A massive blizzard hit Madison last week (two in a row, really), delivering the knockout blow to everyone’s routine. For me, other than massive amounts of shoveling, it meant making my way home from work at 2:30 PM on Friday to an empty house and nowhere in particular to go, or anything to do. So, in keeping with certain Wisconsin traditions, I ate some cheese, cracked a beer, and started pulling out records. I will often scratch my DJ itch by playing tracks for an hour or so on blast radio, usually with no plan, just checking out some new things I’ve picked up and pulling things out on the fly that may go well with them. The result is usually a mix I can listen back to for a few days and enjoy privately, but nothing I’d really want anyone else to hear. Every now and then, though, one of them really clicks. Friday’s mix was one of those; blinding snow was swirling and clumping outside, an even earlier darkness was setting in, and I got into the zone. I posted this one up on my mixcloud and I thought it would be interesting to annotate the tracks here.
KEVIN McCORMICK & DAVID HORRIDGE “coast lines” is from their excellent reissue on the Smiling C label which I absolutely adore. This LP is kindof a homebrew ECM record, just the right amount of mid-fi, crunchy compression on a guitar duet. For some reason I had Paul McCartney’s ‘Check My Machine’ in my head so I thought I’d start the mix with that, but then I realized its on a 45, not on the McCartney II LP. McCormick was right next to it so on it went. A mellow mood starter that lays on soft tones in drifts. It’s interesting to think of these guys exploring such delicately exploratory music given what was going on in early 80s Manchester.
BOWERY ELECTRIC “without stopping” from the 20th anniversary reissue of Beat on Kranky. I bought this on Friday before I left work. I’d been meaning to pick it up for a long time and something about the blizzard just said “it is time”. I did not get into Bowery Electric back in the day. If I was aware of them, their name was too imposingly vague to trip my sensor. After discovering Seefeel, I found my way to them, in search of more music that stripped rock-band structures back to a bare frame, all pop elements removed and replaced by a cloud factory. I recently picked up the Kranky book, which mentions that Bowery Electric made their name in New York by getting on bills with more rock-oriented lineups and then just drowning the club in swirls of cascading low-end and reverbed guitars. It also mentions that they started using a drum machine because their drummers kept quitting, which is sortof amusing given how essential the mechanized rhythm is in all of their work. Martha Schwendener’s lyrics, breathed out with the same sustain as the rest of their sound, are an essential part of the package: “The more you hurry / The later you become”.
SUNDA ARC “flicker” from their 2018 EP on Gondwana Records. The ice floe chunks on the cover of this one compelled me to put it on as all the snow swirled around. I do not know much about this duo, but a friend gave me their double of this, which happens from time to time in my line of work and is always appreciated. I’m a sucker for electronica with a big grand piano at the center. This track is perfectly economical: a stately progression of keys (I don’t know how to describe piano at all), a nice pulsing kick, and just the right amount of squelches to keep it from sounding like a modern Windham Hill record.
MAPSTATION “was dazu gehort” from Sleep, Engine Sleep on Staubgold, 2000. Odds are, there is a German electronic song on every mix I have ever made, unless the brief specifically advises against it. There is just a never-ending supply of inventive music, made synthetically, out of Germany, whether its the guys who created the whole deal (Kraftwerk), or the many permutations of electronic pop and avant-garde sound made since then. Mapstation was a project by Stefan Schneider, who made a lot of other great records as part of To Rococo Rot, Kreidler, and Automne Six. I love this song because it starts off as seemingly just a random sequence of tones, and then slowly resolves into a kind of minimalist anthem.
DIE WELTTRAUMFORSCHER “sweet bird” from 21 Weltraum-Standards, on Staubgold (again). One of the perks of my job is I can sometimes kill time by exploring what deadstock certain distributors still have kicking around from many many years ago, often still priced accordingly, and thusly scoop up some unjustly overlooked 20 year old gems from a cant-miss label like Staubgold, in like new condition and costing as much as records did when a Bush was president. Die Welttraumforscher translates to something like The Dreamworld Explorers, which is perhaps the greatest bandname of all time, and is actually the many-decades running solo project of a Swiss fellow named Christian Pfluger. His multitudinous corpus of cassette releases has been helpfully parceled out into a couple of great compilations, which gives you a broad swathe of multi-genre playfulness. This tune is especially childlike and fun, and features the always welcome warmth of the melodica.
