Joe Rainey - Niineta (pow wow music)
The kind of an album where language loses its structured meaning, and the texture of the sound is the one to guide you through what it’s trying to transmit. Joe Rainey’s music is the right and unexpected antidote to a side effect held by many alternative artists nowadays: the poor notion of focusing so much on infallible conceptualization, where it grounds you into thinking you can’t take away something that wasn’t apparently meant to be there and (therefore) you can’t criticize it, and the music becomes secondary to the overarching point. Niineta is an album that could very easily be fetishized – an industrial-tinged project consisting of pow wow music in the Ojibwe language, consisting entirely of chants and mainly based on a doomsday admission of sound, with many of Joe’s vocals sampled and forced into rather structured beats. A wonderful giving project that could be taken the wrong way by folks fascinated by those words, and uninterested in anything but that description above. But the music remains the antidote: you shut up and listen.
Rainey’s collection of pow wow offerings, something he’s been intensely dedicated to, as inaccessible as it could appear, referring to the sharp sounds and free structures, is actually quite inviting: once you step into the foggy sound, it’s a matter of understanding less the vocal acrobatics on display, but the mechanisms to convey melodies that surpass this album. Niineta is all original compositions, and pow wow music has mainly gotten by on compilations and recollections of live recordings – this isn’t a history lesson, but rather a replacing of Indigenous history into places that leave the isolated. It packs itself a real statement by taking these voices (all sung by one) and scattering them into sounds of static, as if making us realize they’ve been everywhere, in every corner of humanity, amidst even the electricity, this whole time, and we’re just catching up.
Producer Andrew Broder’s way of capturing Rainey’s voice makes for moments where I find myself out of place, because I don’t know for sure where the sounds are coming from, or where they’re particularly headed. I hear the backed up harmonies of “can key” next to hasty drum patterns, and they’re all kicks that never get to have that lingering echo in the mix, so they stay in that limbo, same as the vocals – so when the reasonably stable string section comes along, it’s as jarring as it is moving, likely because of one another. Rainey’s voice gets distorted and toyed with on “bezhigo”, and he lets it happen so his deeper intonations can get some proper air amidst so much oppression – a grotesque drywall of voices, through and through.
The album could, ostensibly, fall into a relentless gloom nearly for the sake of it. But it never does, because the human spirit of tradition is painted as a strong and resilient one. Not that it doesn’t put itself through the wringer. A song like “no chants”, right in the middle of the album, announces Joe’s voice with distortion worthy of gothic rock with percussion that assimilates trap’s 808s into a zombified death march, and Joe’s vocals stop and start with the same patterns taken apart and thrown back in. “easy on the cide” and “jr. flip” take that everlasting spirit of communion and take apart all the different voices, separating them through filters (respectively, autotuning the vocals and sharpening them on opposite sides of the mix to the point of being unbearably abrasive), and their tinkering with the strings gives them no room to hide. The sound simply doesn’t let up.
But the point is, that’s not it. Closer “phil’s offering” ends with potential decay, a buzzing drone of what seems to be a dead fly looped over, but it feels defiant. It won’t let something that could be a nuisance for many die; it simply won’t give up on its spirit, because it knows it could have something to offer. In this vision of pow wow music, the buzzing of a culture that’s been uncomfortable for and derided by many has something to say, and it can empower itself.
At times, the spirit thrust upon these songs is actually quite uplifting, the kind of uplifting that doesn’t hold the barriers many have held for it. The almost-opening of “b.e. son” comes in with loaded strings, and yellings of potential victory that get caught up in their own explosion, and that explosion is contained. When the strings take up the space among the wreckage in the final minute, it’s a surprising breeze in the wind. The relative sparseness of near-closer “ch. 1222”, almost resembling a piano ballad, is haunting in its own right, with how much space the wobbling percussion gives to the edges, yet that space is never fulfilled. It should be a moment of defeat, yet it comes off as one ready to take it step by step, conquering a world that’s forgotten it with time and precision. You gotta run for it! You gotta go there, you gotta be there.
