Genius #9 - Sep '24

A slight over-correction after the past few months: Genius #9 will not include any metal, nor hardcore (unless you count the dreary final Unwound album as a hardcore album, in which case god rest your soul etc). To my fellow dweebs: sorry! Autumn is here! I am still learning Baltimore traditions for the fall, but I will be wistfully missing October in NYC: watching the leaves change in Prospect Park, driving upstate to go camping, waking up from that blissful first night of sleep since June because my apartment is no longer 100 degrees, etc. As a recent re-transplant to the Mid-Atlantic, I’ll probably try to go down to Shenandoah to see the leaves, spend some rainy days in the Baltimore Museum of Art, and I will definitely give out some candy on Halloween, since I will finally be living in a neighborhood with trick-or-treaters.

Ok enough chit-chat — the new year is upon us (shanah tovah y’all), let’s listen to some tunes together.

Table of Contents:

• Capitalism
• Album recommendations
• Replay
• Garbage Corner
• Scene Report (Upcoming Baltimore & selected I-95 Corridor shows)

Capitalism:

This is hardly worthy of a post under “capitalism” because it was lent to me, but after my post about buying a floor tom head, my buddy JL asked me if I wanted his Yamaha DTX402 electronic drum kit that had been gathering dust in a closet for the past 3 years. I haven’t worked all of the ins and outs of it yet, but I’m hoping to use midi data pulled from the drum heads and use it to trigger samples and synths. I am still Not A Drummer, but I am working on that too!

Album Recommendations:

Peel Dream Magazine - Rose Main Reading Room (Topshelf, Sep ‘24)

Sophisticated chamber rock

If you have a Stereolab-sized hole in your heart and wish they had a little more of the soft-spoken vocals & chamber instrumentation of Sufjan Stevens, have I got a band for you. PDM’s sophisticated sound is a perfect backdrop for the lyrics, mostly consisting of memory snapshots in NYC landmarks and apartments. Cascading acoustic guitars, bells, and looped breathy vocals. What more could you ask for? It’s October and this album sounds like leaves crunching under your feet as you climb up the Ramble on your way to the Met. This album is like being on the train to Beacon and seeing as the leaves go from city-green to country-burnt orange as soon as you hit the Hudson Valley. Get cozy in that sense memory with me.

Nala Sinephro - Endlessness (Warp, Sep ‘24)

Jazzy & orchestral ambient

Oh hell yeah surprise new Nala Sinephro!! Her compositions perfectly merge electronic, ambient, and jazz — and these cuts hit some huge, cinematic highs. Sinephro’s blippy arpeggiated synth and blissed-out harp form the basis for many of these compositions. Combined with high strings, soulful and blatty sax, and some off-kilter drumming, you really got a stew going. Sinephro’s Space 1.8 was one of my favorite records of 2021, this is a perfect follow-up. Psychedelic, thoughtful, groovy, spacey, ambient-and-yet-full. “You know that new sound you’ve been looking for? Well listen to THIS.”

Ginger Root - SHINBANGUMI (Ghostly, Sep ‘24)

Maximalist funky indie-soul

The album cover of Cameron Lew in front of a little diorama city is a perfect encapsulation of this album: Lew plays every instrument on this record; powerful drums, funky basslines, woozy keyboard stabs, swelling filters, etc. — and his soulful voice fits each track perfectly. His virtuosity on every single instrument is really something to behold. Synth arrangements of arpeggiators stir up memories of Hot Rats — at times this record sounds like what it would have been like if Frank Zappa didn’t hate people so much. Plus, Lew avoids the pitfalls that turn me off from other funky indie rock bands (your Vulfpecks, your Snarky Puppy’s, etc) by writing songs that are actually fun to listen to; wacky melodies that modulate naturally ++ the songs don’t trade simple joys for winking or navel gazing.

Luke Sanger - Dew Point Harmonics (Balmat, Sep ‘24)

Naturalistic and warm blippy ambient

Extremely satisfying mix of sounds, with good pluck & pulse — full pure synth tones, textures and field recordings from the modular synth and software genius. A lovely companion piece to Languid Gongue, one of my favorite recent ambient albums. Songs differ in terms of how sparse they are, how watery they are: they’re all pretty watery tho, like at least a 7/10 on the watery scale. A lot of different elements to grab onto as the pieces float by. Please stand by for a list of sounds I heard on this album: Blips, bloops, wooshes, skitters, drips, scratches, pings, rings, clicks, peals, dings, vibrations, whirls, claps, trills, whirrs, warbles, tones, resonant strings, fricatives, buzzes, plucks, swells.

