Subaeris: POOLSIDE 女の子

Ohh, I really love White Colours. Consistently interesting and well-crafted releases. Very online-savvy. Great name. Brilliant visual design. The French label is run by Too Much Too Young (né Frédéric) and Rainbows (né Clément), who just find artists they like over the Internet and invite them to release EPs or singles with fantastic covers (here's an interview they did). They've barely had a dud in over two years of under-recognised activity. Even when their tracks take on traditional genres, there's something in the production, or the way it's put together that pulls me in. I could live in a White Colours world.

I particularly liked this recent EP of theirs, Existence by Subaeris. Subaeris turns out to be a really good post-vaporwave beatmaker, strobing those NEW CORPORATE AGE CLOUDS with cybermotor perc and bars of blue ice. Difficult to pick a favourite cos the release remains at a high level and has a nice stylistic coherence, but I'm into the low staccato tones of 'POOLSIDE 女の子.' I think the best coldness manages to find that sonic contrast between the continuous gaseous drones and the sudden, sometimes violent hits of hi-tech. If you like it too, Subaeris has a decent album out on Dream Catalogue and more great stuff on her/his own Bandcamp page so have a look.

pepsi7up: BITTERMAN

The perfect track to kick off an mp3 blog dedicated to online weirdness. The music of pepsi7up is mysterious, superlatively bizarre and full of baffling but undeniable love and beauty. I wrote about him a while back. Checking in on the Soundcloud account recently I noticed a few new tracks had gone up, the first in about a year. Some of them get into the most out-there experimentalism, but 'BITTERMAN' (I can't even begin to think why that name) is easily one of the most charmingly infectious tracks to have gone up since the two versions of 'Over the Rainbow' (now removed, but which I uploaded to YouTube). Like those tracks, 'BITTERMAN' uses a software orchestra and garbled vocaloids - advanced tech - but this time the style is dream indyrock from the late 80s / 90s in a twitching polygon body. As before, it brings you right into a future utopia that's just that much more detailed, more persuasive, more poignant, more otherworldly and more heavenly than anyone else's. The distinction distances and isolates him from so many listeners, but in my book, even with so little material, pepsi7up is the very height of the new online weird.

mp3 blog!

 Mp3 blog Altered Zones, 2010-2011.
A ladder for lesser-known artists, it's arguably the
reason today's underground looks the way it looks.

I'm turning Rouge's Foam into a (part-time, intermittent) mp3 blog! Remember them?!

Over the past few years, my music-writing has kind of shifted from essays (mostly on my blog) that went into quite a lot of depth on famous artists to essays that bring together a number of less well-known artists who are doing new things away from well-known labels. I trace this shift back to the moment I realised that there was an enormous, almost entirely non-reported underground sitting online full of music that was not just fresh-sounding but often really good too. I haven't lost interest in writing on bigger names, but I ended up filling a niche covering emerging music as a columnist because I began to see the urgency in reporting those lesser known artists, and few other writers were doing so too.

The features I write on these schools of new artists go some way to bringing this new online underground some wider attention. But there are also plenty of artists and tracks that don't make it into these features, either because they stand a bit apart or because I already covered the artist or their style before. So in order to keep sharing the good stuff, I thought I'd start presenting tracks on Rouge's Foam in the typical mp3 blog style - embedded track and a little write-up for context (I won't actually be offering mp3 downloads myself, but the format remains). I'll still post links to the articles I've written, and write the occasional blogthing.

This might seem a little retro in a time ruled by sharing on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, which have eroded the mp3 blog as a source for sharing new music. Mp3 blogs are a bit 2006. But what I like about them is that they're separate from social media in general and can be browsed as such. I don't have anything against social media per se, but whether it's other people's accounts or my own, interesting new tracks just come bundled with everything else - pictures, complaints, Buzzfeed etc. The share button world is also low on context - the few sentences written to accompany a track on an mp3 blog is hardly Journalism, but it does provide some valuable context: how the track works in relation to releases, geography, events, backgrounds etc. Well, they're not unlike the news pieces you see on larger music websites. But on Rouge's Foam, these tracks will not typically be the tracks these sites are posting (often after receiving press releases). They'll be weird unknown nuggets from the new online underground.