Marcioz - Between Giant $houlders (glitch)
If it hurts too much, it’s probably because it won’t go away any time soon. The toughest moments on this album, veering toward the shades of electroacoustic compositions with the languid and sharp framing of wonky production, are downright unbearable and repelling. Losing the supposed respectability of ‘classier’ academic pieces in favor of the direct and the electronic; the kind of sounds that aren’t too far away to be felt or touched by just about anyone. Thinking about this album in said purely academic terms is exactly what it’s aiming to drive away. It doesn’t have the shape of that kind of music, nor the sheen, nor the ability to respect it from a ‘distance’, whatever that entails. You’re either involved, or you aren’t.
Considering the title, and the rather flashy titles and the casual cover art, Between Giant $houlders is a pretty no-nonsense release. Its political reasonings are more marked than ever, in Marcioz’s longest release ever: a detailing, by way of collage, of the lingering cultural and financial effects of colonialism, and European erasure of Brazilian heritage, and the attempt at recapturing those processes that inevitably got held back by incessant trauma. The method here is to take methods of European composition, through the lingo of contemporary experimental music, and rip them of their natural conclusions as pieces: reshaping by sheer insistence. It never caves to established structures (neither classical or contemporary) because this newfound world sees no mold worth following.
Thus, the thrusting of many of the tracks here is tied to how much Marcio can drag out the noises until they effectively don’t match with anything else. The compositions here are defiant to their own nature, almost as if they didn’t want to think of themselves as compositions in the traditional, canon sense, because that would be giving in to the “diabo coxo” (lame devil).
So, when this album is forced to end – because like with all music, it must end at some point –, “$ecretos de Un Ojo Atrapado (A Minha Mãe Me Avisou)” becomes more deliberately aimless, strutting around its faux-harpsichord and stopping itself with spoken word vocals, until it ends with no grace or warning. When it feels the need to bring in some type of extra color to its proceedings, it finds itself halfway through with “$ecretos de Una Boca Atrapada (Secrets of a Chocked Counteroffer)”, a terrifying beatbox match between a computer and some primal soul, and neither get to make a proper move to the center, so they fringe on the edges (indeed, a trapped mouth). For that matter, since this album is never calm, opener “Clau$trophozipper” pays due service to its name: a squeaky zipper opening up and down, in different channels, with garage synths in the background slowly escalating so the glitched artifacts never go away. It’s a brutal introduction, with no possible leeways out of it, and the jaunty, baroque-like melody in the second half only pokes fun at the discomfort – an attempt to “reconsider the clavichord and baroque music as a colonial fragment” that forces you to be in that position.
Faithful to its beliefs, the moments of beauty are also outright negated, and turned into discomfort once they have to face reality. The bluntest example of this is “Lo$ Traumas Mestizos”. Marcioz has dealt plenty of times with the cultural discomfort that comes with being someone with a mixed ancestry, and the incorporation of Rompiste Mis Flores’ voice into his kind of guitar-led production, where the Brazilian traditions encounter the unknown of the 1s and 0s, turns said voice into a spectral being. The typical deconstructed electronic composition tries to outcast everything else, before another voice, even more hidden and ashamed, comes out: “I was barely 7 years old – what is 7 years old? – and suddenly some voices on the street called me, “Black!””, and those voices keep escalating. It doesn’t matter what the narrator could think on their own, because that social judgment clouds any view.