JEFRE CANTU-LEDESMA “joy”, from Tracing Back The Radiance on Mexican Summer, 2019. I have been eagerly devouring the music of Jefre C-L for all my grown life, ever since falling entranced by his era-defining post-rock group Tarentel. His more recent solo work has continued to establish new levels of immersive, blossoming sound. This album might be my favorite of all of his pieces of work, that I have heard. He also has an incredible editorial hand when it comes to selecting guest musicians. On this gorgeous piece, he plays vibraphone, while Jonathan Sielaff from Golden Retriever delivers some exceptionally soaring bass clarinet, and Mary Lattimore weaves a lattice of harp near the conclusion.
DIE WELTTRAUMFORSCHER “deine aller schonsten dinge” from 21 Weltraum-Standards, again. This was the track I wanted to play earlier in the mix, but '“Sweet Bird” seemed to fit much better. If I wasn’t writing these notes, nobody would ever suspect it was the same artist. Emotional Bunnymen-style pop drive really hitting the spot here.
CAROLINE POLACHEK “go as a dream” from Pang. 2023 was the year I finally got with the program and began a healthy obsession with C-Pol. I had heard some Chairlift songs that I dug, her spots on Blood Orange tracks were always spot on, and I loved the Ramona Lisa album without realizing it was her. Her new album was a revelation, and it led me back to Pang, which came out during Das Rona Era and didn’t seem to get much publicity (to me, at least). The production on these records is freaking insane; so much energy and punch and vigor exists in such a vast space that threatens to dissolve it but never does. Polachek has an incredibly powerful voice that she can use with a limitless amount of subtlety and nuance, but she sounds like a relatively normal human being at the same time. Pang is full of bangers that are probably on steady rotation in clothing stores I don’t shop at, but I am forever drawn to this dreamy one.
E IS SKY “jr-iae_thegarden_180614” from In The Afternoon on the Vessel label. I’ve had this record on the table a lot lately, and it just so happened that I cued it up after “go as a dream”, and its opening piano notes almost perfectly matched the prior songs vocal melody, before slowly fragmenting away. E Is Sky is the lone record from a briefly existing Australian trio of Corin Ileto, Becky Sui Zhen, and Casey Hartnett. Becky is one of my favorite musicians and people, and I will check out anything she does, and this one was a welcome surprise; a fleeting set of improvisations meant to serve as background music to an Impressionist art exhibition in Sydney. The spirit of Sakamoto is alive and well in this one.
CLAUDE LARSON “rhone delta” from Rivers, Selected Sound, 1981. Claude Larson is the nom-du-synthe of the one and only Klaus Netzle, one of Germany’s lesser-celebrated library synth composers, who I first came to know and love on the Tri Atma LP Yearning and Harmony. Every note of this sumptuous track was recorded on a Fairlight, but it sounds nothing like Herbie Hancock or Stevie Wonder’s music made on the same giant instrument.
DAVID KEANE “elektronikus mozaik” from Aurora, 1985. I pulled this one out at random. I’m not even sure I had listened to it before, nor do I remember how I got it or why, other than that it was avant-garde electronic music with an amazing cover. The piece that this small excerpt comes from has several very poignant moments of dissonance like this, interspersed with some absolutely mood-wrecking atonal clusters of noise. I isolated a minute or two here that approximated the randomness of snowflakes.
E.R.P. “alsoran” from alsoran, originally 2007 on Frantic Flowers label, (this is the 2013 reissue). Keane’s “Mozaik” blended perfectly into the opening drift of “alsoran”, maybe my favorite deep electro track of all time, made by one of the undisputed kings of the genre Gerard Hanson aka Convextion. Back in the filesharing days, I used to download segments of the legendary Cybernetic Broadcasting System’s annual Top 100, where radio host I-F did his best Casey Kasem counting down the years best electro tunes as voted by an audience that I couldn’t really believe existed, as I only knew of 2 or 3 people who liked electro (sup Ron and Ari). Anyway his extreme enthusiasm for “EHHRP” led me to check out this EP which is an absolute masterpiece that I never get tired of hearing many years later. It will forever blow my mind that music this sleek, dark and mysterious was made not in Detroit, den Haag, or Berlin, but Dallas, Texas.
KMRU “erased” from Erased EP, Byrd Out, 2019. I had no idea where this mix was going but I knew it would end up here. When the Kenyan-born Joseph Kamaru’s vivid ambient albums first started hitting (Peel, Jar, and Logue all came out seemingly within the span of 6 months), I went back and checked out his debut EP, which showcases his knack for blending synthetic chords and field recordings, but also goes for this stuttering triumphant sequence of stabs that rushes blood throughout your entire body, and then dissipates before it wears out its welcome. Ideally, you had spent the length of this mix shoveling a very long walkway, and this song was the perfect soundtrack to looking back on your work with exhausted pride.
Well now I gotta listen again