Sarah Davachi - The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir (Late Music, Sep ‘24)

Resonant drones with careful attention to details

Exquisite drone release from Davachi, with a ton of different textures and forms: breathy pipe organ, warm brass, scratchy violas, hushed voices, flutes, mellotrons, etc. Every sound resonates beautifully and, when there are multiple sound sources all at once, they beat against each other in fascinating ways. The low tones & vocal movements in “Trio For A Ground” really got me in a specific state, listening to this album feels like descending into something. This is a true artist’s true vision for the limits of purity, stability, and predictability. Great for contemplating the past, present, future.

Upcoming October albums to look forward to:

• Orchestral anarchist post-rock leviathan Godspeed You! Black Emperor is releasing an album on 10/4 via Constellation with the only possible title: “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” !!!FREE PALESTINE!!!
• I’m hotly anticipating Polish hip-hoppy jazz quartet Błoto’s new release all about mushrooms. Grzybnia is out on 10/10 via Astygmatic Records.
• Rapper E L U C I D has been on an enormous hot streak and his latest, REVELATOR will be out 10/11 with Fat Possum and looks like another big win
• 70s country-folk artist Tucker Zimmerman returns with an album recorded with and produced by Big Thief that looks to be really special. Dance Of Love is out on 4AD on 10/11.
• Imaginative experimental pop duo Fievel Is Glauque were not on my radar, but the single has me totally convinced that Rong Weicknes out on 10/25 via Fat Possum is going to be a great time.

Replay: October All Over

Unwound - Leaves Turn Inside You (Kill Rock Stars/Numero Group, 2001)

The second you press play, an overwhelming bagpiping of synths starts up — each oscillator’s pure note clicks on, one at a time, until you are enveloped in the sound. The droning, drifting tones hold their position for 2 full minutes. They quickly fade, giving space for the first guitar riff to roll in, as if a doorway opened. From then on, you’re trapped in the dark and nihilistic melancholy of Unwound’s final album, self-recorded & self-produced.

The first time I put this album, I was on a 3 hour long solo late-October drive in Virginia. The synthesized mellotron strings and huge Led Zeppelin drum fills felt like they were propelling me to my destination (the woods). The kaleidoscopic vocal mixing merged with the colors of the leaves and I was truly sent — it was a psychedelic experience. Ever since, I’ve been an enormous fan and a staunch defender of this ambitious record.

It’s a vastly different record from the Olympia band’s others — absent are most of the hardcore leanings, the screaming, the feedbacky, torn up guitars. These elements are replaced by vocals that are moaned and whispered, buried underneath a wreckage of low-mids: guitars gurgle, the pick attack from the bass eats into the same frequency band, the drums sound like they were recorded underwater. The whole thing feels like a bedroom project from before the advent of digital recording; the band built their own home analog recording studio in a “moldering farmhouse.” The album would prove to be the last that the trio would make: tensions had grown too far for the band to continue, with bassist Vern Rumsey’s alcohol abuse and withdrawal pushing the band to their limits. Unwound would not reunite until after Rumsey’s heartbreakingly young death in 2020.

The 2x LP clocks in at 74min and you get the gamut of sounds: shuffling post-punk, orchestral GY!BE-esque arrangements, ambient piano, and noisy poppy garage rock. The overall sense of listening to this record is a sort of swirling sadness that unfolds over each knotted up guitar line. If you read the lyrics alongside the listen, you get the sense that the album is haunted by a sleep paralysis demon.

Highlights from the A and B sides: “Terminus” is a 10min slow-burner that swells and grows into an orchestral piece, before scaling back again to a completely different feel. The 60s psych-pop of “Demons Sing Love Songs” features drummer Sara Lund and Janet Weiss (from Sleater-Kinney and Quasi) singing the most reverbed-out backing vocals. “Off This Century” is an achievement in cathartic songwriting.

The C and D sides add momentum as the album pushes on: opener “One Lick Less” is an acoustic-led shoegazing song that tears into its own structure until the only thing remaining is the droning vocals, stretched to oblivion. Then comes “Scarlette,” the one barn-burner punk song on this thing with harsh vocals and a sick backwards mellotron section through the middle 8.

The album closes with “Below The Salt,” a mostly-ambient 11min slow-burn where the piano, drums, bass, and guitar’s delayed repeats all seem to play slightly out of time with each other — until they suddenly line up, triggering a huge chorus. When the track dies out, the final song starts: familiar and huge post-rock with a swelling anthemic sound and it sounds like another crushingly heavy track… but then suddenly it fizzles out into a comedic little ragtime joke track with trumpet blats — this one is, of course, titled “Who Cares?”

If there ever was a “it’s fall” record, it’s this one — Leaves Turn Inside You is the turn-back-the-clocks of punk records, it’s the sound of dread; hunkering down and waiting for winter. The darkness of a 4pm sunset. A perfect swansong.

