None of these signs lead where they point
2023 Mix 16: Little Dragon and Flume revisited, Israeli funk, Indonesian disco, an accidental glimpse of early amapiano, belated warmth for The Clientele, and yes, that Oscar Isaac
Each week I skim through about 2,000 songs mostly from Spotify's company-curated New Music Friday playlists. Whenever I find 80 minutes worth of music I like, I make a CD-length mix and write a newsletter about it.
Not really sure how I’ve been able to keep this up on a weekly basis (only missed one week so far, which happened to be when I did my 1985 special), but on top of this quixotic newsletter enterprise I’ve also built up a huge stockpile of album tracks to pad out a week I don’t make it to 80 minutes. (Two of them feature today: Marta and Eddie Chacon.) I don’t follow albums with anything like the doggedness of my youth (you can see every album list I’ve made here), but they’re still a going concern.
If you’re interested in the ongoing list of the albums I happen to like so far this year, here it is, in no particular order (though the stuff I like best tends to be at the top).
Hey, things are changing, huh? The internet is changing, anyway. I’m not sure what it’s changing into — it feels like we took things a too far in a bad direction and everyone is course correcting but not thinking much about the next step forward. I’m almost forty and we’re barely past the thick of a nasty pandemic, so maybe this is all as it should be.
Make sure you’re subscribed to this thing before another social media ship goes down!
Mix 1 // Mix 2 // Mix 3 // Mix 4 // Mix 5 // Mix 6 // Mix 7 // Mix 8 // Mix 9 // Mix 10 // Mix 11 // Mix 12 // Mix 13 // Mix 14 // Mix 15
MIX 16: NONE OF THESE SIGNS LEAD WHERE THEY POINT
1. Marta f. Tricky: Moving through Water
A song from the solo project of Marta, Tricky’s go-to vocalist in the last few years, suggests what it would sound like if Tricky tried to make a White Stripes song.
It’s been over ten years since I fell in love with Little Dragon’s Ritual Union and to this day I couldn’t tell you why it was such an incredible album while nothing they’ve done since has gotten close to it. Maybe it’s the sonic adventurousness the band pursues—here they’re incorporating dub—whereas Ritual Union limits itself to a simpler palette. I hear hooks all over Ritual Union that remain elusive in their other work. But sometimes they give me glimmers.
Sababa 5 is a collection of Tel Aviv-based musicians, including Kutiman/Kutiman Orchestra, whose 2009 remix project ThruYou is maybe the definitive artistic statement of the early promise of YouTube and all those exponentially expanding networks for content and connection. It captured the naïve promise of the transition from the internet’s childhood (web 1.0) into its troubled adolescence (web 2.0). Now that the internet is firmly post-adolescent, it mostly just wants to get high and chill out, and this funk music is a serviceable soundtrack.
4. Flume f. Jim-E Stack: Chalk 1.3.3 [2017 Export Wav] [c. 2017]
Like Little Dragon, Flume put out one early ‘10s album (his 2012 self-titled debut) that perfectly encapsulated a sui generis sound before blowing all his resulting cred on showpieces with diminishing returns. This song is from Arrived Anxious, Left Bored, a collection of sketches, fragments, and rejects from 2015-present. The songs on the compilation map out an alternate timeline in which Flume’s chipmunk vocal squiggles didn’t metastasize into the ugly scourge of what Edward Oculicz so memorably described as “100% pure bort”: that’s where you melt anything that resembles a chorus into pitched-up gibberish hammering out a synth line. (It’s gone now, good riddance.)
Could Flume have avoided the superstar collabs and operatic impulses he can’t quite realize, and been rewarded with…uh, less fame and money? It’s like regretting the path not taken, but in the wrong direction. “I coulda been a loser! I coulda been nobody!”
5. Choses Sauvages: Mort de peur
Interesting how dance-punk seems to flare up cyclically in fainter and fainter iterations. The Liquid Liquid bassline has no liquid in it, the sax has no skronk, the guitars have stretched out to obtuse angles, and the vocals are…well, French. And it works.
Utah based singer-songwriter with some Comfort! At the Indie Disco.
Fusion band Snarky Puppy reincarnates with a dynamite lead singer, Guadeloupean Malika Tirolien, whose versatile but slightly opaque alto reminds me a bit of, you guessed it, Yukimi Nagano, the lead singer of Little Dragon.
French rapper yo-yos smoothly (can you yo-yo smoothly? maybe if you’re a professional yo-yoist?) between sing and shout.
