Indie

Shibuya-Kei is a subgenre of Japanese pop that originated in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. If you were a music nerd in the ‘90s, you probably remember Cibo Matto, Cornelius or Buffalo Daughter. The base of the music was 80s synthpop, but there was also a coat of shimmering guitars stubbled with quirky electronic flourishes and occasional forays into jazz or lounge. It was self-consciously cheeky music that occasionally teetered towards kitsch, and was viewed, by Western hipsters, with a tinge of exoticism. Birgitta has some wonderful playlist on her Spotify channel, and this one does a great job at capturing the genre’s oddness, thought it’s curious that she didn’t include Pizzicato Five.

From the warped breakbeats of drum n bass to the frenetic 808 attack of footwork, the last two decades of electronic music history have been marked by a fetishization of the drums, as technological advances have allowed producers to go ever deeper into rhythmic design.Black Origami, the remarkable second album from Gary, Indiana, producer Jlin is one of the most important recent developments in the history of electronic percussion, a brilliantly overblown yet mind-glowingly complex album of rhythmic possibility.Jlin emerged from the world of footwork in the early 2010s with the track “Erotic Heat,” which appeared on volume two of the iconic Bangs & Works compilation series on UK dance label Planet Mu. But if that track was an outlier in the footwork world of dance battles and frenetic DJ cuts, her 2015 debut album Dark Energy would see Jlin gravitate further into her own darkly elegant orbit, incorporating operatic arias (on “Black Ballet”) and Chinese erhu violin (on “Unknown Tongues”).Black Origami sees Jlin blow open the definition of what footwork can be. You can still feel the influence of footwork producers like DJ Rashad on a track like “1%” (featuring Holly Herndon), with its skittering hi-hats and coal-black synth lines, but elsewhere Jlin widens her global percussive net to take in everything from tabla drums (notably used in electronic music by London producer Talvin Singh) on “Kyanite” to the djembe on “Nyakinyua Rise,” all of which battles against Jlin’s drum-machine finesse in a global-percussion street fight. Jlin also takes on sounds that are closer to home: “Challenge (To Be Continued)” is a brilliant rhythmic tussle between US marching band and footwork hi-hats, while “Hatshepsut” throws a Joey Beltram hoover sound into the mix.Black Origami is also notable for its eye-opening array of collaborations, which veer several steps into the left field of electronic music. “Holy Child” sees Jlin work with minimalist composer William Basinski, the haunting “Calcination” features the gothic vocals of Fawkes, while the hip hop-ish “Never Created, Never Destroyed” includes vocal work from Cape Town rapper Dope Saint Jude that Jlin chops and splits to her own devices.Black Origami bears the influence of each of these collaborators and yet it sounds like none of them. It’s a footwork album but only in the very widest sense of what footwork can be. As such, Black Origami resembles—in spirit more than in sound—the work of 90s electronic-music producers like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Photek, and Remarc, who took the chopped up breakbeats of drum n bass and pushed them to ridiculous new levels of subatomic complexity, creating something quite revolutionary in its pointillist intensity. Black Origami is a worthy successor to these names, a jaw-dropping work of percussive complexity that marks out Jlin as a singularly brilliant talent.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

This post is part of our program, The Story of Kendrick, an in-depth, 10-part look at the life and music of Kendrick Lamar. Sound cool and want to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out and share on Facebook, Twitter, or with this link. Your friends will thank you.Shakespeare once famously declared that brevity is the soul of wit, but simplicity has been the last thing on Kendrick Lamar’s mind for the majority of his career. His two previous albums, 2012’s ghetto uprising saga good kid, M.A.A.D. city and 2015’s political prog-rap opus To Pimp a Butterfly were sprawling, intricately detailed patchworks, suffused with symbolism and strung together with the kind of recurring characters and monologuing one would expect from the Bard himself. But DAMN. is a different story. Having already claimed the throne as one of (if not the) most talented rappers in the history of the game, DAMN. is the sound of a young artist at the peak of his abilities delivering his music straight, no chaser. Not to say that DAMN. isn’t as multilayered and critical as anything else K.Dot’s put his name on, but now more than ever it feels like Lamar’s focus is entirely on the songs rather than the cohesive effect of the project. Each song on DAMN. feels as if it is coming from a different universe, be it the ‘90s slow ride of “HUMBLE.” or the futurist R&B of “LOVE.” or the absolutely bipolar “XXX.,” which travels between Metro Boomin minimalism, Public Enemy fury, and smooth boom-bap consciousness in the span of four minutes. Though Lamar’s influences are vast and easily traceable (the bassy Afrofuturism of Flying Lotus, the beat-poetry prophecies of the Last Poets, the self-aware party-rap of OutKast), on DAMN. he synthesizes them effortlessly, letting his own musical voice shine through more clearly than ever before.All of which makes DAMN. an incredibly fun, engaging listen, and adds another notch to Lamar’s already impressive catalog. With small-time songwriters emerging from the woodworks on major tracks (Zacari?) and mind-boggling appearances from big-name rock stars (U2!?), DAMN. is packed to capacity with ideas and influences and collaborators—so take a listen to this playlist and start unpacking the latest from one of our generation’s greatest.