Maybe it's just me, but I've noticed a drop-off in the number of mp3 blogs I can rely on, or in their quality or regularity. In particular, I miss Altered Zones, which caught the wave of hypnagogic pop and broke the news of so many of the artists that are now huge in today's underground scene. With institutions like Altered Zones gone or drying up, a gap between new music and its wider success has emerged: it's no longer clear how young&weird artists get from Soundcloud, Bandcamp or debut cassette beginnings to touring whole continents (...unless they're rubber-stamped by the limited, more conservative capacities of older, richer, more established labels and websites). Since I'm now finding new music by the bucketload straight at the source - SC, BC, Mediafire - I realised I can help plug that gap once filled by mp3 blogs... with an mp3 blog.

I can't promise the flow of new tracks will be constant, regular, dense or everlasting (and the tracks might be a few months old), but I hope you like some of em!

System Focus: The Divine Surrealism of Epic Collage

 'False God Fallen God False God Fallen God. Even Though I'm a False God I'm Still a God' - Diamond Black Hearted Boy

... and we're back. With a new monthly column for The FADER concerning emerging directions in underground music, going by the handsome title SYSTEM FOCUS. And this SYSTEM's first FOCUS is a network of artists I've been finding remarkable and profound for nearly two years of watching them carve runes into SoundCloud: Diamond Black Hearted Boy, E+E, Felix Lee, Total Freedom, TCF, Why Be and more. Click here to read 'The Divine Surrealism of Epic Collage.'

Cover of the Blasting Voice compilation

Grand piano keys creep out of an abyssal mist that curls from the open mouths of ghosts. A brand-new car gives chase across the dirt plain, a foreboding echoed in an Olympian crackle through a sky heavy with clouds. Towers of Babel glint sinister on the horizon, dark mills whipping up this slow storm. Then, a voice of immaculate R&B: I know you’ve been hurt by someone else. She reverberates at the edge of infinity, lifting the piano up into a mile-long shaft of light. Cause if you let me, here’s what I’ll do. I’ll take care of you...

Elijah Paul Crampton (E+E)

The album on which it appears, December’s THE LIGHT THAT YOU GAVE ME TO SEE YOU is full of visions in which R&B romance becomes epic spiritual epiphany, and where Judgement Day pandemonium becomes the trials of personal love and innermost courage... E+E is at the center of a remarkable network of underground musicians—also including Total Freedom, Diamond Black Hearted Boy, TCF and several other artists—who have been combining fragments of pop with epic textures and violent sound effects. The framework is avant-garde sample collage, but their work tells stories about 21st-century experience that emanate surreally from cinematic sound-palettes, transcendental theology and stark, pure emotion. It lives on an unexpected spectrum between avant-queer club and that hi-tech no-space in which radio idents and the logos of games consoles and film companies appear as gigantic monuments, incandescent with divine light...

Felix Lee (lexxi_)

At first, much of this music might simply sound like a gratuitous hodgepodge of extreme sounds with little logic to connect them. But slowly, each juxtaposition of sound-objects becomes a surrealist image framed by its own curious insistence, and each sample becomes an element in a dreamlike cipher. In the same way that 16th century Dutch artists Bosch and Brueghel‘s paintings combined everyday life with esoteric religious imagery, and in the same way that the twentieth-century surrealists parodied bourgeois culture and plumbed newfangled psychiatric theories, the epic collagists reflect contemporary life, but in ways that don’t yet seem fully comprehensible... Their tracks seem to echo the intense experiences and high stimulation of our technologically mediated environment, and the panic attacks and bottomless terror that follows overstimulation. But they also gaze into the ornate decoration in our God-like multimedia lives, revealing its bliss and mystery. They’re science fiction, too, showing the organic sliced and spliced into the machine, voicing itself somewhere between Utopia and Dystopia. And they emphasize the religious ritual and spiritual intensity in such modern youth commonplaces as playing a first-person shooter or listening to pop with a heart unclouded by indie-boy cynicism...

