It's not butterflies or fireworks
Mix 29: Soft bangers by Jessy Lanza, Carly Rae Jepsen, Tinashe, Jamila Woods, Aluna sans George, Shygirl, and Dej Loaf, plus Icelandic italodisco and clipping. riding a wave of noise
Each week I skim through about 2,000 songs mostly from Spotify's company-curated New Music Friday playlists. Whenever I find 80 minutes worth of music I like, I make a CD-length mix and write a newsletter about it.
Did I tell you that right before I left for vacation I got stung a dozen or so times by a swarm of wasps that burrowed into our compost bin? I was thinking about that as I read the below description of baile funk from Nyege Nyege Tapes, who it turns out is responsible for releasing that DJ K album I featured last week:
[In the 2010s,] artists like Bin Laden and MC Kauan would perform alongside dancers dressed as jokers, clowns, exorcists, nuns and other horror archetypes. This profane, carnivalesque atmosphere is taken beyond its limit by DJ K, who saturates Arabic chants, devastating kicks and rowdy textures pushing everything into the red.
A key component of his sound is known locally as 'tuin', a hyper-shrill and piecing squeal like the sirens on 'Isso Não é um Teste' and 'Sequência Terrorista de Heliópolis'. What at first might seem irritating and provocative is actually intimately interfaced with the environment and lifestyle of São Paulo's bailes.
Tuin is what the baile funk enthusiasts call the auditory hallucination caused by lança perfume, one of the most used drugs in funk culture. Mostly chloroethane mixed with perfume and often sold in pre-packaged high-pressure tubes, its effects are an increased heart rate, euphoria, and sensitivity to high-volume and high-pitched sounds. Thus, the sound of tuin is skillfully designed by DJs to build a hallucinogenic experience that goes beyond music. What some understand as noise, in baile funk is a stimulus for a trip to the edges of consciousness: the impulsive and uncontrollable desire to dance or move — or "embrazar", as they say in the bailes.
This does not answer my questions as to why DJ K seems more arty and affected than other strident baile funk that seems just as hallucinatory, if perhaps less carnivalesque than they describe. But it does answer many questions I did not have about illicit inhalants in São Paulo, and makes me thankful that I encountered my wasp friends sober.
In other news, I see that the margarita song from last week (“One Margarita” by That Chick Angel) is, as I suspected, a viral Tiktok thing from a comedian. But I did not know it’s a response song to an anti-gay preacher.
Mix 1 // Mix 2 // Mix 3 // Mix 4 // Mix 5 // Mix 6 // Mix 7 // Mix 8 // Mix 9 // Mix 10 // Mix 11 // Mix 12 // Mix 13 // Mix 14 // Mix 15 // Mix 16 // Mix 17 // Mix 18 // Mix 19 // Mix 20 // Mix 21 // Mix 22 // Mix 23 // Mix 24 // Mix 25 // Mix 26 // Mix 27 // Mix 28
MIX 29: IT’S NOT BUTTERFLIES OR FIREWORKS
1. Jessy Lanza: Limbo
This is the first of a long block of soft bangers, the first two distinctively Canadian. On “Limbo” you get a restrained “My Boo” homage of the sort last seen on “Moonlight Sunrise” by TWICE—both songs recommended by Joshua Minsoo Kim, and as far as I know Joshua was the only one comparing “Limbo” to Atlanta bass.
2. Carly Rae Jepsen: Psychedelic Switch
I needed no special algorithms to find this CRJ track, though it took me a few listens to warm to it, and also to identify “One More Time” by Daft Punk in it, a comparison that I am apparently late to making. Sue me — I haven’t clicked with Carly Rae Jepsen in ten years!
3. Tinashe: Talk to Me Nice
Woozy and layered, there are at least two good songs in here, a promising hint of more minimalist R&B from the spiritual heir to the blank slate divas of the mid-aughts. What do we call that minimalist trend in hindsight? R&Blank?
4. Jamila Woods f. duendita: Tiny Garden
Usually admire-don’t-love Jamila Woods from afar; this time I admire-don’t-love her a bit closer up.
5. Aluna: The Way I’m Wired
Aluna sans George, I likely wouldn’t have clocked it if I hadn’t mistaken it for a new AlunaGeorge single, so lucky for me it kinda sorta was.
6. The Japanese House: Boyhood
Had no recollection of The Japanese House over at the Singles Jukebox, but she made an appearance back in 2017 to middling reviews. Phrases from those reviews capture the vibe of “soft banger,” though: Alfred Soto’s “shimmer and lopsided gait…a face like mist”; Dorian Sinclair’s “inoffensive, dreamlike”; Josh Langhoff’s “the glistening aftermath of a storm”; Megan Harrington’s “feel good ’80s nostalgia with an affectless vocal”; and Claire Biddles’s “decorative [rather than] vital.” Check, check, check, check, and check.
