this is your music on brain
new music from cameron winter, sleeper's bell, eddie chacon, the convenience and
This weekend I read a wacky article from Bon Appetit about a mayonnaise-pineapple sandwich and almost without thinking, got the ingredients to try it.
I took one bite and immediately thought, what am I doing. No one can tell what’s going on, other than agreeing that we’re in some degree of constitutional crisis. Eric Adams’ corruption charges are dropped, which means his Bringing Swag Back bit is about to get a big splash of bootlicking, and he’ll find a way to keep throwing money at the NYPD while the MTA gets drained unless we fall in line on ICE raids. I’m mid-chew in this sandwich that tastes like I’m eating a 2012 Buzzfeed article and I’m freaking out about what the city and country will look like for my kid. Do I need to learn how to fire a gun??
Anyways the sandwich tastes exactly like you think it would, but would slap with bacon like a Hawaiian Pizza BLT. Next time!
Anyways, here are the Good Links:
This Is Your Music On Brain – Richmond electronic musician Molasses Industries had a benign tumor removed from his brain, so of course he ran CV through it into his modular. The resulting musical output is pretty interesting but it’s genuinely, impressively gross – and tbh “my neurosurgery team let me take a portion [of the tumor] home” is a hospital perk I didn’t know existed. Speedy recovery dude!
No Fit Off Without A Knockoff – Sam Valenti’s wise words on the power of the bootleg, and the importance of being bootleg-able
TV on the Radio on the Tascam – Tunde Adebimpe shared the original demo for “Young Liars,” which is amazingly well-formed for a cassette four-track sketch!
Kool Things – Thurston Moore talked about what he can’t live without with the Strategist, including way more lotion and soap than you’d expect
As always, you can follow along on our playlists on Spotify and Apple Music, which update every Tuesday along with the newsletter. Enjoy!
Cameron Winter – Love Takes Miles
My friend Nathan pitched this record to me as “what if SMOG made a Wilco album and was 20 years old” which is both an effective pitch to get me to check an LP out, and turns out, a pretty accurate take on Heavy Metal. That said, the mix of intentional amateurism, Winter’s unusual baritone in off-kilter layers, and the mix of the strange and the consonant remind me of the initial run of Brian Eno solo LPs. There are so many standout moments on Heavy Metal, but “Love Takes Miles” has an endearing Eno/Cage heartbeat in its oblong structure, armed with my favorite chorus of the year so far.
Sleeper’s Bell – Bad Word
“Bad Word” is a killer portrait of living in the middle of heartache from Chicago duo Sleeper’s Bell. The instrumental opens up after a devastating couplet – “We got right back together/ Now we treat her name like a bad word/ Feeling light as a feather/ Til I think about her.” The song finds no resolution, instead sitting in the middle of the bad feelings of trying to figure out what you mean to someone else and what they mean to you amidst heartbreak.
The Convenience – Dub Vultures
“Dub Vultures” is a slice of nervous post-punk that constantly seems to fall over and reset itself as it collapses into a new refrain or texture. The stop-start energy may be the result of the New Orleans’ duo using loops from improvised jams to write the songs for their new LP Like Cartoon Vampires – but the result feels less art project and more like guitar-pop classics refracted through a broken lens.
Zach Bryan – Dear Miss
Bryan said he’d release this song if the Eagles won on Sunday, and thankfully he wasn’t too distracted by Kendrick’s flare jeans to remember to drop the song.
Eddie Chacon – Let You Go
Lay Low, the latest LP from Eddie Chacon was recorded over two years in Nick Hakim’s Brooklyn studio, but Chacon’s West Coast roots shine through in the album’s dusty, rubbery funk. There are drizzles of Shuggie Otis and Arthur Russell in Hakim’s production, but at the root of each song is a familiar FM R&B pocket. The songs are equally fitting from Stones Throw, who put the record out, or a deep dollar bin cut – nothing is retro, but everything is timeless.
throwback
Rutherford Chang – White Album Side 1 x 100
My friend Nick wrote a lovely in memoriam for artist Rutherford Chang, whose We Buy White Albums project led to one of my favorite ambient experiments, “White Album Side 1 x 100.” Chang collected first editions of White Albums and decided to record 100 of them, syncing their start point and then letting them slowly drift apart. It’s a haunting, wonderful listen – it takes longer than you’d think for it to devolve into ambient chaos – and I highly recommend taking a listen today in Chang’s memory.