For all the times it takes to make its points abundantly clear, once those facets are able to being unlocked (and even then, with the acknowledgement that if you weren’t there, there’s a big side to the story you’ll never know), it gets to have itself some kind of fun in its reshapings. It’ll never afford itself to be ludicrous, or humorous, because it knows better than to do what its colonizers would do – it never takes its suffering or its culture as a joke, and it doesn’t have that peripheral vision to mock, which is one of the prices of forcing itself to be close to the fire at all times. But there’s some glee in a rather understated aspect of this album, which is the flute work. Its inner workings on “New Potosí Capital ༽༽༽ $€€ Mercosul Visa” get to work those low ends before the beat comes in to never find some solid ground (and there’s even one hidden vocal melody around the 3-and-a-half minute mark that’s quite striking); said flute gets to have a more comprehensive payoff earlier in the highlight “Victim Award (Para Vocês Eu $ou Só Um ≁≁≁≁≁≁ & Em Respeito Ao Diabo Coxo)” with a nervous twitch in its system and different echos in different corners of the mix, sometimes even at the front center.
What’s being done this whole time is never going to be something that thinks of itself as anything less than righteous. The conceptual framing of an independent Brazil, free from the chains thrown to it centuries ago, is one being done here by exploiting those systems: throwing them apart from the inside. Incredibly ingenious, but also limited in some stances: some systems are hard to throw away just like that, and if you are stuck between ‘giant shoulders’, assimilating them with anything but bad blood is going to be harmful to one’s fight. It’s a good thing there’s never any sign of respect or remorse, and it never comes off as a pose – anything but! The issue here is, the aftermath. Between Giant $houlders spends its entire time destroying, but at some point something else has to be built. A wonderful manifesto, in practice and in theory, and I expect even more actions to follow. The global South as the matter of the conversation? I’m down. Let’s keep our eyes close to the action.
Mild Sorrow Integrated - arbol. (glitch pop)
Music made from the inside, for the outside. arbol. is the kind of record that appreciates the beauty of nature, and wants to revel in it all from a distance, but distance that will echo into a proper understanding of why it loves nature in the first place.
An album full of wonders, with many moments that stand out as miniatures that hold grander ideas. Mild Sorrow Integrated’s previous ‘thing’ was combining the harsher sounds of dark ambient with the explosions of dubstep, but this comes to be a different outlook on how to step outside into the world once the aspects that held the pandemic together start to dry up. Infinitely curious music, harkening to see what else is beyond these video game ‘bit’ tones. You’d expect there to be some tension from those apparently opposite forces, but the opposite seems to happen – the trees serve as a muse, and the digital landscapes reinforce how uncomparable those natural sensations are, and how oddly they can be translated to this world.
The moments here are in bits and pieces, in ways that make many songs palatable without necessarily feeling overstuffed, or even longer than they should be, with 30 minutes and time to spare. The drum-and-bass fluttering of “moonpop // jupiter’s tune” with dialing tone synths and voices ringing into the phone, singing a pretty melody to pass the time. Similar video game synths on top of somewhat harsher drums that hide some beatboxing on “fruit point syntax”, before the track raises the tempo and the slurry of chopped acoustic guitar comes around like a kid on a sugar rush; so when slower drums simmer the song down to rest, it’s like a parent slowly tucking you in. Those same acoustic guitars becoming electric, yet sly, on “leaves”, as they move in syncopation to a tremendous groove set, often interrupted to load a bit more, but always moving forward.
Those moments are what keep the album floating, and pressing on, and make way for utter beauty in the compositions, the kind that doesn’t stop reminding you of the gentle ways to be found. This album’s two real stabs at melodies, singable melodies that are sustained in time and aren’t held to notes, are in the two longer pieces on the second half. There’s “bow // bit rime”, with its more subdued percussion than usual, and an ethereal melody incorporating the released main chord progression, that keeps filling itself up by virtue of opening up the bass, and finding ways to let that blue sky near the composition, coloring the track with different kinds of brushes. Closer “plaza” cautiously takes a while to get going, but that’s because it wants to prepare itself: a composition moving backwards as a background laptop screen, so in front a main piano melody scatters itself on the track one note at a time, like a rock skipping in a lake; and the psychedelic strings that feel like a sample of a sample just feel like a casual reminder of how much there is in that wonder of a world that the outside can be.