Lars Holdus (TCF)

It’s the birdsong added to “Smile” that suggests the Garden of Eden, or, at least, a spring morning. But there are religious overtones throughout Crampton’s work... He describes his process as the assemblage of trash, corpses, and shit (one of his most common sound-tags is a toilet flushing) into a new beast, an analogue for the creation of humans by the Lord, and thus hopefully something that can live transcendent and ever closer to God. For this, Crampton seems to have developed his own symbolic system, reminiscent of expressionist and neo-expressionist artists like James Ensor or Philip Guston respectively, that represents the holy struggles of biblical scenes and those who seek to emulate and draw inspiration from them. As well as pop and contemporary classical musics, the elements of this system include Latin-American dance styles and radio idents, vehicle engines, twinkling bell-tones and violent sounds like weapons being swung.

Ashland Mines (Total Freedom)

Yet although Total Freedom has a slightly more dance-ready sound, his aesthetic has lots in common with the other collagists, and his sonic tag is a blood-curdling scream. Much of his original material comes from an intense noise background, yet his remixes of Nguzunguzu (on their Timesup EP) and Dat Oven’s “Icy Lake” (on the recent Fade to Mind / Night Slugs reissue) derive a minimalist perfection from bare sequences of sound effects. Mines’s Soundcloud is full of strong Frankenstein creations, typically combining pop vocals with minimal, intense, or just plain weird backing. His recent combination of Ciara and Vissacoor (the joint project of L-Vis 1990 and Massacooramaan) goes particularly hard.

Olin Caprison (Palmtrees Caprisun (VIOLENCE))

With a name that sounds like that of a magical anime hero, Diamond Black Hearted Boy’s voice and presence are much more evident in his work than in that of the others, where he presents himself in the persona of a ‘fallen god,’ and a ‘fake boy.’ As such, he comes across as a sort of Lucifer—the tape opens with a text on the inter-relationship of humans, God’s grace, sinners and the law—but also a prophet or, in that Renaissance garb on the tape’s cover below, a kind of allegorical morality figure guiding us through the dark, disorienting, and sometimes heavenly places in which he lurks. Yet on a simpler level, DBHB’s is a voice on the outer reaches of hip hop culture and its means of self-expression. If Kanye is a ‘God,’ DBHB is a fallen god languishing in some weird purgatory, and his collected work is a Yeezus for even greater degrees of alienation...

 DBHB

His economically titled album e, from August 2011, is more ruthlessly cybernetic, like a stressful trek through a sci-fi-action shooter. zᵉʳº, on the other hand, is one of the most punishingly cold and minimal releases you’ll come across, a meditation on almost total nothingness with a sound palette that could’ve come from a Hollywood space blockbuster. DBHB’s latest release How The West Was Won, Wanted: Dead or Alive flicks through the wreckage of the twentieth-century Americana like it was TV channels on a concave wood-paneled screen, jerry-building a mock-epic (anti-)hero’s tale along the way...

 E+E

Norwegian producer Lars Holdus, known as TCF, has been exploring epic soundscapes of a more abstract electronic nature in Oslo and Berlin. Like a painting by French artist Yves Tanguy, the assemblage of TCF’s music and its space are surreal, but the objects are not as often recognizable like they are with the other collagists. Nevertheless, on his tape for Berlin cassette label YYAA and upcoming EP for Mute offshoot Liberation Technologies, TCF creates a similar thrill of hurtling through sublime hi-tech holiness almost free of rhythm, with great chunks of machine flying past. His music’s sense of a technological territory is enhanced by the names of his tracks: large strings of numbers and letters, as if each recording was churned out by a computer capable of producing trillions more, and allotted a code whose meaning only its systems can grasp.

 

SENTINL

For me, these collagists represent one of the earliest and most imaginative subsections of the recent turn to hi-tech sounds that has cut across underground music lately. With the spread of this aesthetic, maybe more listeners can pick up their unique material, find a way into it, and expand their following beyond the cult. Either way, it’ll remain some of the most mystifying and moving work in the field...

Pattern Recognition Vol. 11: Gangnam and Beyond

The latest Pattern Recognition hopefully captures something of my recent obsession with K-pop (click here to read). Introducing you to (if you haven't already been introduced to) Big Bang, G-Dragon, T.O.P, Taeyang, Seungri, Block B, B.T.S, Teen Top, 2NE1, CL, f(x), GI. You have to check out some of these videos!

