Indie

Justin Vernon’s 2016 full-length as Bon Iver, 22, A Million, isn’t just a career-jarring reboot of his sound; it’s a radical revision of the singer-songwriter template. Instead of the guitar-based meditations of previous efforts, the musician erects alien constructions from cyborg falsetto, Auto-Tune-smeared soul, baroque electronica, and bass drops splitting the difference between post-dubstep and modern R&B. Man and machine, nervous system and motherboard — their differences fall by the wayside with each successive cut. In hopes of deepening listeners’ appreciation of this profoundly mutant offering, I’ve put together a mix of key inspirations (Kanye West, Arthur Russell), peers exploring similar ideas (Frank Ocean, James Blake), and illuminating examples of sampled source material (Mahalia Jackson, Sharon Van Etten). Hopefully, you’ll find our playlist to be as deliciously novel and immersive as 22, A Million itself.

Bradford Coxs music with Deerhunter and Atlas Sound has been rooted the more noisy sectors of modern American indie music, but his playlist for Spotify is much more expansive. It draws from everything from the classic pop of Dee Clark and Elvis Presley to the Cuban fusion of Bola De Nieve and Lo Borges. The African balladry of Ballaké and J Omwami is particularly beautiful. This is delicate and sublime music, and while it doesnt necessarily reflect Coxs specific aesthetics, it does reveal something of the emotional texture he sometimes injects into his music, especially his "solo" work with Atlas Sound.

The erudite Brian Eno once said, “There were three great beats in the ’70s: Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, James Brown’s funk, and Klaus Dinger’s Neu!-beat.” They are so great, in fact, that strains of their DNA can be detected in practically every groove-based genre of the last 35 years. These include not just hip-hop and techno, but industrial and jungle/drum ’n’ bass as well. Bringing together landmark recordings from all three, this playlist is a sprawling tapestry of densely undulating polyrhythms, purring 4/4, and ecstatic syncopation punctuated with seriously nasty breaks. The bulk of the tracks feature Kuti, Brown, or Dinger, obviously. There are exceptions, however. Kraftwerk, for instance, explored Dinger’s motorik rhythm to great effect years after the group and drummer had parted ways. Hit play and find out why Eno knows what the hell he’s talking about.

Westside Gunn and Conway the Machine are the closest things to conventional East Coast rap that Eminem has ever affiliated himself with. They arent giddy hitmakers like 50 Cent, nor bizarro pill-poppers like D12; theyre more like Obie Trice, if he only rapped over the most austere Alchemist beats. If they were the Clipse, Gunn would be Pusha T, the flashy, flamboyant personality, while Conway would be Malice, the calculating visual technician, both exposing the hustlers lifestyle but never quashing spilled blood. Gunn built his buzz while Conway was recovering from a gunshot wound in the face from a 2013 incident. Now, they stand in front of one of the biggest audiences in the world: Gunn fresh off his outstanding Hitler Wears Hermes mixtapes, and Conway making numerous guest appearances and live radio freestyles.Though they’ve painted industry numbers to a point—mixtapes, big-name cosigns—they’ve taken an offbeat path to Shady Records. They’re brothers in blood, in business—Gunn managed Conway initially—and in rap. Their streets are Buffalo, NY, but the feel of their records is Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, and their lyrics are indebted to the classics of Nas, JAY Z, Raekwon, and Capone-N-Noreaga. Releasing multiple projects on limited wax with England’s Daupe Records, which now retail on eBay for tenfold, their songs aren’t on the radio, but their faces are spray-painted on murals all over the world. Theyve named their label Griselda Records after the queen of narcotics trafficking, and styled themselves Fashion Rebels, their mugs colorfully stitched on hats, hoodies, and tees that sell out within minutes on Instagram.Gunn and Conway continue the formula of slick NYC brutality over minimalist beats that dont leave your subwoofers in a tizzy. Like post-Roc Marciano acts Ka, Hus KingPin, SmooVth, SonnyJim, et al., their approach isnt the 808 and a drum kit, its the dust-speckled four-bar vinyl loop. Combine that with unmatched chemistry, an in-house producer, Daringer, who rarely works outside the clique, and the unknown ills of upstate New Yorks historically bleak and violent corners, and you get a familiar late-’90s feel with references to Yeezy Boosts, cherry BMW X7s, and sneaker colorist Ronnie Fieg. Their fanbase, which includes Eminem, Royce da 5’9”, and Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali, has spoken: There’s still space for splashy late-’90s East Coast rhymin’ in the era of mumbling for millions.