Garbage Corner:

Brazilian Baile Funk

Please consider taking a moment to read this amazing Bill Haisley piece for Defector about Brazilian Baile Funk, a genre of music that I was completely unaware of. Essentially harsh noise hip hop, this shit is hilariously overblown and deep-fried digital fare made by 20-year-olds using mobile phone apps. It’s fucking crazy. I can’t believe anyone is listening to this at all — let alone an entire country’s youth culture. Avant garde left-field & harsh, each song sounds like a mashup of 8 poorly mixed Death Grips tracks smashed together. Electrifying and inspiring. Haisley describes it best and has specific recommendations to artists besides d.silvestre, so please read his piece.

The ecosystem that has produced this remarkable music scene is a delicate one, which has clearly thrived while existing at the margins of the music industry and the Western world's covetous eye. Part of what makes funk funk is its fast pace, the way sounds and techniques arise and evolve at lightspeed, the ease with which songs are posted online to be discovered by the specific audience that knows how to find it, the way it stays hidden from and/or scares off the gringos.

Scene Report:

In September, for just one weekend I went back in time — for both me and my parents. And my buddy Aled came down to bear witness & hang for the whole thing, which was great. Hopefully we will finish our EP soon & i can write about it here.

Dismemberment Plan at 9:30 Club (9/6)

Wow, the year is 2010 and I am at the 9:30 Club seeing a Dismemberment Plan reunion show. The band still has it, esp nice to hear that Travis Morrison hasn’t lost a single step with his vocal delivery and the band still has their weird-as-hell timing down. The funniest part for me is that they’re still using cutting-edge-in-the-year-2000 tech for all of their shit. The band takes turn using the one M-Audio MIDI keyboard, Travis played a different M-Audio pad controller — it was clear that they were just triggering the literal samples from the album recording sessions. They played almost all of Emergency & I, and integral record to my 20s and one of my favorite songs written by and for the sad sack of shit. This was first time I’d been back to the 9:30 Club since… 2017 maybe? The sound is unbelievably good — check the video above out and listen for yourself, every instrument is perfectly crisp.

Bruce Springsteen at Nationals Park (9/7)

Talk about aging guys who still have it! This was a really special show — my not just because I finally got to see The Boss in action, but we had great seats (thanks to my parents for bringing us along lol) & the setlist was FULL of Darkness On The Edge Of Town deep cuts. Bruce’s voice is def getting a little huskier and he’s clearly slowing down a little (unrelated/related but he seems to have developed a southern accent to cover that up). I can’t tell if it’s the Obama podcast or the jacketless-3-piece suit, but he is definitely VIBING like a politician working a rally. I don’t care. He can do whatever he wants at this point, including the ticket scalping shit. Who cares. The band absolutely cooked, they’re all 100 years old and they rocked for almost 3 straight hours. Highlight of the show: at the end of the initial set, there was a short lull before the band launched into “Born To Run” and every single light in the stadium went on all at once. It was overwhelming. And seeing the crowd of boomers jumping up and down brought a tear to my eye. The other highlight was the touching tribute to Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici during “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” — the song my mom most wanted to hear. Bless.

October upcoming shows

Baltimore:

• 10/1 (Tue) Deerhoof @ Ottobar
• 10/11 (Fri) The Richard Lloyd Group @ Holy Frijoles
• 10/13 (Sun) Xiu Xiu @ Metro
• 10/16 (Wed) Ekko Astral, Powerwasher, Pretty Bitter @ Ottobar
• 10/24 (Thu) Boris @ Baltimore Soundstage
• 10/31 (Thu) Show Me The Body, High Vis, Bib @ Baltimore Soundstage

DC:

• 10/1 (Tue) Vampire Weekend @ The Anthem
• 10/5 (Sat) Y La Bamba @ Black Cat
• 10/8 (Tue) KEN Mode, Euclid C Finder @ Pie Shop
• 10/8 (Tue) Lesley Mok & Phillip Golub / Mickey Lusk / Majid Araim, Nate Scheible, Layne Garrett @ Rhizome
• 10/9 (Wed) Mass Of The Fermenting Dregs @ Howard Theatre
• 10/9 (Wed) Neko Case @ Strathmore Hall
• 10/10 (Thu) Fake Fruit @ Comet Ping Pong
• 10/10 (Thu) Public Speaking / Slow Slow Loris / Hatchers / Jeff Surak @ Rhizome
• 10/11 (Fri) Xiu Xiu @ Black Cat
• 10/12 (Sat) Max Roach Cenennial @ Kennedy Center
• 10/18 (Fri) Rrose @ Flash
• 10/18 (Fri) Toshimaru Nakamura + Gene Coleman + Nick Millevoi // Vernal Scuzz // gen/loss @ Rhizome
• 10/19 (Sat) Illuminati Hotties @ Black Cat
• 10/19 (Sat) Billy Bragg @ The Atlantis and 10/20 (Sun) @ 9:30 Club
• 10/20 (Sun) Ginger Root @ Black Cat
• 10/20 (Sun) Pardoner @ Comet Ping Pong
• 10/23 (Wed) Sunset Rubdown @ Black Cat
• 10/23 (Wed) DEHD, This Is Lorelei @ Howard Theatre
• 10/29 (Tue) Drinking Boys & Girls Choir @ Songbyrd
• 10/29 (Tue) Cursive @ Union Stage
• 10/29 (Tue) Drinking Boys And Girls Choir @ Songbyrd

