ALTER.NATION #58
Guerilla Toss, Omni, Hemlock Ernst, Kenny Segal, Lightning Dust feat. Stephen Malkmus, Levitation Room, Gong Gong Gong 工工工, North Mississippi Allstars, Hiromi, Jeremiah Jae / L'Orange, DIIV, Joshua Redman / Brooklyn Rider, Penguin Cafe
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"Future Doesn’t Know"
ALTER.NATION #58 on DEEZER
Guerilla Toss - Future Doesn’t Know
On their new EP What Would The Odd Do?, the art-rock experimentalists Guerilla Toss are addressing the opioid crisis from a deeply personal angle... “Future Doesn’t Know.” It’s one of the poppiest songs Guerilla Toss have ever released, yet still fried and off-kilter, like Deerhoof if they were video game characters. At Flood, Carlson calls it “a song about the personification of the future, and finding your own truth.” She continues, “So often we look to others for the meaning of life or what to do next, but really the only answer is within.”
Omni - Courtesy Call
...the third single from Networker, their first album for Sub Pop... finds the Atlanta trio letting a bit of oxygen into their tightly wound post-punk sound. It begins with a reference to an “after hours history lesson and a smile that keeps you guessin’.”
Samuel T. Herring also known as Sam Herring and by his rap moniker Hemlock Ernst, is an American performer and rapper from Baltimore, Maryland, better known for being the frontman of the synth-pop band Future Islands.
Kenny Segal also known as Syndakit, is an American record producer and DJ based in Los Angeles, California. In 2018, Mixmag described him as "one of the best hip-hop producers in the city.
Hemlock Ernst & Kenny Segal - Addicted Youth
For years now, Samuel T. Herring, frontman for the great synthy-indie Baltimore band Future Islands, has been making rap music. Herring raps under the name Hemlock Ernst, and it’s not the embarrassing, halfassed side project that you might expect from the not-so-proud history of indie rockers attempting to rap... “Addicted Youth” doesn’t sound that different from Future Islands. Segal chops up a few shards of acoustic guitar, and Herring ruminates on fears and regrets, letting some melody creep into his voice. We hear a few hints of the soulful growl that Herring uses when he’s singing. Herring also full-on sings on the outro, but only to quote Eric B. & Rakim’s “Microphone Fiend.”
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| Hemlock Ernst |
Lightning Dust feat. Stephen Malkmus - A Pretty Picture from Spectre
Lightning Dust's excellent 2013 album Fantasy marked a shift for the Vancouver duo, moving from the subdued folky tones of their earliest work to embrace dark, synthy pop. The band began as a side project of founding Black Mountain members Amber Webber and Joshua Wells, foiling their main band's brawny guitar rock with moodier material. Fourth album Spectre comes after a six-year interim where Webber and Wells parted ways with Black Mountain to focus on Lightning Dust full time. Still leaning heavily on vintage synth sounds and brooding moods, the band lets go of the pop formula that informed Fantasy for a more multi-dimensional approach to the album's songcraft. Webber's stunning vocals are even more central to these songs than before... The production, songwriting, and performances all reach new levels of curiosity and unpredictable moves, making it some of the band's most captivating work.
Levitation Room - 2025 from Headspace
After debuting with Ethos, an album that sounded like it could have been released in 1966 to minor acclaim, Levitation Room return with a record that maintains their note-perfect, backward-looking sound but adds some new wrinkles. This time around, they aren't stuck in one particular year or style and this looseness gives them room to explore. Some of these journeys lead to winning results; some of them don't work quite as well. Looking at the positives first, there are several tracks that capture the strutting swagger of Ethos and deliver similarly fuzzy garage feelings. "2025" lets guitarist Gabe Fernandez take off in flights of fuzztone frenzy while singer Julian Porte sneers mightily...
Gong Gong Gong 工工工 - Gong Gong Gong Blues 工工工布魯斯 from Phantom Rhythm 幽靈節奏
Gong Gong Gong is a duo from Beijing who play an alarmingly stripped-down form of hypnotic rock which spiritually evokes the blues as well as punk, but otherwise can't be directly compared to any other genre or artist. The instrumentation consists almost entirely of Tom Ng's guitar (and a barely audible shaker) and Josh Frank's bass, which interlock to form insistently chugging rhythms. Ng sings entirely in Cantonese, and his lyrics (as indicated by the translated lyric sheet included with the vinyl pressing of the album) express frustration and anxiety, but ultimately provide words of encouragement... their ability to create such a big, imposing sound out of limited elements is fascinating, and the determination which drives their work is admirable.
