Scenes

Footwork is a little maddening, but its also brilliant. Its deeply experimental. The percussive elements are very tightly clipped and the songs are repetitious to the point of being disorienting-- its one of the musics key characteristics, and gives the music a polyrhythmic sway. And the songs mutate; they were created to be mixed and distorted by DJs, which means that they were more or less created to be defaced. Its also littered with random and current pop cultural references, making it a sort of barometer for social relevancy - a role that hip-hop used to fill. Its also deeply funky. There are a lot of great playlist out there that over this, and Teklife recently announced that they were going to become a record label. Wills Glasspiegel does a nice job here at introducing the genre.

Back in the stormy ‘70s, when Brian Eno was inventing ambient music in England and Tangerine Dream was mixing Moogs with Krautrock, a crew of electronic individualists in France was busy crafting some singular synthesizer tapestries of their own. Sometimes they were influenced by the aforementioned trailblazers and their ilk, but often they were finding their own idiosyncratic way into previously unexplored electronic thickets, without stopping to worry about what the end result might be or what anybody would think about it. With the notable exceptions of Jean-Michel Jarre, who found fame with his 1976 classic Oxygène, and Moog pop pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey, these artists were working well under the radar, largely unnoticed in their own country and all but invisible on an international level. (And that remains the case today—a lot of this music isn’t available on Spotify, so I’ve created a YouTube playlist instead.) But the frequently quirky electronic vistas they created deserve their own chapter in the saga of synth music.

Paul Putti’s short-lived Pôle label achieved underground renown releasing albums by his project of the same name as well as fellow travelers like Philippe Besombes, freely utilizing minimalism and avant-garde techniques. Composers like Jean-Pierre Decerf and Teddy Lasry crossed over from the world of “library” recordings for film and TV but ultimately made intoxicating, atmospheric music that stood on its own. On tracks like “Speedway,” the duo Space Art came off like a Gallic version of Autobahn-era Kraftwerk. If there’s ever a synth-assisted apocalypse, Fredric Mercier’s doomy, titanic “Storm” would certainly make a suitable soundtrack. And Philippe Féret has all but vanished into the deep pockets of time, but his 1978 debut album nevertheless found him at the front lines of the ambient movement. Take a deep dive into a French river filled almost to overflowing with visceral analog electronic tones and maverick notions about what music could be.

Maybe it’s the cheap rent that’s essential for sustaining the vitality and vibrancy of artists and culture in a modern metropolis, or maybe it’s the proximity to beloved landmarks and bit players from The Wire and the movies of John Waters; either way, Baltimore continues to thrive as a musical hotbed, one that retains a fierce loyalty among the many great acts born and bred there. Future Islands count as one, even if they started two states south in North Carolina.After moving to Baltimore in 2008, they became part of a remarkably welcoming DIY community, one that resulted from the efforts of Dan Deacon and other members of the Wham City arts collective to transform the city from yet another study in American urban decline into a haven for millennials with a taste for maverick sounds. Some of those sounds were dreamy and some raucous, but all were more than a little weird.Of course, longtime local institutions like Dischord post-hardcore types Lungfish had already done much to foster that spirit, and before its members headed off to NYC and Europe, the teenaged Marylanders of Animal Collective paved the way for freak-flag-fliers like Ponytail and Ecstatic Sunshine. Future Islands weren’t the only imports; Matmos relocated there from San Francisco after Drew Daniel got a job teaching at Johns Hopkins. Wherever their origins, the fertility of the ground occupied was soon recognized worldwide thanks to the success of Future Islands and other Baltimoreans like Deacon, Wye Oak, Beach House, and Lower Dens.With this week’s release of Future Islands’ fifth album, The Far Field, it’s a fine time to celebrate the city’s indie scene with a playlist of Baltimore acts you may already know and love, and others who deserve more than hometown-hero status, like Ed Schrader’s Music Beat and relative newbies Sun Club. The music by Future Islands’ many side projects—such as Peals, William Cashion’s duo with former Double Dagger bassist Bruce Willen—is further proof that local politicians made a dumb move when they changed the city’s old slogan, “The Greatest City in America.” Keep it weird, Baltimore.

The rise of Hiatus Kaiyote, the Melbourne-based ensemble whose blend of jazz fusion and downtempo earned a 2016 Grammy nomination for Best R&B Performance, has drawn attention toward the Down Under’s unlikely hotbed of post-millennial soul. Some of the acts on our survey hail from Australia, while others come from nearby New Zealand. But all hew to the kind of cool, urbane, and hip-hop inflected beats that have thrived in underground music circles since the early ‘00s. Onetime Disclosure collaborator Jordan Rakei is earning acclaim for his Cloak debut, New Zealand duo Electric Wire Hustle is a familiar Okayplayer and Soulection favorite, and Ngaiire just released an album on Sony Music Australia.

Aside from being vaguely familiar with Hood and Flying Saucer Attack, I knew nothing about Bristol post-rock. And Im still not sure if its a "real" thing, but the music is quite beautiful. It has all the dreamy textures and ethereal melodies of Sigur Rós, and the shifting, odd tempos of the Chicago scene, but it also sounds fairly dreary in parts, which is a nice touch. Pitchforks Nick Neyland provides an overview:

A group of interconnected musicians traced a filmy circle of darkness around the English city of Bristol during the late 1990s and early 2000s, forming a significant post-rock outpost. They often appeared on each other’s records, started short-lived projects together, and assembled brittle home-recording setups that provided a lo-fi flipside to the city’s trip-hop forerunners.