9. Kimati & Alba Bwoy f. Ground Up Chale: Body Type
This came up a few weeks ago on my Naija pop playlist and I see they have a much more popular song from this album, “Far Gone,” which suggests to me that the hint of a similarity to “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran has kept me tethered to this song, a fact that I find embarrassing but have come to accept as a core element of my personality. Which reminds me, I recently heard the exact marimba hook to “Shape of You” in an Afghani song playing in a kebab restaurant and didn’t even Shazam it, what was I thinking??
10. DJ Maphorisa x Kabza De Small: Vula Vala [2019]
One of my current amapiano lists threw out this song from 2019, which might as well be the Triassic. I was late to amapiano in 2020, so I don’t really have a sense of what was going on the few years prior as it formed. You can hear some different ideas across this whole album (Scorpion Kings), prototypes of the more stable amapiano template that would dominate afterward.
There’s a short documentary, Shaya!, that tracks how amapiano evolved from deep house music and “number” music to the now ubiquitous form, starting in the late ‘10s. It begins with a an anecdote that reminded me of tales of DJ Kool Herc’s block parties from the 70s: “There’s this other guy who started this thing, like when someone was playing [house music], he takes the piano, like he’s in church, and starts playing over the music.” (If they name that other guy, I missed it.)
Indonesian disco, the sort of light pastiche I get a lot of on the Indonesian Spotify list. There must be stuff happening there that isn’t reflected in the lists I’m pulling from but remains a subject for future research.
12. El Alfa x Big League Fendi x Seriousman: ABLOH
Dominican dembow star gets his kids involved in the family business. Sez one YouTuber: “The children of Alfa have a unique gringolandia Flow, they were born with success.” Will take their word for it. Was reminded of OMG Girlz, the group Lil Wayne and T.I.’s daughters formed in the late 00s.
13. Guiba f. Mashinomi: 涙 [Namida]
Sunshine pop jaunt punctuated by woozy wobbles, like when you’re enjoying a summer walk but slowly realize you didn’t properly hydrate.
Egyptian singer who was once selected to be a protégé of Gilberto Gil through a Rolex mentorship program.
15. The Clientele: Blue Over Blue
I’ve been dimly aware of the Clientele since Scott Plagenhoef started evangelizing for them at Pitchfork circa 2003, but nothing ever clicked. This sounds way more polished than what I remember their whole deal to be back then; I guess at some point they added a bunch of jingle to their jangle.
16. Tony Allen & Adrian Younge: Don’t Believe the Dancers
One of two songs I shortlisted this month by Afrobeat pioneer Tony Allen. This is the one I kept, another entry in Adrian Younge’s remarkably consistent Jazz Is Dead series, which has put out two or three installments a year since 2017.
This is one of the ringers from my albums playlist. I hope to maybe write about them separately as albums someday, though I likely won’t. I have given myself over to the ceaseless flow of content available to me, and that means songs. Speaking of songs, Eddie Chacon is formerly one half of the early 90s duo Charles & Eddie of “Would I Lie to You” fame.
18. Fred again… & Brian Eno: Cmon
Always love to google someone and immediately activate “is ____ a nepo baby” in the People Also Ask section. I have learned that Fred again.. is a child of the British aristocracy (his dad is a King’s Counsel barrister) and he has just made an album with Brian Eno, his friend and neighbor since he was a kid recording music in Eno’s home studio. Sounds like a lucky guy. Album’s gorgeous.
19. Gaby Moreno & Oscar Isaac: Luna de Xelajú
Guatemalan singer teams up with Oscar Isaac (no, the other…wait, it really is him!) for a pretty duet of the Guatemalan standard by Paco Pérez.
20. 浦上想起: 近い夜明け [ Urakami sōki: Chikai yoake]
A Japanese artist who liked the Carpenters and Alan Menken growing up and it shows. Gets a lush Jon Brion-ish cinematic sound out of what I’m assuming is a much less expensive studio setup than Brion’s got.
I didn’t realize I was in the market for the Vietnamese Matt Mahaffey (the one-man band behind millennial kitchen-sink-pop never-was Self…have you listened to Gizmodgery lately?) but here he is. Tangentially related: in the YouTube comments I’ve surmised that Vietnamese fans of The Weeknd call him “Tuấn Cùi.”
22. Billy Strings f. Willie Nelson: California Sober
Fun country duet to close things out. The two principals are equidistant from 60, which is to say that Willie Nelson is three Billy Strings old.
That’s it! For some reason my days on Twitter feel even more numbered than usual. I might even hop on LinkedIn for god’s sake. (Let me know if you have a Bluesky invite.) But otherwise, I’ll just be kind of hanging out here, waiting around for everyone else to show up.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from The Clientele’s “Blue Over Blue.”