. 1 there too). Elsewhere, icons of the era returned in unique ways: Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor scored a superhero TV series, Primus’ Les Claypool teamed up with Sean Lennon for some quirky psych rock, and Faith No More’s Mike Patton made an avant-decadent LP with ’70s soundtrack king Jean-Claude Vannier. Finally, the soaring voice of Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington returned for a moment thanks to Lamb of God guitarist Mark Morton, who released a song they recorded together in 2017.
Taking a look at the playlists for my show on Boston’s WZBC might give the more seasoned college-radio listener a bit of déjà vu: They’re filled with bands like Versus, Team Dresch, and Sleater-Kinney, who were at the top of the CMJ charts back in the ’90s. But the records they released in 2019 turned out to be some of the year’s best rock. Versus, whose Ex Nihilo EP and Ex Voto full-length were part of a creative run for leader Richard Baluyut that also included a tour by his pre-Versus outfit Flower and his 2000s band +/-, put out a lot of beautifully thrashy rock; Team Dresch returned with all cylinders blazing and singers Jody Bleyle and Kaia Wilson wailing their hearts out on “Your Hands My Pockets”; and Sleater-Kinney confronted middle age head-on with their examination of finding one’s footing, The Center Won’t Hold.
Italian guitar heroes Uzeda—who have been putting out proggy, riff-heavy music for three-plus decades—released their first record in 13 years, the blistering Quocumque jerceris stabit; Imperial Teen, led by Faith No More multi-instrumentalist Roddy Bottum, kept the weird hooks coming with Now We Are Timeless; and high-concept Californians That Dog capped off a year of reissues with Old LP, their first album since 1997. Juliana Hatfield continued the creative tear she’s been on this decade with two albums: Weird, a collection of hooky, twisty songs that tackle alienation with searing wit, and Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police, her tribute record to the dubby New Wave chart heroes (in the spirit of the salute to Olivia Newton-John she released in 2018). And our playlist finishes with Mary Timony, formerly of the gnarled rockers Helium and currently part of the power trio Ex Hex, paying tribute to her former Autoclave bandmate Christina Billotte via an Ex Hex take on “What Kind of Monster Are You?,” one of the signature songs by Billotte’s ’90s triple threat Slant 6.
