(Not a) Mood Hut Feature

“People often only think of Mood Hut as a record label, but we are foremost a collective, and for a long time we did free park parties in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. For me, those nights reached close to the potential of what dances can be. When none of the usual constraints are put upon you, and when everyone is present in a beautiful place, willing to give themselves over to the whole thing. That’s when things can really ascend.”

Read more: (Not a) Mood Hut Feature

Back in 2014, Andrew Morgan dosed me with a jam called “Openin’ Up,” which opened me up to the curious incubatory sound emanating from Vancouver and a span of cryptic 12″s on the nascent Mood Hut label. Over the years, the label/ collective have remained elusive: going ambient instead of clubby, dropping an album of diffuse disco edits, and other unexpected left turns.

Nearly ten years along, Jack J drops the first proper artist album for Mood Hut, a lovely, effervescent, contemplative album which a certain music website lamented as having “no obvious epic or clear highlight.” As a longtime fan, I took the opportunity to chat with Jack (as well as Chris Wang and Yu Su) and to dip a toe into the Mood Hut mystique and “that sound.”

Jack J and the Mood Hut Collective Reimagine Dance Music In New Forms for Bandcamp

Brushed Thoughts Shift at Dawn mix

Been a minute, but I made a new Buy Music Club mix. It’s origins lie in a mix originally conceived at the nadir of February (working title “OOF/ebruary”), focused on new releases and recent listening. I was touched that artists like Woo and the Havels both reached out to me to share their new works and included some of that here. Other highlights include Joseph Shabason’s dreamy interpretation of Satie, the new Batu, and Eiko Ishibashi’s Drive My Car score.

Brushed Thoughts Shift at Dawn at Buy Music Club

The Lot Radio

Not actually the view from The Lot Radio.

Last month, I did a special Sunday morning set for The Lot Radio. That day was thick with chilly clouds, so I leaned into that sort of ambience, starting off with some chorale clouds, gradually adding a little sprinkle of some more spring-beckoning sounds on the back half of the set.

Beta World Peace @ The Lot Radio 3-6-22

Vaguely remembered tracklisting below:

Yasuaki Shimizu

“I was playing around with a radio transmitter I’d made when I heard something from outside the house and, fascinated, followed the sound outdoors. Striding off down the path between the rice fields, I paused halfway along the expanse of paddies to listen, and heard a chorus of thousands, tens of thousands of insects, like a wave of electronic sound washing over me. It was this experience that sparked my interest in sound and space, and which inspired me to begin exploring the many different sides of what we call sound.”

Eiko Ishibashi feature

“The way the Japanese film industry works, you have very little time to do the soundtrack. There’s very little real instrumental music in Japanese films now. Most soundtracks are done by one person on a keyboard. Eiko’s soundtrack is so different that people here overlook it. It doesn’t operate in telling you what your emotions are.”

Congratulation to Drive My Car for its well-deserved Oscar! Two of my early favorites for 2022 come from Japanese singer/ composer/ flautist/ songwriter/ drummer/ noisemaker Eiko Ishibashi. One is her indelible soundtrack for the Oscar-winning Drive My Car, the other an imaginary soundtrack of sorts for Law & Order, entitled For McCoy. I was honored to speak with her and Jim O’Rourke, as well as director Ryusuke Hamaguchi for the story.

Eiko Ishibashi and the melodies that carry Drive My Car for The Washington Post

New Directions in Gwoka

“Gwoka was born out of necessity to reflect the moods of a people—its joys, its fears—and that’s why there are so many different rhythms. In Guadeloupe, gwoka is considered to be much more than a music style. It’s how they assert their Guadeloupean cultural identity as distinct from French national identity. Transmitting gwoka music involves the transmission of a collective history.”