7. Shygirl f. Erika de Casier: Crush
Sounds like there’s more Erika de Casier in this than Shygirl per se, which doesn’t bother me as De Casier’s songwriting chops have been solidified in her work with NewJeans — just like how King Midas “solidified” stuff, too.
8. Dej Loaf f. Teni & Cheekychizzy: Please Don’t Go
Got an immediate sense of Naija pop in this song from Dej Loaf, whom I haven’t heard since I was teaching high school, where my students listened to her a lot. No surprise that, sure enough, collaborators Teni and Cheekychizzy are Nigerian. Nor was I surprised she fit in so well: the glass sculpture garden of Naija pop is a no-brainer mise en scène for the post-R&Blank divas of the mid-10s. (Rihanna is neither blank nor post-blank and wouldn’t quite fit in amongst the glass sculptures, I think; so far she has not taken my advice to make an amapiano album instead.)
9. SHEBAD: Patience
Here we’ve tiptoed out of the soft banger suite and into something a more eclectic, though not much harder: soul vocals, jazz-fusion noodling, light post-rock drumming in various time signatures, occasional flashes of indie strings and horns. Canadian.
10. Ultraflex: Digg Digg Deilig
Synth-pop duo comprises members from Iceland and Norway but claims inspiration from Soviet-era Russian pop and italodisco.
11. Wombo: Slab
Brief post-punk trifle, mostly texture.
12. Swedish House Mafia: Ray of Solar
I remember Swedish House Mafia sounding much dumber than this, which is not to say that this does not sound dumb (it does, a little) but it nonetheless provides another clue that from my uninformed EDM vantage a bunch of formerly big dumb EDM acts are revealing more sophisticated tastes now that the genre bubble has burst, which would make ending the best thing that ever happened to EDM. But as my mom taught me the Judds taught her, every ending is a new beginning.
13. Bike: Santa Cabeça (Minami Deutsch Remix)
Brazilian psych-rock gets remixed by a Japanese band that bills itself as krautrock — the blend is appealing, though the original isn’t without its dreaminess, and the accompanying album is worth checking out.
14. Salin: Si Chomphu
Each week I seem to get another scrap of Frank Zappa bootleg ephemera from Spotify. So imagine my delight that I can finally rep an aimless guitar solo in a much shorter song by a Thai-Canadian woman instead.
15. Myaap: Hts
Low-rent (and better for it) Milwaukee bounce, single-minded about making you dance, like a cartoon bully shooting pistols at the ground around your feet while someone films it for Tiktok.
16. Varhız & SİMO: ŞUKAR
Noisy Turkish rappers who seem to be incorporating a pinch of baile funk in their style, though they could use another couple tablespoons.
17. DJs Di Guetto & DJ N.K.: Mete Chuva Muita Chuva
Noisy Portuguese DJs, another winner from the Príncipe label.
18. TravelCore, Trackademic, & Mike Baker the Bike Maker: Sippin’ Mai Tais on Kauai
Decided I could indeed justify including this decidedly dorky Native Tongues-rhapsodizing track on its sample alone: Mai Tai’s 1985 European smash “History,” which they squeeze every penny out of.
19. 細井徳太郎: 魚_魚 [Tokutaro Hosoi: Yu_Yu (“Fish_Fish”)]
Vocoder-heavy electro that juts out at odd angles. This track tempered my inclination to include a Max Tundra rerecording of his 2002 song “Lights” from Mastered by Guy at The Exchange.
20. Hikaru Utada: Gold また会う日まで [Mata Au Hi Made “Until the Day We Meet Again” w/ strikethrough]
New single from the Japanese star whose disco-ish album from last year I really liked, but about whose much longer career (qualified for the People’s Pop Late Work poll!) I know little. Not sure I’ve seen a song yet this year that comes with its own strikethrough html that’s impossible to replicate on most streaming services. Anyway, just mentally cross out “until the day we meet again” — apparently that’s not happening.
21. Aho Ssan f. clipping. & Resina: Till the Sun Down
Abrasive, which is par for the course for a clipping. feature, and long, which is also par for the course, but compresses the characteristic ratatat rapping into the middle, like an impossibly dense nucleus at the center of a song made of a swarm of electrons circling a vast empty space.
***
Ack, “swarm”! I shudder to mention it. But speaking of impossibly dense nuclei, I’m still trying to find a book that’ll explain me basic physics like I am impossibly dense about the subject. Currently enjoying Chad Orzel’s Breakfast with Einstein but can feel the physics phacts draining from me like…some physical phenomenon heretofore described in the book that I’ve forgotten. (See?) Any recommendations? Send ‘em my way.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from Jamila Woods f. duendita’s “Tiny Garden.”