On Heavy Rotation: 26 July 2023
New music by NewJeans, Burial, MFR Souls x MDU a.k.a. TRP, Gooooose and A$AP Rocky
Thanks to a very kind tweet from Pitchfork writer Philip Sherburne, this newsletter gained a bunch of new subscribers last week. Thank you and welcome! Please note that English is not my first language (I’m Dutch), that it’s been more than a few years since I was a professional critic and that I really only started this newsletter when I found myself with some extra time after losing my job as a copywriter. (I’m close to landing a new one… fingers crossed). Intimidatingly, one of my new readers has an @nytimes e-mail address. So let me tell you all to go read the excellent 50 rappers, 50 stories feature that the Times published last week!
2NE1’s 2011 breakthrough video “I Am the Best”
Hip-hop was the first music I became a fan of, as a genre. I never got into K-pop with anywhere near the same kind of intensity, but I’ve been keeping check on it for over ten years. This started mainly because I was blogging about music videos (I still am, kind of) and I started seeing some of the most striking pop videos coming out of South Korea in the early 2010s. For some reason, it was almost always the girl groups (and some solo women) and never the boy bands who impressed me the most: 2NE1, 4Minute, f(x), Girls’ Generation, HyunA, Luna, Red Velvet and WJSN/Cosmic Girls in particular. The acts with the most interesting videos usually made the most interesting music as well, fortunately. Min Hee-jin was the artistic director behind three of the aforementioned groups, and now has her own label under Hybe Corporation, the biggest K-pop conglomerate of them all. Her first signing has just released my favourite new almost-an-album.
DISQUE POP DE LA SEMAINE
Cutting-edge dance pop like the short, slinky songs by NewJeans is kind of the holy grail of pop music for me. It’s not often done exactly right, but when it is (from Scritti Politti, my favourite group as a teenager in the 1980s to, more recently, artists like Robyn and Charli XCX), I can put it on repeat and… joy fills the room. By definition, K-pop experiments with musical styles, but to be honest I often find the results quite unsatisfactory. NewJeans, comprised of five girls between the ages of 15 and 19, debuted a year ago and immediately stood out with their look and sound, which was more in line with American and European fashions and styles. The singles “Ditto” and “Zero” featured subtle breakbeats that can be traced back to Jersey club, an underground dance style, and that surprising musical approach is even more pronounced on their current hit “Super Shy”. Another song on their new, second e.p. Get Up (five-and-a-half songs in over twelve delicious minutes) is “ETA”, which, with its cut-up horn sounds and a more robust, sped-up breakbeat, nods to Jersey’s edgier sister sound, Baltimore club. The most experimental track of the bunch is “ASAP”, which holds off from any beat at all for almost a minute and sees Minji, Hanni, Danielle and Hyein balance on Art of Noise-like synth clouds. The production and songwriting are a collaboration between Koreans, Americans and Scandinavians (including Erika de Casier and Smerz), with occasional input from some of the NewJeans members themselves. I honestly can’t tell their voices apart, but maybe that will come in time. They mainly sing in English, so singing along isn’t a problem regardless.
THREE SONGS
Burial tracks are like dreams. Time is stretched and condensed: sampled snippets can build for minutes and a single composition can last for up many more. After one is finished you can hardly describe what you’ve been listening to, but you know how it felt. Much seems to have happened, but the details have evaporated in a mist of muffled beats and dislocated vocals. The singing voice on “Unknown Summer” (there’s also a little boy talking about peace and quiet and a clear blue sky) sounds not unlike that of reggae legend (and frequent Massive Attack collaborator) Horace Andy, but, as in a dream, it really could have been anyone.
“The Game (Amapiano Bootleg)” started out, I have to assume, as an unofficial remix of the record it samples, the 2006 house track “The Game” by the Belgian producer Kid Crème. The original’s most popular iteration is Kid’s Piano Mix, but we’re talking regular house piano here and nothing approaching amapiano. Still, it must have made an impression in South Africa and Mdu a.k.a. TRIP is one of the veterans of the scene. Only a looped snippet of the original survives here and although it’s embedded deep in the mix, it’s an exotic enough sound source in this genre to give the track its deeply unusual, hypnotic feel.
Gooooose is the Shanghai-based musician Han Han and I think Rudiments is his sixth solo album. Even though it came out today and I’ve only listened to it once, I want to include a track here because I think it’s very good and strange, and “Sandbox” stood out to me on that first listen. Imagine if Aphex Twin made a jazz record. The drum sounds are very tactile. There’s what I could describe as a bass synth solo before a full orchestra blasts in a minute before the track ends in an acid cacophony. I can’t wait to listen to this album again and figure out what the hell else I’m listening to.
FULLSCREEN
A$AP Rocky may be starting an armed rebellion in “Riot (Rowdy Pipe’n)”, but you can’t deny the man’s patriotism. He’s driving a daisy-age tank, and his infantry is a gold pendant. The rapper (and director) is wielding hip-hop as soft power with a lot of flag-waving, expensive cars, beautiful women, high fashion, and a rain of dollar bills. Rap and rap videos have worked this way all over the world for decades of course, but rarely has it been this explicit. USA! USA!
My latest Echobox.radio Heavy Rotation show has been archived here. Listen to me talk in Dutch in between fantastic records for two hours. Playlist:
Vigro Deep - “Soundcheck” (Rinse)
DrummeRTee924 featuring Ross & Golden Lady - “Cyborg” (DrummeRTee924)
Aphex Twin - “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f” (Warp)
Sampha featuring Yaeji - “Spirit 2.0” (Young)
Róisín Murphy - “Fader” (Ninja Tune)
Jpegmafia & Danny Brown - “No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!” (Peggy)
Cable Ties - “Perfect Client” (Merge)
Baba Stiltz - “Wild Ride” (Public Possession)
Joanna Sternberg - “The Love I Give” (Fat Possum)
James Blake featuring the Ragga Twins - “Big Hammer” (Polydor)
Landstrumm - “Minimoo” (Swamp 81)
Karenn - “Happy Birthday” (Voam)
Barker - “Birmingham Screwdriver” (Smalltown Supersound)
Olof Dreijer - “Rosa Rugosa” (Hessle Audio)
Jlin - “Fourth Perspective” (Planet Mu)
Kode9 - “Infirmary” (Fabric Originals)
Al Wootton - “May Your Angels of Light Accept Him” (Trule)
PJ Harvey - “The Nether-edge” (Partisan)
Alabaster DePlume featuring Momoko Gill - “Did You Know” (International Anthem)
Jonny From Space - “Never the Right Time” (Grid)
Jaimie Branch - “Take Over the World” (International Anthem)
Keita Sano - “Sweet” (Morris Audio)
Ace of Base - “All That She Wants (Axel Boman x Off the Meds Extended Remix)” (Playground Music)
Jessy Lanza - “Limbo” (Hyperdub)
K-Lone - “Love is” (Wisdom Teeth)
Ploy - “Crazy BBY” (Timedance)
Tristan Arp - “End of a Line or Part of a Circle?” (3024)
Thanks once again for reading and listening, and remember you can stay up-to-date on all things Heavy Rotation by subscribing to my Spotify playlist of the same name and my Disque Pop de la Semaine and Fullscreen Instagram accounts. I will also never leave Twitter, I don’t care.