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J.PERIOD Pays Tribute to Hip-Hop Culture and Legends in the Richly Creative Content of the Song/Video “The Legend of Globetrottin’”

In song and short film for J.PERIOD’s “The Legend of Globetrottin’” is an animated comic book and live action featurette that charmingly relates the tale of one of the greatest basketball matches in history between Masego and J.PERIOD. But it’s more than that, of course. It begins in a record store where crate diggers are looking for solid wax to sample when they think they spot DJ Jazzy Jeff and indeed in puppet form it is the legendary DJ. The song deftly samples sounds of a basketball game and various MCs taking verses in classic hip-hop style telling the story and the jazz samples and unconventional beats like a nod to one of DJ Jazzy Jeff’s collaborators years ago in J. Dilla. This rich fusion of elements, style and presentation really speaks directly to hip-hop culture as a significant creative subculture of American and global culture but in tying it with comics it layers storytelling styles and elements in a way that is highly accessible and experimental at once resonant with what Dmitri Jackson did with his 2018 comic collection Blackwax Boulevard: Five Years, What a Surprise (2012-2017) Watch the video for “The Legend of Globetrottin’” on YouTube and follow J.PERIOD at the links below.

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Six by Seven Transforms Supercaan’s “Zoetrope” Into a Gripping and Unsettling Soundscape From a Dark Dimension

The Six by Seven remix of Supercaan’s “Zoetrope” maintains the introspective mood of the original but highlights the otherworldly aspects of the track and its textures. It is slower, spookier and given a similarly black and white video treatment by Simon Peecock as well the song becomes an unsettling dip into a bleak mirror image of the song like Six by Seven turned the vibe inside out and stretched the breezy pop sound of the single to its limits. Lars Von Trier did not direct the video, Swans did not do the remix but that intensity and emotional menace and desperation runs through the remix and the video seems to be coming to us from the same sinister alternate dimension from which we hear the sounds of the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Suspended tones and vocals that echo in the distance and hit us up intimately close. It’s disorienting and compelling at once and completely spins “Zoetrope” into a song that is basically unrecognizable from the source material which is what some of us want from a remix worth our time. Watch the video for “Zoetrope [Six by Seven remix]” on YouTube and follow Supercaan at the links below.

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1st Base Runner’s Darkly Urgent “Night Stalker” Resonates With a Cinematic Menace

1st Base Runner, photo courtesy the artist

The title track of 1st Base Runner’s Night Stalker EP is a little like getting into the head of an obsessive in a focused episode. The nearly whispered only words in the song “I will follow if you leave me” are like a mantra that establishes a constant emotional image, like a rhythmic element in itself. This over percussion like a drum stick hitting an oil drums with the reverberation processed out. Later a tonally sharp, ascending arpeggio suggests urgency and in the last third of the song, full-fledged, bright drones convey a sense of pursuit like the person whose words we hear is closing in on his prey whether a person who has wronged him, or who holds the promise of some kind of psychological fulfillment or a goal, a dream that is slipping away if life is allowed to pass by. There is a sense of low key desperation underlying this industrial and synth driven track and one that implies it’s a section of a larger narrative and just like on the EP this is the penultimate chapter with the climax of the story on the horizon. Listen to “Night Stalker” on Spotify and connect with 1st Base Runner at the links provided.

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Springworks’ Collage Pop Experiment “Catastrophe Just” Is Like the Mutant Offspring of Kiwi Rock and Musique Concrète

Springworks dropped on us “Catastrophe Just,” a song that sounds like it was assembled from a sped up sample of a 1980s New Wave pop song, perhaps something from the Flying Nun imprint due to the slightly outre melody and rhythm, taped from the radio dropped into a field recording of a busy restaurant from the perspective of the dish pit lending a unique, almost pointillist texture and percussive element that was never meant to be used that way but somehow also works so that the rhythm of that and the melodic sample synergize to create something new and truly unusual yet undeniably accessible. That it ends on the sounds of people talking from a crowded room gives it a haunted quality as well but without the spookiness. Not much like it and though lo-fi the concept is not, rather it’s arrangement taps into that sonic resonance to mutually recontextualize and create something that isn’t hypnogogic pop or experimental post-punk or anything like that but its own hybrid style which we don’t hear nearly enough. Listen to “Catastrophe Just” on Spotify and follow Springworks at the links below.

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The Loud Bangs’ “Candy Sometimes Always” Transcends Pop Conventions With Its Collage of Visceral and Expansive Effervescence

The Loud Bangs, photo courtesy the artists

Linear musical structure matters less than layers of emotional coloring and tone in The Loud Bangs’ “Candy Sometimes Always.” It somehow works as a hooky pop song without conventional structure because the collage of guitar melody, distorted waves of textures, an almost sampled, musique concrète element of vocals and expressionistic percussion collude to sweep you away in a sustained effervescence that feels like a bubbly cleansing for the brain in the listening. Fans of Asobi Seksu, Blushing and the more pop end of My Bloody Valentine will appreciate what The Loud Bangs have done here and with the rest of its December 16, 2022 EP Salvation Memorial Hospital. It is music as visceral as it is dreamlike in emotional resonance. Listen to “Candy Sometimes Always” on YouTube and follow The Loud Bangs at the links below.