Captain Beefheart was a man, but also an idea, and to write a straightforward piece about him here seems antithetical to his essence. He had a mustache sometimes and other times he had a goatee; sometimes he wore a fedora and other times he wore a cowboy or top hat. Despite having no musical training, he played numerous instruments. Occasionally, he composed at the piano, which he did not know how to play. He was friends with Frank Zappa, who produced Trout Mask Replica. His music is indisputably its own strange amalgamation, but it was still as directly tied to the confusion of the ‘60s as any music ever was, fusing blues, beat poetry, jazz, rock ‘n roll, psychedelic, noise, and avant-garde. His voice was almost magical and he could shift between gravelly falsetto and rumbling baritone at the drop of a harmonica. To try to make sense of Captain Beefheart is pointless, and furthermore, it goes against his very being. Sure, he can be understood as a social phenomenon, but this playlist isn’t about that. It’s called “Captain Beefheart Insanity.” Just go with it.

Following the US election on Nov 8, 2016, we asked Dowsers contributors to discuss the moods and music the results inspired. We collected their responses in this series, After the Election. The following text is a transcript of an e-mail to a friend that accompanied the playlist. Hey Jordan,Sorry that it has taken me so long to write this to you. Since I last saw you, things have been a bit crazy, for all of us, I guess. I’m glad to hear that you’re doing well. I was worried, at first, with you being in Texas, but I’m glad to hear that Austin remains a solid blue fortress. I know you mentioned that you were into Run the Jewels, but hadn’t dug into any of El-P’s solo work, so I’ve made you a playlist of his early work. You can find it here. As a note, I had to make a Youtube playlist since his earlier work is not on any streaming services. So, I’ve been listening to El-P’s music in various incarnations for nearly 20 years. At first, I lumped him in with the other abstract/heady/sci-fi emcees of that era — Del the Funky Homosapien, MF DOOM, Kool Keith, et al — but that doesn’t feel accurate now. Those guys were walking, rapping therasuses or science books, and tapped into a grimey-but-essentially-goofy thread of afrofuturism where robots and aliens are cool, and people talk in polysyllabic rhymes. For El-P, the idea of unseen universes didn’t carry so much a promise of escape (as it traditionally does for afrofuturism), as it represented an opaque, existential threat, and his lyrical density was more of a textural element.Impenetrability was the point. The occasional Marxist-tinged slogan or Philip Dick reference would surface, but you didn’t need to unpack all of El-P’s clustered alliteration to understand that things were fucked and scary. There’s a sense of vulnerability when he describes drones hovering over Brooklyn, or builds a narrative around the idea of a factory that manufactures abusive stepfathers, or describes a Nazi theme park. Like he raps on “Tuned Mass Damper,” "Motherfucker, does this sound abstract?/ I hope that it sounded more confusing than that."The first album that I ever professionally reviewed was El-P’s solo debut, Fantastic Damage. The album came out in May, 2002 — a few months after the attacks on the Twin Towers — and it’s hard to overstate how important it was to many of us. There are those who’ve pointed out the similarities between 9/11 and this election — the collective shock, a sense of unreality, the helplessness and fear we feel. But there are also differences. After 9/11, culture as we know it shut down. We were urged to pull together, irony was declared dead, dissent quashed, and, for the sake of our safety and our nation, monoculture reinstated. Neil Young tried to heal us during a marathon for dead firemen. My roommate foisted an American flag outside of our apartment. For months, things were like this: patriotic country songs and overwrought rock anthems. We’d all come together collectively, as a nation, and it was weird as fuck. Fantastic Damage — with its throughlines of static; lo-fi rumble; crusty, cacophonous boom bap; and jerky, noisey funk — was an anecdote to the sanguine. Every word that El-P rapped rang true, even the ones I couldn’t understand, which were a lot of them. It validated a lot of the confusion and darkness and paranoia we felt. It contained no answers, per se, but it was enough to know that there were others who felt like they were walking through the world with a gun held to our heads (see the video for “Deep Space 9mm”).I’ve returned to those early albums since the election. Honestly, Run the Jewels feels more appropriate now. It’s cleaner, clearer, and more focused in its dissent; its anger is cut through with liberal doses of humor and levity. Killer Mike is a moderating force for El-P. Fantastic Damage feels like an ugly artifact unearthed from a dark time capsule. Maybe we don’t need to open that, yet.Anyway, I hope you’re well. I finished that Emma Cline book. I was wrong and you were right: It’s good. The prose in the first 50 pages was really verbose and overworked. It felt like she had something to prove, as a young, first-time novelist. But once it settled in, it was pretty great. The Suzanne character felt well-developed and original. I liked that issues of gender and sexuality were present, but kept at arms length; it made them feel more powerful. Did you finish Savage Detectives? I’ve been thinking about rereading 2666. Last night, I read Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s The Last Wolf. It’s only one sentence long, but that sentence lasts for 75 pages. So, yeah, I hope you’re doing well. Write me back and let know what’s up.Best,Sam