The futuristic weirdness that was 2013 had extended into an incredible year for the South Korean charts, with mad offerings from the likes of G-Dragon, CL, f(x), Taeyang, T.O.P, Block B, Exo and many others opening up to me an elaborate, almost psychedelic world of ornately intense songs and bizarre fashions...

For me the main appeal of K-pop is its overall intensity. It’s pop, only more so. It so often feels like an accelerated form of the pop most Westerners are familiar with. The West has long considered the future to lie in East Asia, either technologically or politically, and South Korea has among the most developed internet usage and infrastructure in the world. It also holds and televises tournaments of the sci-fi computer game Starcraft, and uses robots to teach kids English, guard prisons and do battle with jellyfish swarms in what they’re calling “co-operative jellyfish removal strategies.” K-pop regularly reflects this futuristic image—to many Westerners at least—by being stranger, catchier, more elaborate, more complex, more unreal and just generally going harder than Western pop. It’s like a glimpse into the future, or at least a deeper, more intense present...

G-Dragon—who has been in K-pop since the tender age of five—is known most of all for a crazy-but-cool fashion swag that has been garnering plenty of Western attention, but he also plays a larger creative role in his music and videos than many K-idols do. The guy carries on like a cross between Nicki Minaj, Agyness Deyn and Jim Carrey. The best term to describe “One of a Kind” was coined by Dusk and Blackdown: ‘ghetto ridiculous’...

Bouncing over a beat that chops up succulent slabs of thrash-wobble, it’s what hip-hop might look like minus the key element of ‘keeping it real’: crisp oversize hoodies, children, a tiger, a bear, a sequence featuring a tennis tantrum in a fashion museum, and a color-scheme that suggests a barcode angrily losing its mind... G-Dragon is keenly aware of the unrealism of swag, of swag as a dream that is performed...

With his deep voice, mature looks and gentlemanly suave, you might be forgiven for expecting T.O.P to lean over a grand piano with a whisky and pour his heart into a good old croon. Nope. Appearing as a gelato-haired Capital-of-Panem dandy general in “Fantastic Baby”, T.O.P becomes an early-twentieth-century gentleman adventurer for the existentialist fever dream that is “Doom Dada”.This one has a particularly intriguing beat, with its minimal Space Invaders synth, swooping ice-cold textures and child crying out at the bottom of a well (fortunately, the instrumental’s out there). T.O.P raps over this at an intimidating pace, dribbling wantonly surreal lyrics such as, “you with the sleeping cells, have you seen the last weapon… shower that washes the eardrums, you unstoppable hot souls...”

The idol that makes f(x) particularly special is the androgynous Amber Liu, who flouts gender norms by rapping and singing in a deeper voice, having short hair, and flaunting her straighter silhouette in more male-gendered clothing (typically, the same type of thing streetwise boy bands like BTS would be wearing), even though it means she doesn’t match the others. But watch any video and you’ll see that that’s far from a problem. The idea that someone like Amber would not just be welcome but celebrated in a girl group alongside women with a more conventional image is pretty liberating. Can you imagine such a thing in Western pop? AND Amber speaks three languages fluently and has a black belt in Taekwondo. Best idol ever...

Sound progressive? Some recent K-pop videos have been downright revolutionary. In what is probably something of a response to the Arab Spring, Occupy, austerity riots and recent Hollywood films (e.g. The Hunger Games, Elysium), there’s been a spate of them depicting violent dystopian uprisings against oppressive regimes—Big Bang’s “Fantastic Baby”, BTS’s “NO” and B.A.P’s “Badman” for example. These images, as well as K-pop fashion’s recurrent interest in military-style clothing, become particularly resonant when you remember that South Korea has an oppressive regime very close to home. Taeyang’s “Ringa Linga’” begins its otherwise merely let’s-get-this-party-started lyrics with the intriguing simile, “Put your hands up like the country’s been liberated.” The video for G-Dragon’s “Coup d’Etat” arguably sees him become a despot, but at its conclusion he destroys a giant concrete wall, donning a red balaclava and standing in front of giant red flags...