For all of its many goods, Mild Sorrow Integrated proposes the Internet as a place of exploration, a safe space to understand one’s full potential, and prepare to realize it outside. Taking a deep breath before touching that external air, because the different simulations have all been run, and strangely enough, they all had positive outcomes. A flip on “touch grass” into its best and warmest conclusion.
Himera - Sharing Secrets (bubblegum bass)
I’m gonna miss this place!
Not all the way gone, though. Clearly, since Sharing Secrets exists. But it will leave, and wither away. All things must pass and such. It was one of the first times I ever felt that I was aware, wonderfully aware, that there was something else going on out there, and I could access it, and I wanted to access it. The PC Music boom, the at-times called ‘bubblegum bass’ that later translated to the much different hyperpop (which I admittedly don’t get along with as well as I’d want to). A.G. Cook, Hannah Diamond, Danny L Harle, easyFun, GFOTY, Spinee, Life Sim, Lipgloss Twins – for a long time, I called their “Doodle” my favorite song of all time, and I meant it. And of course, everyone’s bestie SOPHIE, who got away from this scene and sound right before it imploded, and then she left us wondering for the rest of our lives, as if we didn’t miss her so every day.
A lot of people at the time called their music a product of irony and detachment, or a kind of pseudo-postmodern shit with no theory that aimed to poke that bubblegum aesthetic while also tying itself to the same processes by way of cynicism. Whole time, I called bullshit. It was childish music, with very simple 1:1 ways to understand and process emotions, and you could definitely call it stunted at times. But never anything less than earnest (at least, when it came to the pros and those who really meant it). The music, at its best, would take the harshest tones imaginable in the lane of trance music and festival house, and place them in the context of pure isolation; they were tunes for people who felt, by a combination of many factors, that there was something about the outside world that was out of reach, and could only be accessed in fragments and parts. It was about trying your best to overcome, but also with a soothing effect that understood the difficulties. It was hard to deny the infantilization of some figures, and the mega cutesy aspects could get overbearing at times – but those weren’t the aspects that critics would hit them with. And the dignity that could arise from this way of pop music at its best wasn’t one that could be found so easily.
That scene is gone. Dissipated. Danny L Harle has gone to the art pop scene with Caroline Polacheck, A.G. Cook is doing who-knows-what-next with Charli XCX, and many of the other artists have tapered out and left things alone. Some things just simply end, and the future that they hypothesized over was simply not to be. And everyone’s moved on. So here’s a farewell.
Himera’s production is fit for moments of curious melancholy, where you find yourself missing things and people you never thought you would. Their entrance into the scattered circles of post-post-peak PC Music – such as their friendship with Umru and felicita, and even having Hannah Diamond on this album – makes it so they don’t tackle these plastic sounds with an air of a revival, but that of a bowing out. Faithful, but ultimately reaching somewhere else. It’s a favorite of mine in 2022 if only because it takes me back to those curious nights, where despair and enthusiasm felt like similar concepts. I feel that when I hear say, opener “Rubber Ball ♩ Wooden Horse ♩ Magic Wand ♩ Building Blocks”, and its waltz-like intro that stumbles into an airy agitated woman, before expanding into a glorious instrumental of synth stabbings and whirling artifacts. Stopping over and over into new ideas, this time with a better emphasis on instrumentals than before, where the plastic grossness underlined those same arpeggios, escalating towards an icy beyond.
This album is taking less from the GFOTY way, where the point was there was this constant wink at the audience inviting us to buy in with a wider tongue-in-cheek mood. Instead, it’s far closer to Cook’s solo music after he left behind the intentions of wonky, and before he took in the colder spheres of the Charli XCX albums; right in that sweet spot where there was a tad less humor, but a lot more space. The scattered vocals on “Pose!” aim for that curious feeling without getting to fully realize it. “Our Garden” attempts to kick start itself for 5 minutes, with far more assertive pianos than Cook ever had but a similar chaotic vibe of caged-in vocals spurring themselves out, like an anxious party with no bass. But Himera also gives bigger room to the Life Sim inspirations of rollercoaster synths met with blasting drums and bubbled up breakdowns, like on “Today I Opened My Eyes”, which always veers towards a realization it doesn’t feel comfortable meeting – so when it has to, it generates melodies by way of fighting stances, and they still get swapped away for other, perhaps newer beginnings, even if there’s a rush to move forward.