Chances are it will never become a national holiday unless Jack White is elected president, a possibility that may not be so far-fetched given the universe we now live in. Regardless, Record Store Day has fast become one of the most cherished events on the calendar for a growing swath of music lovers. Back when it began in 2007, the event’s humble ambition was to celebrate the musical ecosystem fostered and sustained by the nearly 1,400 independent record stores in the U.S. But little did the participants know that vinyl sales were about to boom, making an unlikely climb from 1.88 million units in 2008 to 13.1 million last year. So what if the top-selling vinyl LP last year was by Twenty One Pilots? Nothing can spoil the sweetness of this comeback, not with new record stores becoming the surest sign of a gentrifying neighbourhood.Meanwhile, the number of special releases for Record Store Day has grown nearly as dramatically. Ranging from instantly covetable seven-inch singles to ridiculously lavish box sets—and from long out-of-print albums by heritage acts to obscurities by new favourites—the massively diverse slate for this year is another embarrassment of riches. To whet your proverbial whistle, here’s a selection of tracks from this years Record Store Day releases that can be yours. That is, of course, if you happen to be in the right store at the right time. Quantities range from the 5,000 copies for the new edition of David Bowie’s BOWPROMO—a long AWOL EP originally released as a teaser for Hunky Dory—to the mere 200 copies for an exclusive split single on Captured Tracks by Alex Calder and Homeshake, all proceeds for which go to the International Refugee Assistance Project. It’s up to you how to spend those dollars on Record Store Day, but make ‘em count.

The African nation of Ethiopia has a unique history. It was never colonized by a European power, and through much of the 20th century the country was ruled by Haile Selassie, a member of Ethiopia’s Solomonic dynasty and the spiritual hero of the Rastafari movement. After 44 years as emperor, Selassie was overthrown in 1974, and the coming years saw a surge of repression and bloodshed by the communist military junta that took over. But in the waning years of Selassie’s reign, Ethiopia become famous for producing a generation of singers and artists who reinvigorated and reinvented local popular music.As has been documented over the past decades by international labels like Buda Musique—known for its famous Éthiopiques compilation series—great artists like Mahmoud Ahmed, Mulatu Astatke, Tlahoun Gessesse, and Bzunesh Beqele came to prominence in the ‘60s and ‘70s by playing in the capital of Addis Ababa with Emperor Selassie’s Imperial Bodyguard Band and the Police Orchestra, both state-controlled outfits. The music—called adadis zefanotch, or “new songs” in Amharic—was decidedly modern, influenced in part by American funk and jazz, but also drew heavily on local rhythms, modal systems, and the folk repertoire while featuring lyrics sung in Amharic and Oromigna.One fine example is Mulatu Astatke’s 1972 album, Mulatu of Ethiopia. Recorded in New York City in between Astatke’s studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, the album finds the jazz composer forging an Ethio-jazz sound by melding Latin jazz and psychedelic soul while using pentatonic melodies and 3/4 rhythms. The album is being reissued this month in a deluxe LP package via Strut Records, so to celebrate, we’ve put together a playlist that looks at his music and the music of other Ethiopian greats from that period—a body of work that still sounds revolutionary today.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Even if you take Soundgarden off his résumé, the late Chris Cornell was one of the most dynamic and adventurous rock singers to emerge in the 90s. He explored lush psychedelia and folk-informed songwriting on solo albums like Euphoria Morning and Higher Truth, and was a must-have soundtrack guest, whether crafting sprawling acoustic gems like "Seasons" for Cameron Crowes Singles or teaming up with Joy Williams for 12 Years A Slave. He created funk-informed arena rock with Audioslave and an a Generation X-defining duet with Eddie Vedder on Temple of the Dogs "Hunger Strike." Just to prove there was no genre he feared, hes the only rock singer to have worked with both Timbaland and the Zac Brown Band, while always sounding unmistakably like himself.

Clap clap clap clap: one of the dominant sounds of hip-hop and R&B in the 2010s is a synthesized handclap, hitting hard on straight 8th notes for every measure of the beat. This deceptively simple formula, which was foreshadowed in the previous decade in beats by Soulja Boy and Swizz Beatz, is compatible with any number of rhythms and production styles, from New Orleans Bounce and D.C. Go-Go to Atlanta crunk and stomping EDM. Stars like Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Kanye West, and Nicki Minaj all have their share of clappers, slowing down a soul clap for a relaxed groove or picking up the BPM to a frenzied pace that no pair of human hands would be able to keep up with.