NYC:

• 10/4 (Fri) Alessandro Cortini & Rachika Nayar @ Knockdown Center
• 10/11 (Fri) John Zorn (Cobra 40th anniversary) @ Roulette
• 10/15 (Tue) Xiu Xiu, YHWH NAILGUN @ LPR
• 10/15 (Tue) More Eaze, Tar Of @ Cassette (fka Sundown)
• 10/22 (Tue) Fat Dog, Lip Critic @ TV Eye
• 10/23 (Wed) Nels Cline & Yuka C Honda @ The Stone
• 10/24 (Thu) Zeena Parkins & Ikue Mori @ Roulette
• 10/25 (Fri) M3 Fest (gamelan orchestra, jazz groups, Craig Taborn) @ Roulette
• 10/26 (Sat) M3 Fest (more cool experimnetal and world stuff) @ Roulette

Philly:

• 10/9 (Wed) Tim Berne’s Snakeoil @ Solar Myth
• 10/10 (Thu) Yard Act, Omni @ Union Transfer
• 10/11 (Fri) Fake Fruit & Spllit @ Foto Club
• 10/16 (Wed) Billy Bragg @ Scottish Rite Auditorium (in NJ)
• 10/18 (Fri) Ekko Astral, Powerwasher @ Foto Club
• 10/18 (Fri) Ginger Root, Amaiwana @ Union Transfer
• 10/24 (Thu) YHWH Nailgun @ Foto Club

Further Ahead:

• 11/1 (Fri) Touché Amoré, Soul Glo, Portrayal Of Guilt, @ Black Cat (DC)
• 11/2 (Sat) Touché Amoré, Soul Glo, Portrayal Of Guilt @ Union Transfer (Philly)
• 11/8 (Fri) Spirit Of The Beehive, Kassie Krut (ex-Palm) @ Black Cat (DC)
• 11/9 (Sat) Spirit Of The Beehive, Kassie Krut (ex-Palm) @ Union Transfer (Philly)
• 11/15 (Fri) Ed Shrader @ Comet Ping Pong (DC)
• 11/15 (Fri) Chat Pile, Mamaleek @ First Unitarian Church (Philly)
• 11/15 (Fri) Slowdive @ Franklin Music Hall (Philly)
• 11/15 (Fri) Haley Heynderickx @ World Café Live (Philly)
• 11/16 (Sat) Haley Heynderickx @ 9:30 Club (DC)
• 11/17 (Sun) slowdive @ The Atlantis (DC)
• 11/19 (Tue) Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Alan Sparhawk (of Low) @ 9:30 Club (DC)
• 11/19 (Tue) Chat Pile, Mamaleek @ Metro (Baltimore)
• 11/19 (Tue) Cortex & Nels Cline @ Solar Myth (Philly)
• 11/21 (Thu) Body Meat @ Songbyrd (DC)
• 11/23 (Sat) Blood Incantation @ Baltimore Soundstage (Baltimore)
• 11/23 (Sat) Meth Rats @ Metro (Baltimore)
• 11/23 (Sat) Adrianne Lenker, Suzanne Vallie @ The Atlantis (DC)
• 11/24 (Sun) Horse Jumper of Love @ Ottobar (Baltimore)
• 11/25 (Mon) Adrianne Lenker @ Union Transfer (Philly)
• 11/26 (Tue) Adrianne Lenker @ Union Transfer (Philly)
• 12/8 (Sun) billy woods & Kenny Segal @ Union Stage (DC)
• 12/10 (Tue) The Blood Brothers @ Union Transfer (Philly)
• 12/13 (Fri) The Blood Brothers @ Irving Plaza (NYC)
• 12/13 (Fri) The Jesus Lizard @ Union Transfer (Philly)
• 12/14 (Sat) The Jesus Lizard @ Black Cat (DC)
• 12/15 (Sun) The Jesus Lizard @ Black Cat (DC)

Cheers,
LM