I’m trying out a bit of a different format for the blog post this week. Instead of a song-by-song mini review and breakdown it’ll be more of a free-flowing meditation on the playlist - though I’m still hoping to get more review-like writing on this platform. Part of the intention of the blog in the first place was to experiment more with form and practice to find a style of writing that works for me, so don’t be too surprised if the flux continues over the coming weeks. It also removes some of my anxiety about repeating tracks - I can enjoy them without having to find yet another way to review them! I am going to make up the weeks I missed by the way, that doc continues to fill out as we speak.
Last week, Thursday the first of May, we debuted a new format on Portland Radio Project. Instead of (must-listen) Thursday nights being three shows back to back, my co-presenters Jonny, Patric and I pooled our timeslots and our playlists to create one huge free-flowing four-hour party. I had a blast - we had a blast - riffing off of each other’s selections and branching out from our usual sound. I played Fievel is Glauque! And Squid! And Lucy Dacus! And the Minutemen! It was, to borrow the parlance of my usual genre lane, an excellent b2b2b.
I showed up at 5:30 with a nearly three-hour “short”list of songs, but outside of my opening cut (Justice - Genesis, obviously) I didn’t plan for my sets at all. I played off the room, off of Jonny and Patrick’s cuts, off of themes and lyrics and artists from two sets before. It reminded me, in the best way, of sharing a Spotify session on a long road trip. A song reminds you of another song so you add it to the queue, but there are already five songs that will play before it - each of which reminds you and your friends of three other songs, which must then be queued, which extends the queue further, which dissolves the original seed into a spiraling periodic network of in-jokes and throughlines. I’m not much of an instrumentalist, but I think a good back-to-back is the DJ’s version of a good improvised jam session.
So now, a week later, I sat down to playlist with the memory of improvisation still on my fingertips. I knew I had some new releases to play -- that Wisdom Teeth comp really is as good as I was hoping -- but beyond that, I had no plan. So I gritted my teeth, said yes and to myself, and improvised. The first three tracks of this playlist were planned in advance, the rest stitched together with enthusiasm and vibes from my library on the studio computer. I hope it was fun for the audience at home to listen to, because I know it was fun to make.
The unfortunate side effect of this approach is that I played a lot of repeat tracks from earlier episodes this week, something I don’t love to do on my shows. I’m going to keep that in mind when I go to playlist next week’s show, but I want to retain the core of this week’s approach. Some of my best shows, both in the Warehouse Continuum and the previous incarnation Rants and Raves, have now been wholly improvised. I improvise when I mix, why shouldn’t I improvise for radio?
I don’t have much to say about the possibly legitimate minimal revival, partially because a lot of words have already been written but mostly because the more I read about it the more charged emotions I stumble into. Just look at the comments on the discogs page for Audion's "Mouth to Mouth." Regardless, there’s a lot to like about the new Pattern Gardening comp on Wisdom Teeth, a label I enjoy more and more every week.
It’s a beautiful spring in Portland this year. I’m writing this from my backyard, surrounded by trees, watching lazy clouds drift across a warming sky. We’re too close to summer to listen to chilly, crystalline music. FTP Doctor and Tenzia allay my concerns by peppering their tracks with Metro Area or Patrick Holland-esque electric piano chops, an essentially spring sound in my mind, and let their percussion flit about rather than settle too close to perfect regularity.
They also deploy what I’m fairly certain is crinkled cellophane in the background. Those samples, along with the mouth sounds that mix up the back end of the track, harken to things like the Matmos catalog or Iz & Diz’s “Mouth”: genuinely good songs based on borderline gimmicky sampling techniques. There’s echoes of that ethos in recent work from Polygonia and even Virtual Riot - something to keep an eye on.
I recently went back and read Resident Advisor’s top 100 albums of the 2000s, a list topped by Ricardo Villalobos’ Alcachofa (and, confusingly to me at least, Metro Area’s self-titled at #2 ABOVE Discovery and Untrue - but getting annoyed and nitpicking rankings just lets the list win). This is where I decided I didn’t know enough to get opinionated about minimal yet because good god it is ALL over this list, to the point of receiving mentions in non-minimal blurbs as a point of comparison. My familiarity with minimal is entirely retrospective. I’ve listened to and enjoyed the stuff that gets held up as the tentpoles of the genre (particularly this and Luomo’s Vocalcity), but I didn’t realize the saturation that minimal seems to have had at its peak. I can have my song-by-song taste, but I’ll leave the grand historical context arguments to Ben Cardew or Shawn Reynaldo.
Removed from context, I like “Easy Lee” quite a lot. The vocoder loop the track is built around is geologically dense with texture and variation and the spelunking percussion around it creates sparkling facets of distraction that pull you in every direction just long enough to receive the full wallop when the vocals return.
A lot of the more recent music that I’ve credited for merging the organic and the electric mask their digital origin with woody sound design or field recorded atmospheres, but “Easy Lee” feels like it cuts to the core of the computer and lets the minerals inside sing, a silicon chorus with an orchestra of copper tracings.
More great spring music! I played this one on the Thursday Night Mixmash, and I snuck it in again here even though it falls well outside the typical scope of the show. There’s something addictive about the outro on this song, but I cannot for the life of me find the origin of the sample. Let me know if you know it, I’d love to watch whatever old adventure movie I assume it’s clipped from.
There are, frankly, TOO MANY good shows in Portland this Saturday. Cousin is playing an all-nighter at Process, DJ Stingray 313 and Kode9 are playing at Spend The Night’s 10th anniversary party and Bristol weirdo Mun Sing is playing a free show at Barn Radio, all of which I’d likely attend were they on separate weekends. How could I possibly choose? Well, it seems like the universe may have chosen “none of the above” for me, since my knee is currently far too sprained to think about dancing for multiple hours on concrete floors. I might see if I can post up in a corner at Process and chair dance to Cousin’s ambient worlds, but that feels like a disappointing compromise. Alack.