This post is part of our program, The Story of Kendrick, an in-depth, 10-part look at the life and music of Kendrick Lamar. Sound cool and want to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out and share on Facebook, Twitter, or with this link. Your friends will thank you.

Long after MTV died, the golden age of music videos began. Freed from the constraints of corporate gatekeepers, cutting edge artists such as Kaytranada and ANOHNI crafted videos that were elegant and deeply personal, while established icons such as Gorillaz and Björk pushed technological boundaries in videos that were innovative and pleasantly disorienting.Perhaps no artist has taken such care at crafting a specific visual language as Kendrick Lamar. His videos not only function as promotional visual elements, but serve as an apocrypha of sorts, expanding and exploring the ideas put forth on his knotty, intricate tracks. A great example of this is “Alright.” Shot in stark black-and-white, and oscillating between locations in the Bay and Los Angeles, the visual maintains the loose narrative flow and spoken word interludes of To Pimp a Butterfly, but it’s most effective at playing with signifiers of a police state. Cops loom in the background, glaring out of police cars or aiming air pistols at protesters; Kendrick floats above the proceedings, seemingly hovering between transcendence and resistance. “Alright”—alongside Kendrick’s other best videos—achieve a sort of synesthesia, reflecting, both thematically and aesthetically, the MCs knotty but celebratory survey of modern blackness. “King Kunta” may be the most purely euphoric representation of inner-city life committed to video.Kendrick’s fans have responded to this approach, though Kendrick’s ascent to the top of the pop world has been a slower burn than most. As of this writing, Lamar has over two million YouTube channel subscribers and nearly 700 million overall views. While he has numerous videos that have been viewed over 50 million times, his latest clip, for Damn.’s leadoff single, “Humble,” was viewed 53 million times on YouTube in its first week. As a point of reference, it took previous singles “i,” “Alright,” and “King Kunta” months to reach this milestone, and, if projections hold, “Humble” will easily be his most successful single to date. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLemeQ5_nNS5VYdUxIWSd14cT1vIAcniBcIt’s fitting: Kendrick’s time has come, and “Humble” feels like a coronation. The video is a collection of startling, uncanny imagery. A shot of Kendrick rapping in a cathedral and dressed as a bishop segues into one of him in all black, lying on a table and surrounded by women in bras and surgical masks who count hundred dollar bills. In another shot, Kendrick, dressed in a patterned Caddyshack polo shirt, smashes golf balls atop a run-down car in a Los Angeles aqueduct. And, in perhaps the video’s most iconic shot, the MC sits at the center of a recreation of da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.”It’s easy to read the video’s themes as a meditation on the role of spirituality and religion in an increasingly secular society—topics that have become increasingly prevalent in the MCs work—but the video also reflects a technical acumen, an understanding and willingness to recontextualize pop culture signifiers. Much has been made of Kendrick as an icon for a new, woke generation, but, first and foremost, Kendrick is a badass rap stylist who makes videos that are visually stunning.

Tribe Called Quest created universes by cobbling together post-bop saxophones, rolling bass lines, and hard boom bap beats, topping them off with Q-Tip’s fluid freeform rhymes that played an alto sax to the gruff, declarative blurts of Phife’s deceptively straightforward lyrics. As music nerds, we’d already digested the Velvet Underground and De La Soul, so we instantly got Tribe’s vibes and references, but blending these two opposing worlds—despondent, glamorous sleaze rock and idiosyncratic, jazz afrocentrism—was a revelation. Here’s a playlist of some of their best and most well-known samples, from RAMP to Lou Reed.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Chicago’s underground has been on fire the past few years. Every other week seems to deliver a new batch of releases from the Hausu Mountain label, purveyors of madcap electronics and cyborg-bopping eccentricity. The shadowy Beau Wanzer, whose icy and forlorn productions disintegrate the divide between post-punk and techno, is nearly as prolific—and that’s just one dude. And then there’s Jaime Fennelly’s always progressing Mind Over Mirrors project: his latest album, the critically lauded Undying Color, wanders dense, rippling expanses of pastoral art folk and baroque électronique.Of course, “underground” means a lot of different things to a lot of different heads. For denizens of the city’s thriving avant-garde jazz and hardcore punk scenes, it conjures up a significantly different cluster of artists. So for this playlist, we focus primarily on musicians, bands, and oddball geniuses who stalk the back alleys, linking DIY electronics, industrial, droning experimentation, and mutant dance music. At first blush they may seem too far apart to link, but in Chicago, where musicians from different disciplines have always mingled freely, the overlap between them is substantial.This idea is reflected in the growing catalog of Midwich Productions, a label specializing in “electronic music from the urban wilderness of the Midwest.” Founded by longtime resident and musician Jim Magas, it’s home to both HIDE (pictured at top), who unleash mechanized nightmares that carry forward the city’s electro-industrial tradition, and Alex Barnett, a composer whose quirky, bubbling pieces ooze a cozy sense of nostalgia for ’70s synthesizer music.As you can probably guess, a lot of this music gets awfully weird—Fire-Toolz’s collision of boom-box EDM and grindcore rasp makes zero sense. Yet a good deal of it is deeply beautiful: Quicksails, an alias for multi-instrumentalist Ben Billington, crafts flickering avant-pop that bridges DIY electronics with the city’s deep reverence for jazz and free improv. It’s music that could only come from Chicago.