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Kendall Bates’ “Transmission 3” is Like the Sample Soundtrack of a Winter Vacation on a Remote and Tranquil Planet

Kendall Bates crafts a deep sense of space and mood on “Transmission 3.” Like maybe we’re hearing the decayed recordings of a device sent to capture and send forth the sounds of a distant planet and in the transmission wavelength something is added to the sound patterns of water coming into a shore we can’t see. Or it was once video and now all we have is the sound portion or the data approximation and reconstruction of those transmissions from which a scientist might be able to glean some facts about that planet and its environment from this particularly abstract and corrupted information but once plugged into a program to map out the wavelengths into sound we get the tinkling of chimes, slowly expanding drones, the sound of rain and an incoming tide and an environmental sound of such depth of field it’s like we are sitting on that alien shore and soaking in the beautifully desolate tranquility that is nevertheless rich in subtle sensory detail. Listen to “Transmission 3” on YouTube and follow Kendall Bates at the links provided.

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Mantocliff’s Avant-Neo-Soul Hypnogogic Pop Single “Ocean” is a Mysterious Journey Into Ethereal Bliss

Mantocliff establishes its own mysterious musical world on its single “Ocean.” The enigmatic lyrics like an ode to the ocean itself as a person of dark depths seem secondary to the slow swirling moods and shifting textures and free flow of layered atmospheric elements like a hazy and more abstract Hiatus Kaiyote. More downtempo and even more driven by a dream logic. In moments its reminiscent of the weirder end of Laurel Halo’s more recent works and highly processed vocals that don’t sit in a predictable style within loping rhythms that shouldn’t work because of how intermittent they seem but it creates an utterly idiosyncratic pace and structure that draws you into its avant pop dreaminess like an electronic Aldous Harding. Listen to “Ocean” on Spotify and follow Mantocliff at the links below.

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Madeline Goldstein’s Darkly Melodic Synth Pop Song “Seed of Doubt” is Imbued With Deeply Cinematic Resonance

Madeline Goldstein, photo by Aleckz Picha

Madeline Goldstein’s use of saturated synth tones and her own wide-ranging, sultry vocals on “Seed of Doubt” is completely engulfing in a way you’d want to hear more often in music in the darkwave and synth pop spectrum. Fans of Patriarchy (the song has the same engineer, Matia Samovich, as Patriarchy’s excellent 2022 album The Unself) will find much to like in the perfect fusion of futuristic disco and Gary Numan-esque soundscapes. It has a similar emotional resonance as Tor Lundvall’s A Strangeness in Motion record in that it taps into a retro pop sound but sounds so modern in its dance beat sequencing it has as much in common with Goldfrapp as it does something in the realm of electronic Goth. With lyrics seemingly about conflicted relationships, desire and identity, “Seed of Doubt” is immediately compelling and riveting from its opening moments until the end. Goldstein is the front person for Portland, Oregon’s long-running synth punk band Fringe Class. After relocating to Los Angeles in 2019, Goldstein launched her solo project which has continued in an experimental vein but leaning more toward a pop sensibility that should be in the wheelhouse of anyone into the ways in which Electric Youth’s music synced so perfectly with the mood and atmosphere of Come True. Listen to “Seed of Doubt” on Spotify and follow Goldstein at the links below.

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BÜNNI Challenges Our Complacency Personally and in Expectations of Pop Songcraft on the Haunting and Alluring “A Helpful Guide”

BÜNNI sounds like he deconstructed a New Age self-help video in crafting “A Helpful Guide.” The song with samples that are like a list of suggestions for deprogramming oneself from standard cultural conditioning and calling into question a personal complacency feels like an independent film short from the 1990s that would have appeared on cable access but shot to VHS. The music has a haunted quality with modern hip-hop rhythm style off the standard pop music time signature and processed vocals as a an instrument and a moody, slightly swirled melody that carries throughout in a dreamlike procession. The song works precisely because it is a subversion of expectations of what vocals should sound like in a pop song, how pacing needs to be to hook you and what the elements of melody and harmony is supposed to sound like. In challenging the listener to disconnect from everyday complacency and do something to make one’s life more meaningful now with even a small gesture that derails standard daily rituals the song’s sounds take one out of standard issue emotional responses. f Harmoy Korine makes another film, this music should be considered for the soundtrack. Listen to “A Helpful Guide” on Spotify and follow BÜNNI at the links provided.

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Elskavon’s Tones of Wintry Solace on “North Sole” Are a Meditative Soundtrack for Deep Internal Growth

Almost impressionistic tones incandesce throughout Elskavon’s “North Sole,” floating in cool drones, textural white noise fluttering like the breath of the musician crafting the track caught incidentally exerting the controls. But then ethereal voices come in with the bright melodic waves of melody. The music video appears to show an aging industrial seaside town and the music matches the slow and organic pace, fading out before a curiously black and white piece of footage of fireworks ends the visual presentation of the song. As ambient as the track is overall the presence of struck bells and other objects gives the song a grounding in the physical world that gives a tangible context to the drift of moods that is what draws you into its contemplative energy suggestive of finding comfort in familiar patterns of life that we take for granted and sometimes come to resent in our pursuit of what we think of as our life’s trajectory only to at some point seek out the experiences that shaped us in ways not so obvious until life experience erodes the filter of ego enough to reconcile the various strands of your lived experience. This song is a soundtrack to that process. Watch the video for “North Sole” on YouTube and follow Elskavon at the links provided. The full album Origins is due out February 17 on Western Vinyl.

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