At first, I wasn’t a fan of the sung tunes on the album, the ones with more present features beyond muses for samples, with the exception of the pent up “Faith” by the end, which I never had qualms with. I still think “Taco” featuring Tohji can be a little too 2013 ‘random’ tumblr-like (it’s called “Taco”), but I grew to appreciate Tohji’s hushed delivery, and the more anxious groove, the closest one here made to fit a club, gets to fully win me over. But the one I misjudged the most at first was “Kiss”. Hannah Diamond on vocals, a legend in her field, but also a singer who’s always been so produced as if made to fit the image of an avatar, removing the person beneath her, which has led to some questionable implications in her music, as well as an awkward fanbase of weirdos who don’t want to acknowledge their female pop icons as living breathing people. “Kiss” also plays into a projection of some basement dweeb’s fantasies, but there’s more agency than before: a close vocal pick up, uncomfortably close, closer than many have gotten; Hannah’s vocals perpetrate what the other person wants, and will provide as long as the other person can also get there; the image of her as one of the girls on “the covers of magazines” isn’t glamorous or sad, it’s status. As well as that, Himera builds towards really tense definitions, where the harsher noise isn’t held back and is rather utilized for that extra climax, because the longing on display can’t be eased with a kiss; that’s what’s acknowledged here, and that’s the advancement that’s key to unlocking the next step.
I must say, I connected rather heavily to “You Make It Look So Easy (S.M.I.LE.Y)”, a song that might never be made like this in its raw form again. At its core, it’s split into 3 sections. A main refrain dominates the first 2 minutes, and it’s a hell of a refrain: curious, sighing, bracing forward, taking a step forward, and then bursting to make way for itself again. Each iteration stronger than the last, with more layers, and it moves through the then-young genre’s notions of how hard it is to let go, and sprinkles around the digital stars to no avail, searching everyone with the same method over and over, and every time, there’s something missing. Petal Supply’s chipmunked “I wish you were here”s are almost unnecessary, but they help pin down how easy it is to understand these seemingly more complicated emotions. As the song moves on, for the typical trance chords and the isolated vocals, the climaxes and the lower moments of introspection seam into one another, and as the melody is morphed into alarm bells – right before it all bubbles itself up, and is let go! Its sense of bubblegum deals with the emotional struggle by cleansing it of any possible skepticism of itself, and then promptly wishes it away. It wants it to really be that easy. It also wishes they were here.
The same way we started, the closing track seems to give itself away in the title, until it seems to be a main starting point. The enclosed structure of a lullaby-like first half that’s met with a panoramic digital expansion in its second half is much more well accommodated in this finale, and it’s one of the best possible versions of the genre: a final, Dreamworks-esque restrengthening of a potential hero in the final scene, right before they sway along to a new land, and we bid our farewell. Bubblegum bass, if that even was a genre, was a limited one with not enough future, and certainly not the future of pop music predicted to it by some randos. What it actually was is a lot simpler to describe: a moment of significance of values and tantrums for those with a stronger itch for something that that they didn’t know was there, and a way forward to understanding the best and worst aspects of relegated pop music. At the same time, a boldening of people who didn’t even fit into the hip aspects of the underground, and who could finally carve themselves a strong niche. An entry into something else. So when Sharing Secrets ends with a song called, “Good Night, I Hope the Future Only Brings You the Best!”, it’s as much of a nod to the sounds as it is to those who got to hear them at the right time. For better or worse, no dreams die, even the most far out ones – best we can do is hope they didn’t destroy us on our way out the door.