With the new third season of David Lynch’s mystery series set to begin on Showtime on May 21, the road back to Twin Peaks gets shorter every day. Now the actor we know best as Agent Cooper—with apologies to Portlandia’s mayor—has a hearty batch of mostly classic-rock tunes for your trip.While the title of Kyle MacLachlan’s “Coffeetime” may refer to the show’s G-man hero and his predilection for “a damn fine cup of coffee”—served with the Double R Diner’s cherry pie, of course—the selection is better suited to cans of Bud with the boys in a big way, thanks to the predominance of FM rock staples by the Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Cream.That may disappoint Lynch devotees who prefer gentler sounds more akin to the placid synths of Angelo Badalamenti’s scores for the director. Nor is there anything along the lines of the filmmaker’s own go-to musical cues: dreamy ‘50s pop like Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet, or industrial nightmares like the Rammstein tracks in Lost Highway. Instead, MacLachlan sticks with his flavor profile of “‘60s/’70s heavy,” which means the playlist could be the soundtrack-for-kicking-back of any easy-going 58-year-old dude aside from a few more personal quirks.The preponderance of Doors songs is only natural for the actor who played Ray Manzarek in Oliver Stone’s 1991 gonzo biopic. Meanwhile, the spate of grunge faves befits a proud native of Washington State. Then there’s the more mysterious plethora of Jethro Tull deep cuts. Apparently, MacLachlan loves Ian Anderson’s raggedy prog-folk travelers so much, he once lobbied his wife to name their son Jethro. Luckily for his marriage, good sense prevailed, but you have to hope MacLachlan found a way to get some Tull into the new chapter of Agent Cooper’s saga. After all, being trapped in the Black Lodge for 25 years gives a guy plenty of time for flute practice.

Its not entirely surprising that the British artist Powell once sampled Big Blacks Steve Albini; the Chicago noise-rockers volume and in-your-face attitude go to the heart of what Powell does in his own music and with his label, Diagonal Records. Co-founded with fellow Brit Jaime Williams in 2011, Diagonal pulls together an unlikely mix of sounds: the lurching rhythms of rockabilly, the clang of post-punk, and the eviscerating feedback of the contemporary noise scene, all of which get hammered into a lumpy approximation of techno. (Youll also find Hall and Oates samples, Autechre remixes, and reissues of early avant-rappers Death Comet Crew in the mix; Diagonals vectors are nothing if not far-reaching.) The overall effect is a little like gargling broken glass with a manic grin on your face.

Alex curates an excellent look back at the last decade or so of instrumental hip-hop, using Dillas Donuts release as a milestone in the genre. The selections range from Dilla-inspired global hip-hop psych such as Onra to the trap clatter of 808 Mafia, and a lot in between. Its an exhaustive look that includes some excellent rarities.Note: We were unable to find the specific Blue Sky Death track that Alex lists, so we made a substitution.

Apart from being the best album of the year, The Life of Pablo is an encyclopedia of contemporary culture. More than any other album in 2016, it is about bourgeois subjectivity. It’s about religion, sex, family, friends. It’s about medication, entrepreneurship, loneliness, and fame. But more than anything, it’s about what it means to be human today. Over the course of the album’s 20 tracks, Kanye explores the far reaches of his conscious mind, ever teetering between faith and despair, confidence and suffering. It has become popular to dismiss Kanye as crazy when taking into account his social media presence and public antics; however, an analysis of The Life of Pablo’s contents show him not only as sane, but vulnerable, in-touch, and acutely reflective.Part of its vast cultural reach is the fact that The Life of Pablo is infused with with a heavy dose of popular music history, from Nina Simone to Desiigner. Its author’s impressive use of Arthur Russell’s “Answers Me” anchors one of the greatest beats on the album (“30 Hours”), while his rhythmic and thematic interpolation of “Jumpman” by Drake and Future is the lifeblood of “Facts (Charlie Heat Version),” a song completed by Kanye’s imitation of Future’s vocables and his use of sound bytes from Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. These references aren’t merely references—they’re so thoroughly woven into the music of The Life of Pablo that they could not be extricated without compromising the totality of the album. In this sense, the album is a monumental achievement.It’s difficult to excerpt any single song or reference as exemplary from an album that nods to everything from Lexapro to Albert Einstein, so the goal of this playlist is to highlight a few great songs on the album and to intersperse them with some of its most interesting samples and musical references.