North Mississippi Allstars - Call That Gone from Up and Rolling
...NMA -- Luther and Cody on guitar and drums, respectively, Thomas on vocals and fife, Carl Dufrene on bass, and Sharisse Norman on vocals -- are a well-seasoned outfit; the quintet and most of their guests have been playing together in various capacities for most of their lives. "Call That Gone" is a filthy, squalling, bottleneck-guitar blues driven by rolling tom-toms with souled-out vocals from Luther and Thomas, her fife trading licks with his guitar...
Hiromi - Yellow Wurlitzer Blues from Spectrum
Since making her recorded debut in the 1990s, Hiromi Uehara has established herself as one of the most gifted jazz pianists of her generation. She issued Spectrum on the eve of her fortieth birthday as an overview of what she learned as a musician in her thirties... It aches with emotion and the hint of a smile in its improvisational moments. "Yellow Wurlitzer Blues" reflects the harmonic invention of Thelonious Monk if he were a stride blues pianist. Hiromi's sense of improvisational lightheartedness is stacked in punchy grooves in turnarounds with deft scalar feints for good measure... This 75-minute recital portrays the nearly spiritual command Hiromi has of her instrument and its various languages to extend her astonishing technical facility. More than this, however, it underscores the visionary, authoritative place her pianism commands in modern jazz.
L'Orange is a North Carolina-born beatmaker with a penchant for sampling early jazz records and vintage radio broadcasts, lending a nostalgic, time-worn quality to his music.
Jeremiah Jae / L'Orange - Cool Hand from Complicate Your Life with Violence
Four years after their first collaboration, The Night Took Us In Like Family, enigmatic beatmaker L'Orange and left-field rhymer Jeremiah Jae teamed up again for another set of tense, thrilling tales about violence and vengeance. The duo conjure up a dark, twisted world where the past clashes with the future, and ruthless combat is necessary for survival. It's enough to drive anyone mad, but the constant struggle is life-affirming, and the album creatively illustrates this vicious cycle. While L'Orange was initially known for his extensive sampling of scratchy old jazz 78s and vintage radio broadcasts, his palette has expanded to incorporate twangy country guitars, blues riffs, funkier bass lines, and even faint traces of exotica...
DIIV - The Spark from Deceiver
Since its earliest days, shoegaze has been seen as druggy music, with warped guitars and murmured vocals that suggest altered states of consciousness and prompt adjectives like "narcotic," "woozy," and "blissful" to describe it... They first delved into this territory with Is the Is Are, which offered beautiful proof that they could be a functional band in the wake of Zachary Cole Smith's well-publicized substance abuse issues. After that album's release, DIIV experienced more seismic changes. Smith spent half of 2017 in different rehab programs; by the end of that year, founding bassist Devin Ruben Perez had departed. On Deceiver, DIIV emerge from these challenges as a stronger, even more expressive band...
Founded in 2005, New York string quartet Brooklyn Rider are known for their accessible but genre- and boundary-challenging repertoire. In addition to recording works by the likes of Beethoven and Philip Glass, they draw focus on emerging composers and contribute their own original compositions.
Joshua Redman / Brooklyn Rider - Sun on Sand from Sun on Sand
A collaboration between saxophonist Joshua Redman, forward-thinking chamber string ensemble Brooklyn Rider, and composer Patrick Zimmerli, 2019's Sun on Sand is a kinetic, richly attenuated album that straddles the line between jazz and modern classical... Also joining Redman are his equally talented rhythm section bandmates bassist Scott Colley and drummer Satoshi Takeishi; the latter of whom is also a longtime Zimmerli associate going back to the '90s... The most impressive aspect of Sun on Sand is how balanced the collaboration feels. Redman has the facility and sound to carry the music, but Brooklyn Rider offer a deeply textured counterpoint, while Zimmerli's expansive voice remains ever present.
Penguin Cafe - Pythagoras on the Line Again from Handfuls of Night
In 2018, as part of a project commissioned by Greenpeace with the intention of raising awareness about the endangered Antarctic environment, Arthur Jeffes wrote four songs about specific species of penguins native to the continent. As Jeffes became enamored by their characteristics, he began to fantasize an entire world of anthropomorphic penguins, and he developed this concept into the fourth Penguin Cafe album. The nine compositions on Handfuls of Night serve as a soundtrack to this imaginary penguin world, and as one might expect of Penguin Cafe, they're as playful as they are poignant... "Pythogaras on the Line Again" is an interpretation of a piece which appeared on Penguin Cafe Orchestra's final album from 1993, using sampled dial tones to demonstrate the principles of harmonics. Conveying a sense of childlike wonder about the natural world, the album is full of life and immensely enjoyable.
Guerilla Toss, Omni, Hemlock Ernst, Kenny Segal, Lightning Dust feat. Stephen Malkmus, Levitation Room, Gong Gong Gong 工工工, North Mississippi Allstars, Hiromi, Jeremiah Jae / L'Orange, DIIV, Joshua Redman / Brooklyn Rider, Penguin Cafe
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