Pattern Recognition Vol. 10: Pon! Cuter Love

v cute illustration by inka gerbert

The latest Pattern Recognition is on the spread of cuteness in the UK and US electronic music undergrounds, especially the influence of the Japanese kawaii aesthetic (click here to read). Featuring JACK댄스, Power Lunches, AG Cook, FELICITA, SOPHIE, DJ Paypal, Tielsie, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, nightcore, j-core, Kanja, ZOOM LENS, Slime Girls, Yasumiyasumi, i-fls, SPF420 & MEISHI SMILE. Includes a rare occasion on which I actually report back on an actual live music even I actually went to. Survived online cold turkey for several hours. The intense cuteness helped.

I think Power Lunches is my favorite club in London right now. The place is like a weird light blue diner and it’s always full of aliens. It’s got flamboyant artificial plants and avant-garde beer bottles and its sound system is proper good—it loves to make a parping noise that sounds like the universe ripping open. Weekend before last, I squeezed myself into its basement and had my brain scrubbed by digital damagists Brood Ma and Recsund, then soothed by the elegant dream-dance of Emotional. Last weekend I dragged some friends down there with the promise of cuteness...

Oh yeah, Sophie, who you might have heard of. Well, we all thought Sophie’s set was one of the best things we’d moved our tushies to in ages, and it was cute, too. The set sounded like it was full of new material—wiggly synth lines and pushy pop divas with their voices pitched up, like grime all painted pink. The other acts played all kinds of tunes—I think we heard Avril Lavigne and a rave remix of the Fireman Sam theme tune. So yeah, it wasn’t a dubstep night or anything...

Cuteness is coming up. Seems like a network of younger producers and DJs are not particularly inclined towards the more po-faced and straight-laced tastes and traditions, be they the screwface macho mainline of the old UK hardcore continuum or the leagues of frowning analogue avants or the Right and Proper Preservation of House. They’d rather have the even more euphoric, poppy, often faster-paced melodic hardcore with pitched-up vocals—the whole thing pitched up really, often so’s there’s no real bass to speak of—and a pinch of weirdness thrown in...

Jack댄스 flyer

While you might have feared that Kyary’s music, videos and performances are little more than a raging torrent of soft, small, pastel-colored objects and lurid affirmation, what makes her art supremely cute is not ultimately the intensity of the cute imagery, but the subtle and charismatic way she wears it. Underneath all the sets and costumes, the slightly restrained, modest, almost shy way she performs the songs and their dance routines cleverly makes her both human and even more cute, since cute things are sooooooo much cuter when they aren’t aware of their cuteness...

I think the essence of cuteness is not just in being cute, in being diminutive, young, pastel-colored, sweet-tasting per se. It’s in being made cute, in having to perform cute, and perhaps in getting it slightly wrong in the process.. I think Kyary dresses up as ‘dressing up’... When you remember that the figure at the center of all these parades is a representation of a pre-pubescent child, the videos can become remarkably poignant...

The California-based Zoom Lens label has a japanophile and cute flavor in much of its imagery and music, which blends dreamy indie with 8-bit and rave euphoria. Slime Girls’ Vacation Wasteland offers really well-composed melodic rock album rendered in 8-bit, yasumiyasumi’s Tokyo Digital Love is a more diverse, almost cinematic take on the same, while i-fls’s Residential Town Loneliness skirts vaporwave with its endearing lil instrumentals... One of the more prominent hubs of middling-to-strong cuteness has been the TinyChat (a free online chatroom service) gig platform SPF420, where gigs have an overwhelmingly warm and upbeat atmosphere and where the track selection mixes underground sounds with songs so unashamedly poppy you wonder whether you’re at a school disco...

Meishi Smile - Lust

If 2014 is going to be a year of cuteness in the online underground, it represents yet another in a series of severe challenges the area has posed to the tastes of more traditional music undergrounds. First there was seapunk, then vaporwave, and now this?! All of them are ridiculous affronts to classic cool and bearded vinylologists—it’s like they don’t yearn to be taken seriously by the establishment or something!...