As a side not, Pitchforks "Essentials" series continues to impress. Their subjects (such as last weeks melodic IDM) continue to be both very idiosyncratic yet strangely intuitive.

Barack Obama was, among other firsts, the first POTUS who shared his listening habits with the public through Spotify playlists. And though he hasn’t personally curated any music selections since leaving the White House, his Chicago-based non-profit recently debuted the first iteration of Hometown, a collection of tracks handpicked by Chicagoans that remind them of home. Comedian Cameron Esposito opens the playlist with one Chicago band covering another, JC Brooks & The Uptown Sound putting an unlikely retro soul spin on Wilco’s fragile epic “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart.” But while songs from and/or about Chi-town dominate, not everyone is so literal with the theme; actor Nick Offerman picks two Tom Waits songs that remind him of his theater days in Chicago (neither of which is Waits’s 2011 track “Chicago”). Kanye West looms large over the playlist, with three curators picking his tracks. One is West’s young protege Chance The Rapper, who singles out the sweetly nostalgic “Family Business.” A few tracks later, President Obama’s former Deputy Press Secretary, Bill Burton, picks Chance’s own “Blessings,” with a tip of the hat to Chance’s father’s work on Obama’s first campaign. But despite some recurring threads, Hometown offers a pluralistic view of Chicago music, with equal room for Liz Phair and The Staple Singers.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.Honeyblood, whose sophomore album Babes Never Die was released on FatCat, are the archetypal Scottish indie band: exquisitely simple songs, hooks so clever it’s absurd, and quirky charm out the wazoo. Nearly every great band — and there are many — that the Scots have given us share these four qualities, while at the same time carving out their own unique niche. Where Belle & Sebastian craft hushed chamber pop perfect for sad-eyed art school dropouts, The Jesus and Mary Chain smother teenage symphonies to god in walls of seething fuzz. Mogwai weave lush, undulating hypnotics rooted in post-rock, while CHVRCHES veer into synth-pop polished enough for big time chart action. On top of all this, Scotland has churned out some of the best jangle pop, twee, and noise pop this side of New Zealand. That first Primal Scream album, the one before Bobby Gillespie and crew discovered acid house and ecstasy, is beyond dreamy. Then there’s the Fire Engines, spazzy, Edinburgh-bred art punks from the early ’80s who were pivotal in establishing Scotland’s very first DIY scene.

When it comes to real rock rebellion, even the most badass American and British artists in history have nothing on the rockers of Iran. The rock ’n’ roll scene in Iran goes all the way back to the ’60s, when influential artists like Farhad Mehrad were beginning to make their presence felt. In the ’70s, artists such as Kourosh Yaghmaei, who became a sort of Bob Dylan-like figure, made their mark, and multiple directions opened for Iranian rock. But the sociopolitical tumult that came with the Islamic Revolution of 1979 brought drastic cultural changes.

Out went the Shah; in came the Ayatollah and the Ministry of Culture, a government body that required all musicians to be officially sanctioned in order to ply their trade. The reprisal against those who tried to defy these rules included oppression and even imprisonment. Still, artists like the Comment Band, Farshid A’rabi, and the B-Band managed to cut through and make their voices heard.

By the ’90s, things began to loosen up just a little bit, and more Iranian rockers rose up. But the threat of government oppression remained a very real concern. On one hand, there were artists who found ways to fight against it, such as the heavy-metal bands Mordab and Angband, which came to the fore in the 2000s. But at the same time, a number of Iranian alternative-rock bands began to expatriate. Groups like Yellow Dogs and Hypernova made their way to the U.S., and the Tehran duo Take It Easy Hospital relocated to London. But even those Iranian bands that left their homeland behind are still part of its musical legacy. And the story of Iranian rock stands to prove that in the end, the spirit of rock ’n’ roll can rise above just about anything.

Critic Andy Beta provides an overview of Italo Disco (which he calls, "the most amazingly uncool genre ever created") in this Pitchfork feature. To be a bit snobby, including Paul Lekakis as Italo Disco is a bit questionable, but Andy is trying to take a wide swipe. Regardless, the genre is limitlessly influential and helped spawn everything from Chicago House to DFA-era New York electro. This playlist demonstrates why with a collection of the kitschy, endlessly addictive cuts. The Gary Cat Park song is a gem, among many others.

Joe Gibbs was one of reggae’s great businessmen and ambassadors, and also one of the genre’s great producers. He was responsible for the highly influential African Dub series, introduced Dennis Brown to America, and worked extensively with the great Lee “Scratch” Perry. The write-up to this playlist on FACT provides an excellent detail to all of this, and the playlist itself is a monster. Though one wonders why they limited themselves to so few songs, the chronological order works to its advantage, as you can hear Gibbs’ sound (and, by extension, the sound of reggae in general) evolve from the late-60s throughout the 70s. As a note, some of these songs were not available on Spotify, but we did our best to recreate it.