Three years ago, Séance Centre’s eye-opening Gwakasonné compilation opened my ears to the music of Guadeloupe. A sound that seemed to encompass Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders’ seeking ’70s work, the tireless drums of Jamaican nyabinghi, the Afro-Caribbean fusion of Cedric Im Brooks, and the synth patches of private issued new age music, gwoka nevertheless defied easy categorization. As I learned more about the form, I realize that the themes underpinning this form of expression tie into so much of our current narrative. It’s music with roots embedded in 17th century colonization, slavery, and creolization. It’s a music of defiance, of protest, of ritual, a music that has strong spiritual ties, acknowledging ancestors and fearlessly moving forward.

The incredible new compilation Lèspri Ka: New Directions in Gwoka Music from Guadeloupe 1981​-​2010 shines a much-needed light on this music. And the past few years have seen a wondrous amount of this music available once more.

New Directions in Gwoka for Bandcamp

The Man in the Eyeball Mask

“Hardy was kind of like a premature old man or Yoda, wise and cynical and merry. He seemed to have had the courage to think clearly for himself early on. Hardy’s odyssey was sexual in part which takes courage and energy. He explored himself and other people until he found the place he liked.” –Gary Panter

1954 HW

For those not familiar, Hardy Fox is co-founder of the Residents and their primary arranger and producer. Spent the better of two pandemic years talking to friends and family of the late Hardy Fox for a story close to my heart, about how a weirdo from small town Texas deals with familial alienation and Texas-sized repression to find solace and salvation in art/ music. It’s also the true origin story of the Residents, well before their days in Shreveport and San Mateo.

“Texas is so straight and insane that smart people there sometimes –as a form of protest or simple mutation and rolling of the dice– want to raise a more bizarre form of hell than people who are happier elsewhere.” –Gary Panter

The Man in the Eyeball Mask for Texas Monthly

Leslie Winer (rerub)

Late last year, a German magazine reached out and asked me if I would write an essay revisiting my interview with Leslie Winer (since my NYT article was the lone interview she gave). We had corresponded for a week and the exchange revealed that her typing voice is exactly as dry, acidic, tentacular, and whetted as her speaking voice. Which doesn’t always jibe with the NYT house style. So I contributed an essay featuring far more of Leslie’s singular voice and rhythmic wording uninterrupted.

Electric Fling

Just before the end of the year, Pitchfork retweeted an old column of mine from 2015 about Italo with the subhed of most “uncool” genre ever. Nevermind that the word “uncool” doesn’t appear in my love letter to Italo, it stirred up all these memes from wankers people trying to ratio the tweet who had clearly never read the piece nor heard Italo until two years ago but couldn’t help publicly posting their ignorance. (And cheers to a former employer for the clickbait-y engagement.) I lament the loss of reading comprehension, but I also hate the loss of nuance that accompanies such knee-jerk responses that defines our online engagement.

Here’s video proof about Italo with a panel of supreme record nerds.

So before every other creative endeavor turns into Pitchfork regurgitated clickbait and gets erased from history, thought I should put up links to my old dance music column, Electric Fling (fun trivia, the original column name was Machine Vibes, but there was another column there with “machine” in the title, so I named it after –yes– an old Italo track by Stefano Breda). Without further ado:

Mister Sunday’s Neverending Dance Party

Ambient Music’s Alternate Realities

Sketches From Ibiza Island

Lisbon’s Batida Revolution

Capitol Sound

Electronic Warfare: The Political Legacy of Detroit Techno

Let Me Be Your Radio: The Bizarro Universe of Italo

Sun Ra’s Free Space

Western Dance Music’s Ongoing Dialogue with Africa

Constant Vacation: Inside Amsterdam’s Dance Scene

The Next Revolución: Adventures in Modern Mexican Dance Music

Rest of 2021

2021 marked the first year I didn’t really submit a “Best of 2021” list anywhere. I stopped writing for Pitchfork after 19 years (the past few years, I was relegated to the sidelines in terms of EOY writing anyhow so no great loss). I did a ballot for Jazz Critics Poll and always ignore those Uproxx emails about ballots. Last year, I got to contribute a Boomkat list, but wasn’t asked this year Anyhow, in filing away some records, I posted a batch of them on IG and thought I may as well type them out now: