Perfume Genius Crack Magazine | Issue 110
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“The excellent Devon festival boasts a carefully curated blend of stimulating talks and under-the-radar bands” - The Guardian TICKTS, FULL LINE UP AND MORE:
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Perfume Genius:
U.S. Girls:
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Contents
Ms Nina
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Amnesia Scanner:
Bbymutha 48
Editor's Letter – p.19
Recommended – p.20
The Click: Cerrone – p.57 Retrospective: Madvillainy – p.67 20 Questions: Zebra Katz – p.81
Rising: Porridge Radio - p.23
Reviews – p.62
Downtime: Little Dragon – p.80
Remembering Andrew Weatherall – p.82
CONTENTS
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F I E L D DAY F E ST I VA L S .C O M
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Last month, we lost a true original. The tragic death of Andrew Weatherall in February registered as a blow to the very essence of underground music. His devout belief in the power vested in records to give form and meaning to our lives – to shape a mindset or the width of your jeans, equally – is all the validation needed for people like us, like you, who think way too much about this stuff. “A lot of trashy pop culture aphorisms say more about the human condition than the latest thinker is saying in three volumes of their work,” he once told The Guardian. His influence is felt on a cellular level at Crack Magazine. He will be bitterly missed.
Saint Etienne Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Andrew Weatherall Mix) Pop Smoke Invincible Perfume Genius Die 4 You Lil Baby Sum 2 Prove IBON No Sleep Sightless Pit Immersion Dispersal King Krule Underclass Travis Scott Oh My Dis Side Ms Nina Piscina Amnesia Scanner feat. Lalita Acá Mazzy Star Five String Serenade Bbymutha Heaven’s Little Bastard U.S. Girls Window Shades Arca @@@@@
It’s intriguing, maybe even therapeutic, that themes in this issue swirl around renewal and reflection. Our cover story captures Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas in a state of artistic and personal flux that he describes as both terrifying and thrilling. He may not have all the answers – but he’s having fun working it out as he goes. U.S. Girls, by contrast, muses on how returning to previous work gave her a chance to revisit her younger, angrier self with a cooler, more measured eye. Even those masters of stylism and abstraction, Amnesia Scanner, are shedding their silicone skin to make music that’s rooted in the human experience. Well, a little, anyway.
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Issue 110
As we put the finishing touches on the magazine, I take heart that there’s no better engine for growth and revivification than this open-mindedness and curiosity, coupled with a healthy self-effacement. It was a lesson that Andrew Weatherall taught so well. As U.S. Girls’ Meg Remy observes: “The world is constantly presenting you with ideas – that is, if you're listening.”
Perfume Genius was shot exclusively for Crack Magazine by Charlotte Patmore in Los Angeles, March 2019
EDITORIAL
Louise Brailey, Editor
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Recommended O ur g ui d e to wh at's goi n g on i n y ou r c i ty Shabaka Hutchings EartH 14 March
AVA London Printworks 14 March
Inga Mauer The Cause 20 March
Caroline Polachek + Sega Bodega Heaven 11 March
Jay Som The Garage 19 March
Hopping once again across the Irish Sea, AVA Festival returns to its second home of London’s expansive Printworks for two days of workshops, demos, talks, live shows and DJ sets. Friday is the one with all the talking, as key figures and organisations from across the electronic music community such as Orbital, Resident Advisor and Abbey Road Studios hit the stage to discuss a variety of engaging and relevant topics for anyone with even a passing interest in the mechanics of the industry. The seats are swept aside come Saturday, as Joy Orbison, Overmono, Peach and many others take over from midday until 11pm. Come for the knowledge, stay for the rave.
Rewire Festival Arca, Bbymutha, Beatrice Dillon Various venues, The Hague 3-5 April 2020 ushers in 10 years of Rewire, the revered Dutch festival urging us to question the world through experimental music. This year’s theme explores the idea of ‘re-setting’ – whether it’s our relationship to our urban environments, our interactions with fast-advancing technology or the ongoing ecological crisis. Keeping the bookings suitably cerebral, artists such as Arca, Beatrice Dillon, Pelada and Hildur Guðnadóttir (who presents her appropriately unsettling score to Chernobyl) will perform across more than a dozen of The Hague’s best venues over three days. A place to contemplate the future while enjoying the present.
Formerly of Brooklyn synth-pop outfit Chairlift (RIP), Caroline Polachek now performs brooding, hi-gloss, PC Musicaffiliated pop-pop, as well as writing for and working with some of music’s biggest names (Beyoncé, Blood Orange, Charli XCX et al). Here, she steps out at Heaven with Sega Bodega, one of music’s most exciting newcomers. The two share a tendency towards a rich seam of avant-garde, titular electronics and dreaming, creeped-out vocals, so expect this to be nothing less than a deliciously weird show.
Beat Hotel Call Super, Kindness, Donna Leake Fellah Hotel, Morocco 19-22 March
Cigarettes After Sex Eventim Apollo 24 March
If your knowledge of the Beat Hotel extends as far as wonky afternoons at Glastonbury... well, that’s fair enough. But let it be known that the name’s history extends far beyond the storied festival – in fact, it goes all the way back to 1950s Paris, where it was the hangout du jour of some of the period’s most infamous waifs and strays. It’s 2020 now, but this spirit remains much the same. Situated in an oasis-like resort on the outskirts of Marrakech, Beat Hotel has put together some of the finest DJs (Call Super, Yu Su, Donna Leake), live acts (Floating Points, Kindness) and food and drink to see you through your gloriously self-imposed exile.
Arlo Parks Hoxton Hall 17 March
Gigi Masin Southbank Centre 29 March
Tony Allen Church of Sound 13 March JPEGMAFIA EartH 6 March
EVENTS
So Solid Crew O2 Forum Kentish Town 13 March
Shygirl Space 289 12 March
Unintentional godfather of the reissue trend, Gigi Masin is nevertheless a certified giant of the ambient underground. After the one-two punch that saw the compilation/ rarities collection Talk to the Sea and seminal album Wind released in 2014 and 2015 respectively, Masin has gone on to worldwide success and renown. Here he presents his new album, Calypso, inspired by the mythical Greek island of Ogygia, and you already know how this one’s going to go – crystal-clear yet dreamlike waves of sound washing over you, deep as the ocean, light as the sun. Nice.
Moses Boyd Electric Brixton 12 March
021 Robert Glasper Lafayette 6 March
Pitchfork Music Festival Berlin RP Boo, Nadine Shah, John Talabot Tempodrom, Berlin 8-9 May
Princess Nokia EartH 20 March The left-turns of rap powerhouse Princess Nokia have been strangely addictive. Born Destiny Frasqueri, she first came through under the moniker Wavy Spice with the deliciously-titled 2012 track Bitch, I’m Posh, broadening into club music experiments, honeyed pop, then rugged hiphop on her breakthrough album 1992, before seizing on the emo revival with the alt-rockindebted A Girl Called Red. She returns this year with a new record, “a coming of age album for young women”, as well as an acting debut in Bronx-set love story Angelfish. Catch the shapeshifter traverse riot grrrl and peak greebo at this stop on her European tour. As ever, girls to the front.
It’s about time Pitchfork Music Festival rolled through Berlin. We’ve cast envying eyes over their Chicago and Paris events, and now the OG music review blog touches down at Tempodrom with a crosssection of music that feels fittingly broad. Friday eases in with hazy soul thanks to R&B frontrunners Lianne La Havas, Celeste and Nick Hakim, plus raging post-punk from Nadine Shah and – our tip – Okay Kaya’s celestial alt-pop about sexuality and awkwardness. Then Saturday brings the doof with names that don’t need selling – Modeselektor, HVOB, Tim Hecker, John Talabot, Kelly Lee Owens – and a footwork showdown from DJ Spinn and RP Boo. Wild.
Halsey The O2 8 March
Bilbao BBK Live Kendrick Lamar, FKA twigs, Yves Tumor Mount Cobetas, Bilbao 9-11 July Nestled against the slopes of Mount Cobetas, in a complex built specifically for the festival, Bilbao BBK Live is undoubtedly a staple of the European festival calendar. Its booking policy – simultaneously enormous and ahead-of-the-curve – has seen it win numerous awards and, along with Frank Gehry’s iconic Guggenheim building, has helped to put the city firmly on the cultural map. This year’s edition welcomes giants like Kendrick Lamar, Bad Bunny and The Killers to the mainstage, while artpop savants FKA twigs and Yves Tumor bring their fluid sounds to the mountains. Over on the Crack Magazine stage, you can catch elusive cowboy Orville Peck, Bristolian techno-punks Scalping and Estonian rapper Tommy Cash.
Cerrone The Jazz Cafe 13 March WIKI Omeara 11 March
Sasha Velour London Palladium 8 March
Flash Festival Eclair Fifi, Yu Su, Bradley Zero Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy 14-16 May Need a holiday but can’t bear to stay away from the beats, even for a few days? You’re just in luck. Flash Festival, situated in Italy’s idyllic Tuscan countryside, has put together a superb cast of feel-good DJs like Eclair Fifi, Raphaël Top-Secret and Bradley Zero to soundtrack your sunny getaway. After you’ve exhausted the dancefloor, the festival has lined up a host of alternative experiences for you to make the most of your Tuscan surroundings. ‘Pasta Making With Nonna’ after getting down to a Yu Su set, anyone? Bellissimo.
King Krule Brixton Academy 24-25 March
Bryan Ferry Royal Albert Hall 11 March
East London festival Re-Textured puts its money where its mouth is. Committing to a 50/50 gender balance for this and all future editions of the festival, a quick look at the extraordinary line-up shows that they’ve pulled out all the stops. Highlights abound, but a new performance by krautrock techno pioneer Manuel Göttsching, a rare live show from digital hardcore legends Atari Teenage Riot and DJ sets from SIREN’s Sybil and Helena Hauff are some of our top picks. And it’s all taking place within Oyster card territory – a treat indeed.
Charlotte Dos Santos Village Underground 8 March Nilüfer Yanya Union Chapel 8 March
Jessy Lanza Space 289 11 March
EVENTS
That lovable scamp King Krule is back. After his alien and timeless 2017 album The OOZ, Archy Marshall slunk back away from the limelight again. His lopsided, solipsistic poetry and deadpan drawl returns with new album Man Alive!, the first release from Archy since the birth of his daughter with photographer Charlotte Patmore. One of the most compelling artists of our time in a new era of maturity – an intriguing prospect indeed.
Re-Textured Sybil, Helena Hauff, Atari Teenage Riot Various venues, London 2-5 April
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For many artists, DIY is more than a mode of survival: it’s a badge of honour, an ethos of self-sufficiency to be upheld indefinitely. Ask Dana Margolin of Porridge Radio about it, however, and you’ll find a much more pragmatic approach.
better. I do really enjoy a good Radio 1 hit – artists like Charli XCX and PC Music, Lorde and Lana Del Rey. As we go forward I want to lean into that more, I think.” She adds with a laugh, “though I say that and then I write really emo guitar songs, so…”
“We've always been lo-fi by necessity,” she says considering Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers, the 2016 debut that the Brighton-formed outfit famously recorded in a shed in the space of a week. “But now we don't have to be lo-fi, we really don't want to be.”
As is perhaps inevitable from a former anthropology student, Margolin uses her lyrics to document vivid snapshots of the human experience, relaying struggles with mental health and corrosive relationships in the process. While she finds the process of lyricwriting “incredibly cathartic” on a personal level, it’s equally important to her that listeners can find their own meaning in the experiences she relays. “Everything that happens around those [experiences] is what is important,”
Margolin’s modus operandi has changed significantly since she first started writing barbed indie-pop under the banner, five or so years ago. Initially a solo endeavour, Porridge Radio has since blossomed into a four-piece band, the tight-knit line-up completed by keyboardist Georgie Stott, bassist Maddie Ryall and drummer Sam Yardley. They’ve all since quit Brighton for London – with Margolin returning to her family home in Hendon – and their second album, Every Bad, is out in March via prestige indie Secretly Canadian. This seismic shift in circumstances isn’t lost on Margolin for one moment. “You can't say you're DIY if you’re not,” she shrugs matter of factly. “We have a booking agent, we have press officers, we have a team working on stuff. And it’s amazing to step up.” Step up is the operative phrase. In terms of ambition and execution, the difference between Every Bad and the C86-esque stylings of its predecessor is profound. Largely self-produced, and mixed by Nilüfer Yanya and black midi collaborator Oli Barton-Wood, the collection sees Margolin’s diaristic introspection and serrated shifts in vocal dynamics applied to an array of arrangements, from the melancholic jangle of Pop Song and Auto-Tuned atmospherics of (Something) to the abrasive art-rock of Don’t Ask Me Twice and the anguished waltz of Circling, which she today describes as sounding akin to a “haunted seaside ride”. “We really love pop production,” Margolin explains. “And making this album we wanted to produce things
she insists. “Those specific moments are there to demarcate the spaces in between.”
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Porridge Radio
Words: Gemma Samways Photography: El Hardwick
For all her vulnerability on Every Bad, Margolin is refreshingly self-assured when pressed about the band’s longterm ambitions. “I don't think we've ever sat and discussed our vision but I think along the way we've always been like, ‘Yeah, we're the best band in the world.’ A peaceful life where I can have a studio, and a little house, and some dogs, and can make music and art whenever I want – that’s my idea of success. But also a stadium tour.” Every Bad is out 13 March via Secretly Canadian
Sounds like: Acerbic art-pop Soundtrack for: Wild mood swings Our favourite tune: Long File next to: Pavement, The Velvet Underground Find them: @porridgeradio
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Words: Eve Barlow Photography: Charlotte Patmore Styling: Jessica Worrell
Perfume Genius is finding a new freedom in physicality – and nobody is more surprised than him
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Mask: Nick Rademacher Shirt: Desiree Klein Trousers: Helmut Lang SS 2004 Mummy Trousers: Artifact New York Shoes: Vintage
MUSIC
emotionally raw, trauma-steeped records with which he made his name. Instead, it gloried in the love for his partner Alan Wyffels, elevating romance to decadent heights. But the way he presented then doesn't feel like him anymore. “It feels weird to be so specific about clothes and presentation, it's a tender thing.” Perhaps it’s easier to say that he simply finds a strange satisfaction in exploring and subverting, well, whatever it is. “I just want to carry a sledgehammer around now, I want to fight people,” he laughs, before qualifying, “that's not purely a masculine thing but I've been taught that it is.”
“It's very confusing,” he says, contemplating his gender presentation. His fifth album, Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, due in May, feels like an extension of this playful new chapter. Not least because the artwork for lead single Describe features Hadreas wielding a sledgehammer, while the LP’s gatefold image sees him draped over a motorcycle in an image reminiscent of Kenneth Anger’s 1969 art film Scorpio Rising, a meditation on homoeroticism, bikers and 60s pop. “I wanted to be covered in dirt, that's how I feel right now,” he shrugs when questioned. “I don't know what the ingredients are, or what’s seasoning it. I actually like being a man. I don't know why! I feel like one – a man.”
Self-exploration has always been a core element of the Perfume Genius project, with its earliest roots in recovery. Hadreas began recording music in 2005, after spending 20 days in a Seattle rehab centre for drug addiction, following a four-year stint living in New York City. He set tales of his troubled youth – abuse, suicide, ill mental health – to piano and posted them to MySpace. These emotionally spare tracks would become his debut album Learning and, listening to them now, feel like a form of therapy. Accordingly, follow-up Put Your Back N 2 It radiated with warmth and a profound hopefulness, while Too Bright, released in 2014, and No Shape, out three years later, captured an artist coming into his own. On defiant single Queen he even weaponised his queerness to exact revenge on heteronormative society: “No family is safe/ When I sashay”.
For Hadreas, gender is continually in flux, and something he occasionally talks about with frustration, as if reaching for a language that's always being rewritten. “I'm figuring it all out as I go. I'm figuring it out in front of people,” he says. His last record, 2017's shimmering and baroque No Shape, was worlds away from the
Hadreas spent most of the 2010s in Tacoma, Washington, building a home with Wyffels, a classically trained musician who often plays in Hadreas’ live band. This newfound domesticity
suited their sobriety but it soon began to feel claustrophobic when they came off the road. “There wasn't a lot of good food there, I don’t want to be too shady,” he quips. The couple moved to Los Angeles two years ago where they have friends and more excuses to leave the house. Then, last winter, Hadreas returned to New York City for one of his most ambitious projects yet. The Sun Still Burns Here is a collaboration between Hadreas and choreographer Kate Wallich. Running in Chelsea’s Joyce Theatre across one week in November last year, the performance piece was described by Wallich as an “opera Janet Jackson musical ballet” and featured music exclusively composed by Hadreas, including the dramatic nine-minute opus
Eye in the Wall. He even performed in it, alongside Wyffels and Wallich’s dance company The YC. Hadreas had never danced professionally before – he and Wyffels learned together. It was embarrassing, he admits. “We're not super young anymore! It shook a lot of stuff out of us. For me I've always had a weird relationship with my body because I was sick growing up. I'm still sick.” He’s referring to Crohn's disease, which he has suffered from since he was a child. A few years ago, for the first time in his adult life, he was in remission. Dance allowed his relationship with his body to change. Hadreas demanded more from it. In class he would cry from elation, he admits. Sat across the table from me, he starts extending his arm
MUSIC
It’s Valentine's Day morning at a café by the East LA River, and Seattle native Mike Hadreas shows up looking every inch the rugged heartthrob. His jeans are a vintage wash, his tank top is soft against his chest, his hair peppered with grey. He struts in leather boots with piercing blue eyes like a Hollywood pin-up. As alternative pop star Perfume Genius, Hadreas performs in many guises: shiny oversized suits with stilettos; costumes that flash David Bowie by way of a Victorian workhouse; marriages of lipstick, manicures and skin-tight metallic vests. Today he abandons androgyny. He is 39 years old, and also somehow a boy.
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“I'M READY FOR A BIG FEELING. IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT IT IS. AS LONG AS IT HAPPENS. RIGHT AWAY!”
Shirt: Dries Van Noten Vest: Jean Paul Gaultier Vintage Cage Vest: Artifact New York Trousers: Wales Bonner Scarf: Linder
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like a ballerina and folding it in front of his face to explain. “I'd look at my arm, consider my arm, and start crying, ‘I've never been present with my arm!’” He scoffs at how ridiculous it sounds. “Like – be nice to your arm.”
“I WANTED TO FEEL EVERYTHING AND YOU CAN'T. I WAS SCARED TO LET ANY OF THAT BACK IN BECAUSE YOU BECOME INSATIABLE – I FEEL THAT FEELING RIGHT NOW. I FEEL DANGER, BUT I ALSO FEEL JOY”
The show inspired a physical intimacy between Hadreas and other people. He developed a passion for weight transference; lifting, being lifted. “I liked carrying people,” he smiles. “It's healing. It's a nonsensical bizarre thing to crave but when people get close to me now, I just want to pick them up!” He revelled in being responsible for the physicality of others, the harmony of it. New song Your Body Changes Everything on the album is about just that: “And now you’re right above me and your shadow suffocates,” he sings. “I was truly in remission in a way I hadn't been – and that’s over now.” He sighs, momentarily tearful that the illness returned just as he was exploring his own physicality. “I was getting off on how much control I felt I had over [my body]. I learned when I was young that your body just does stuff. You have no control. You're almost riding it, you know? If I exercise things will grow. Just because I am sick again, in my body and spirit, I know that I have access. That will make it easier to go back.”
Throughout our conversation I sense a defiance to Hadreas' spirit. His demeanour is intense and fragile, but strong. He experiences moments of connection and joy, making small talk about inconsequential things: the size of the table, the weather, a small dog that comes over to greet us. He isn’t trying to be opaque when discussing some topics – like gender, or his health – he just seems incapable of articulating them fully. Maybe the music speaks for him, and maybe that’s always been the case. We reminisce about a time we met previously, at Latitude Festival in 2012. It was in a caravan that a music blog had set up for sessions with performers and Hadreas had come to perform Madonna’s Oh Father on his keyboard. I’ve never forgotten it, the most nervous performance I’ve ever witnessed. He shook throughout, working through whatever was affecting him that day with that song. Today he is less nervous than he was then. Yet, in spite of his willing company, his radiance, his talk of sledgehammers and physicality, a shade of self doubt lingers. He seems conflicted. He scratches his hands. “I'm not very confident talking about how I feel right now. I don't have a handle on it,” he says, eyes darting. “It's not fun. But it's thrilling.”
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Set My Heart on Fire Immediately sees Hadreas reuniting with producer Blake Mills for an album that leans into moments of swooning Americana – a conscious decision, he explains. The opening track Whole Life sets the tone, sounding a little like an update of Unchained Melody, and there are nods to 50s American pop circa the Everly Brothers, Elvis and Buddy Holly throughout. Crucially, the nostalgic charge is subverted by the subject matter – paeans to queer
desire written in classic melodies. “There's something about me doing that,” he smiles. “I've listened to those songs my whole life but don't feel included in them.” He was inspired by swaggering cowboys who were vulnerable and unafraid to share, writing himself into the history he was raised on. On reflection, Hadreas himself admits that No Shape was written from a place of restraint aspiring to freedom. Set My Heart on Fire Immediately is the response: full-bodied, unsuppressed. Of the tracks on the album, Jason is his most direct and confessional. Hadreas documents a sexual encounter aged 23 with a man called Jason. It was Jason’s first time. “Jason there’s no rush/ I know a lot comes up letting in some love/ Where there always should have been some”. In the morning as he left, Hadreas took $20 from Jason's jean pocket. Reflecting on it now, he felt he had performed a service. “What was needed from me was a kindness to someone who was figuring something out. I felt like I was able to do that, even if just for 30 seconds,” he says. “That relationship was brief, but I think about all my relationships, even if it was just a night. I'm hungry for all of it right now.” This potent sexuality courses through the album. On Describe, Hadreas talks about his stomach rumbling for someone (“Can you just find him for me?”); the cinematic, strings-adorned Leave sees the singer, “begging like a dog, ignore me”; Just a Touch makes mention of a “secret” lover. It all sounds forbidden. Within this context, the album’s title becomes a demand – a call to burn down everything and start over. “I'm ready for a big feeling,” he says, by way of explanation. “It doesn't matter what it is. As long as it happens. Right away!” Hadreas cackles. When I ask him what it is he craves, he moves his arms up and down trying to reach for something above him. He’s worried that the emotion he chases is the longing itself, and despite his declarations of being satisfied, he’s finding that maybe he’s not satisfied at all. “It's never enough,” Hadreas says, of life. “The anticipation of trying to be adjacent to some big thing. That's the reason I did drugs, I wanted to feel everything and you can't. I was scared to let any of that back in because you become insatiable – I feel that feeling right now. I feel danger, but I also feel joy.”
As Perfume Genius, Hadreas has become a symbol of radical queer survival, turning his lived experiences into something liberating, transcendent. It saw him writing candidly about loving another man before queer culture went fully mainstream. “That's always going to sit heavy with me,” he says. “‘Cause I still need it. When I watch a TV show and two men kiss I still cry. The show could be horrible, I could hate them both, but I'm like, ‘Ah it's happening!’” These small victories mean a lot when you grow up the only visibly gay student in high school, the target of bullying so severe you’re forced to eventually drop out. “Surviving anything is something you carry by yourself. We carry it together too, but it feels very lonely.” His extroverted, candid character onstage has afforded him a strength that has started to seep into everyday life and has helped to heal old wounds. “I used to be nervous to order at a restaurant. Sometimes I order for everybody now. Maybe I've gone too far!” he laughs. Indeed, it’s been ten years since he first began uploading songs to MySpace. Hadreas is proud of his ability to keep showing up, over and over. “I feel relentless,” he says. “I'm always trying to get better in my own way. That wasn't always an interest of mine. I keep holding onto the good things that I'm learning, to the love that I'm given,” he pauses. “Even though I'm feeling really unhinged right now.” He tells me that, in this state, he finds comfort in poetry, Texas singersongwriter Townes Van Zandt, Gossip Girl (“I had never seen it!”). And, of course, writing songs, which “does something that I can't figure out how to say or do.” Then, he tells me how, the other night he decided to get out of the bath and walk to the living room, then back to the bath, and back to the living room, for 45 minutes. “It was the most satisfying thing I'd done all week.” We giggle over the absurdity of it. “I don't know why! Something's rewiring.” It must have been a shock to the body, getting in and out of the water, I say. “Oh, I didn't get in. I went towards the bathtub,” he smirks. “I acknowledged where I'd been. Then I returned again.” Set My Heart on Fire Immediately is released 15 May via 4AD
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Corset, Leather Belt & Boots: Vintage Jacket: Helmut Lang AW 1999 Silk Organza Moto Jacket: Artifact New York Shorts: Desiree Klein
Words: Anna Cafolla
Photography: Michelle Helena Janssen
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She was once mad as hell. Now, U.S. Girls’ Meg Remy is tempering her rage with reflection
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Half Free, her first release with renowned label 4AD, dabbled with 60s girl group choruses and freefalling glam rock solos. But it was its followup, In a Poem Unlimited, that saw her fully embrace the subversive promise of pop music. The album’s political barbs, stealthily buried like razor blades between disco grooves, served as a document of women’s anger; a rallying cry, and act of defiance, in the face of systemic oppression. Each blistering track presents broken but unbeaten everywoman characters, fighting both capitalism and duplicitous men. Somehow, it was Remy’s greatest success.
“Hindsight is a powerful thing. The world is constantly presenting you with ideas – that is, if you're listening,” explains Remy, as we talk over a glass of wine in a central London tapas restaurant. For her, hindsight is both a cultural and personal phenomena. She has just quit smoking after almost 20 years, she’s doing yoga, going to therapy, and reading In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. The ongoing journey to self-improvement runs parallel with, intriguingly, a new desire to revisit her previous work. “I feel lucky as an artist to have this huge back catalogue with records that act as physical milestones, that I can pinpoint these important life moments, put some tracks on and know where I was and what four-track tape I had, and how I felt shitty or really fucking great.”
Heavy Light, by comparison to its predecessor’s full-throated howl of rage, is a far less intense record. “I knew that after In a Poem Unlimited I wanted to strip back to vocals and percussion,” she explains. More importantly, and perhaps most tellingly, Remy chose to cover three of her own tracks on Heavy Light. These are Statehouse (It’s a Man’s World), Red Ford Radio and Overtime. “It was exciting to explore whether the meaning would remain intact, or totally change. We tell ourselves, ‘Oh, if I had a time machine I would go and change this thing...’ But would I? It was interesting to get the opportunity to do exactly that.” Re-recording Overtime, a 2013 track which tells a visceral story of a partner drinking away money – Remy has always had a way with narrative – came after a failed attempt at finding a spa during a studio break. It led to a chance meeting with a dancer from the song’s original video, a curious coincidence that felt like fate. “It was so refreshing to revisit a track about this fraught relationship with my older perspective. I felt lighter.” Most notable, though, is her Red Ford Radio rework – an act of renewal that transforms the fuzzy, no wave-ish original first heard on her 2010 album Sleeping on Grass. Remy’s voice sits much higher in the mix, the chilling lyrics undisguised by grit or grain: “I don’t care about nothing,” she sings, creating a kind of strange double, seemingly reviving a previous character she has embodied, while also holding it at arm’s length.
“Hindsight is a powerful thing. The world is constantly presenting you with ideas – that is, if you're listening”
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Remy first surfaced as U.S. Girls in 2007, though the Illinois-born, Torontobased artist was at least four musical projects into her career even then. She started out, aged 15, in a riot grrrlinfluenced band named Slut Muffin. She went on to traverse the local band circuit in Chicago, before relocating to Toronto, where she expanded on her growing avant-pop sensibilities. The fuzzy tape-loop experimentations of Remy’s early work – from 2008’s Gravel Days to 2012’s Gem – segued into more accessible but playfully experimental pop and biting, dark disco. This shift culminated in her expansive and celebrated sixth album, Half Free – all with her DIY spirit intact.
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“Nos mienten sobre el ayer para que no entendamos el mañana,” is the refrain that sits at the centre of U.S. Girls’ new album, swirling around a concoction of marimbas, oscillating synths and a beat that walks with purpose. The Spanish-sung lyrics, taken from the song And Yet It Moves/Y Se Mueve, translate to “they lie to us about yesterday so that we don’t understand tomorrow”, a musing on the importance of reflection, all the more vital in a polarised society. It’s this notion, to keep one eye on the past to bolster our futures, that is the beating heart of Heavy Light, Meghan Remy’s eighth LP as U.S. Girls.
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“So many people are deciding to be brave and tell their stories. I have that responsibility too”
The majority of Heavy Light, Remy explains, was written during the highly theatrical Poem tour, when her ideas were at their most ambitious and adventurous. Hitting on a new way of writing and recording, she called on 20 session musicians and a large group of backing vocalists to collaborate with her in the studio, as well as longtime collaborators Steve Chahley, Tony Price and husband Max Turnbull. “It was a huge challenge, even just managing a large group’s emotions and needs,” she admits. “It’s so eye-opening to go over these tracks that I attach such personal meaning to, and hear others reflect their own selves in them.”
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Crucially, this creative re-evaluation was mapped onto a different sound palette. Eager not to repeat herself, she abandoned In a Poem Unlimited’s MO of disguising political rage within
slick, stylised pop songwriting. “I don’t want to do that again,” explains Remy, swirling a toothpick around a bowl of artichoke hearts. “It was great, I learned a lot but I knew that for [Heavy Light] it needed to be almost not about how it sounds, and more about capturing the performances as they were and sitting with what that means.” The result is high-drama sax riffs, fullbodied choral refrains and a funk-heavy rhythm section. Shedding her cast of characters and their psychodramas, Remy mines her own life experiences – kicking back against the ideals imposed on women’s bodies in Slate House, while textured conversations on consent play out on the lush balladry of I.O.U. “She could have never, ever known, we’d over-reap what she’d sown,” Remy sings defiantly, railing against lofty expectations of emotional labour on Quiver to the Bomb. Advice
to Teenage Self is a gorgeously intimate patchwork of Remy’s recorded interviews with the vocalists about their childhood, which she then stitched into her own personal narrative. Above all, the rich orchestral production on Heavy Light is carried by a choir of voices – “a lot of queer folks, a beautiful summer camp vibe” – that made sessions feel like muchneeded group therapy. “I knew I would cry a lot,” she admits, exhaling through closed teeth and stabbing another olive with a toothpick. “Sometimes we would do a take and I’d feel so emotionally drained, but then we would have to sit and technically deconstruct it. Like, dude, you’re saying the mic needs to go here or whatever, and I’m freaking out about the 34 years I’ve just injected into the record!” She smiles at this, and reveals how the creative relationship between herself and Turnbull has evolved. “He’s a Leo, I’m a Cancer!” she laughs, pointing to the tiny crab tattoo on her wrist. “We’ve relied on being emotionally and creatively intuitive in the past, but we made consent much more explicit this time around. That was tough after 20 years, and he stepped away for a
lot of the process, then came back to mix. We made an altogether better record for it.” Remy credits the deeply personal and collaborative journey that marks her latest chapter to somatic experiencing, an alternative therapy that is meant to alleviate physical and mental stress by bringing a person’s focus to their bodily sensations. “I’m always trying to make things that I want to see or things that would help myself, especially as a woman,” she explains. “If I want people to accept themselves, I have to do it myself. This was the first time I wasn’t scared to be really earnest, erase a persona.” Is she ashamed about the past personas she has performed? She pauses to think, running a finger over her the rim of her wine glass. “I’m older now and living in a world where so many people are deciding to be brave and tell their stories. I have that responsibility too. I was doing a lot of preaching when I was younger, and that became a persona I wanted to get away from. I don’t have all the answers that I thought I once had. I was angry, and anger makes you loud.” Heavy Light is out now via 4AD
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Ms Nina has logged on
Growing up a shy teen, Jorgeline Torres found her voice online. As Ms Nina, Madrid’s ascendant reggaeton star, she's discovered her inner extrovert
When Torres was 14 years old, she and her family left their home in Córdoba in search of a better life. They ended up in Motril, Spain, a small coastal town on the southern tip of the country. It was a difficult transition as a teenager. “I’m an immigrant, what’s easy about that?” she deadpans. Nothing, I tell her, I’m also a Latinx immigrant in Europe. “Well, at least I didn’t have to learn a new language, I guess.” Torres speaks in insouciant strides, always tempering bold statements with softer counter-comments, as if she isn’t sure how her words are going to land. This is a habit she picked up when
The ascendant reggaeton star has spent much of her life trying to mould herself to her surroundings. Real name Jorgeline Torres, the 29-year-old was born in Córdoba, Argentina, a city sat at the foothills of the Sierra Mountains. At home, she was a quiet child who mostly kept to herself while her parents loudly blared music, windows open wide – and she’d always privately hum along. Her mother was a fan of cuarteto, an upbeat genre pioneered in their hometown, but she also listened to Mexican balladeers Juan Gabriel and Thalía. Her father, who leaned more towards rock, imparted his influence on Torres and her brothers, teaching her how to play guitar at a young age. “I regret not keeping up my guitar practice. It would have been a nice skill to have to contribute to my brothers’ Argentinian folk band back then,” she tells me. “It’s also a shame that the situation isn’t good in Argentina because I miss the people, our way of life and everything, to be honest…” she trails off.
Ms Nina is power walking through the cobbled streets of her Madrid neighbourhood. She’s running late for a hair appointment that she’s had booked in for months, and if she misses it, she won’t be able to see her favourite stylist until she’s back from a lengthy US tour. Her hair, currently a brassy shade of blonde, has been long overdue for change. “I’m dyeing my hair darker, I’m tired of this colour,” she pants down a WhatsApp line. It makes sense, I say, her hair has been this colour for a while. “I’m tired of it,” she retorts. “I want to feel like myself again.”
This over-the-top aesthetic would eventually characterise her output as Ms Nina, the internet’s princess of reggaeton – and Torres’ alter ego of sorts. She didn’t always know she wanted to be a reggaeton artist, though. In fact, she didn’t even know she could be one. She doesn’t produce or play any instruments and, by her own admission, “can’t sing”. But with her newfound confidence, she decided to give in to the musical impulses she never explored when she was younger. After connecting with Bay Area reggaeton singer La Favi online, the two collaborated for 2016 single Acelera, Ms Nina’s first official step into the world. The pair joined forces again that same year for sleepy dembow ballad No Eres Bueno, but it was Torres’ first solo endeavour, 2017’s Tu Sicaria (‘your hitwoman’) that
Finding a community on Tumblr, Torres first gained recognition for her first artistic love: graphic design and collaging. Her blog – which still exists on the site – is a kaleidoscopic explosion of pop culture: the background is a play on Louis Vuitton’s iconic white monogram print, superimposed twinkles appear on every other photo, as does Lisa Simpson’s infamous eye-roll. There are rainbow-treated collages of 90s icons like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Tupac, all layered under millennial-friendly slogans with a feminist slant: “I’ll smile when I feel like it”; “I only accept apologies in cash”; “puta”. Each day, her following grew higher, eventually reaching the tens of thousands – something Torres, still timid and in her early 20s by this point, never expected. In real life, she was an introvert with fluctuating self esteem but online, she was a cult hero. “At first getting attention online was overwhelming, but eventually it made me feel good,” she explains. “I’m grateful for the internet, because without it, I would never be the artist I am now.”
Styling: Hottie Ken
The mixtape’s title, translating to ‘perreando on the outside, crying on the inside’, could
Ms Nina’s highly-anticipated 2019 debut mixtape, Perreando Por Fuera, Llorando Por Dentro, is definitely freaky. It’s also determined and unmistakably anchored by female sexuality, a document of an artist who knows exactly who she is – and a far cry from the “awkward person” she once was. “This ass is admirable/ Like me, no one has it/ I was told your girlfriend is jealous/ It’s not my fault I’m delicious,” she sniggers in Spanish on Te Doy, backed by an oscillating dembow beat provided by Mexican producer El Licenciado. I ask if her lyrics are a vehicle for self-acceptance or a tool for education. “Both,” she responds. “Without realising, I write music with messages to help us all feel sexy and free. But I’ve always had a filthy mouth and the people who take it the wrong way are closeminded. Not everyone is shocked by my music. Even my own father has conservative tendencies sometimes, and look at the daughter he got!” She erupts into laughter.
For now, she’s happy to focus on herself. When she’s not playing sold out shows from Mexico City to Berlin, she’s at home with her cat Lupita, usually cooking (“avocado is my favourite food!”) and dancing around her kitchen to old school reggaeton. “It’s the only way I stay away from toxic situations and stay sane,” she laughs. “Every night I go to bed
She is also seemingly at the centre of another conflict. Torres rose as part of Spain’s growing reggaeton scene, which has catapulted artists like Bad Gyal, Bea Pelea and Yung Beef to international stages. But it’s a movement that has been criticised for appropriating the Afro-Latinxpioneered genre, ignoring the effects of Spanish colonialism and white privilege. Reggaeton isn’t everyone’s for the taking; it’s a genre that had to be fought for, a style of music that is political in and of itself – from the worn-in seats of Panama’s diablo rojo buses, where the first dembow riddims rung out in the late 70s, to the housing projects in Puerto Rico that brought the sound to the mainstream. When I ask Torres if it’s isolating being one of few Latinas in the midst of this controversy, she is hesitant to answer. After all, this is the country that took her in as an immigrant and the scene that nurtured her talent. Following a long pause, she finally replies: “People care about Latin art now when they didn’t before, and it does bother me a bit, but it was always going to be like this, when something becomes popular…”
Ms Nina appears at Sónar, Barcelona on 18 June
But when she steps on stage, Ms Nina is revealed. She swaggers around, never staying in one place for too long. She throws it back, whining her waist and popping her back with a knowing control. Her eyes are glossed, her mauve lips plump and perfectly lined. The crowd – a bobbing sea of mostly young, queer Spanishspeakers – hang onto her every word, waiting for a mandate to drop it down to the floor, kindred in perreo. She takes a moment to catch her breath in between songs, often calling on everyone to get rowdier. In this moment, it’s hard to ever picture Jorgeline Torres as a social outcast. Here, she’s an adored star with a curious depth and a mischievous smirk, reggaeton’s very own Rihanna. For her final address, she pauses longer than usual, patting down the kinks in her skin-tight orange trousers. Then she looks up with a palpable glare. “Yo soy Ms fucking Nina!”
I recall the time I saw Torres ambling around the artist area at Bilbao BBK Live last summer. The area, nestled in the contours of Mount Cobetas, doubled as a viewing platform for the city’s most visceral sunsets: warm yellows, cloudy pinks, a deep terracotta. It was as if the view was handpainted for an Instagram backdrop – something Torres also felt, as she got a friend to take photos of her in front of it. In this space, she’s off duty; your everyday Jorgeline Torres, dressed down in leggings and a t-shirt, who is more preoccupied with taking selfies and picking through the catered snack table than commanding a room.
as Jorgeline – the girl who is quiet, chill and likes to eat. I’m just normal, you know?”
Hair: Fernando Martínez
be taken as a post-ironic internet gag – after all, she was once fuelled by re-blogs. But between the barbed rhymes about one night stands and stealing your man, there are pockets of vulnerability. “Today I woke up sad again/ And I don’t know why/ Because I have it all/ How stupid” goes the translated refrain on Resaca, her most bare – both emotionally and sonically – track yet. She tells me that this is a side of her that she struggles to express, both as Jorgeline and Ms Nina. “Honestly, I have a hard time talking about my emotions,” her voice quietens. “There are days where I’m not OK, there are days where I feel hot, I feel ugly, I want to dance, I get my heart broken, and well, I think my lyrics reflect that conflict.”
Makeup: Miss Diamondz
First coined by Chilean artist Tomasa del Real, neo-perreo – a reference to reggaeton’s distinct style of dancing – started off as an underground subculture working in tandem with the mid-2010s mainstream boom of the genre. In this corner of the Latinx scene, artists and fans alike are sex-positive, queer-inclusive, ultra-feminist and, crucially, extremely online. Pulling reggaeton’s breakneck dash in exciting new directions, neo-perreo’s fresh electronic bent often melds with more traditional Latin sounds; it’s not uncommon for artists to fold salsa, merengue, vallenato and cumbia into the mix. Given her digital influences, it’s no surprise that this is where Ms Nina found her artistic home. “Let me make this clear: I’m not a reggaeton purist,” she declares. “I pay homage to all the music I was raised on, the music that helped me when I was down and helped me raise my spirits. Who cares if I mix old and new sounds? It makes my music more freaky.”
would carve her out as a singular voice in reggaeton’s new digitally-drenched direction: neo-perreo.
Photography: Felipe Longoni
she was in school, a period of her life she looks back on with contempt. “The truth is, I was very insecure in school. I was very shy and treated myself like I was inferior. I was unhappy, I felt like I was ugly and a freak.” So she did what any normal teenager would do – she turned to the internet.
Words: Rachel Grace Almeida
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Produced exclusively for Crack Magazine by Gilles de Brock - @gillesdebrock
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Words: Maya-Roisin Slater Photography: Kurt Heiter
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Cryptic aesthetics and maximalism defined the first era of Amnesia Scanner. These days, they’re pivoting to real emotion
“I'm such a stylist!” Ville Haimala laughs as he carts a bright orange office chair into the small corner studio he and his musical partner Martti Kalliala share with their label PAN. He's arranging the room for their Crack Magazine photoshoot, the little metal tag on the back pocket of his Prada jeans flapping with every stride. The two form experimental electronic duo Amnesia Scanner, which rose from an aesthetically cryptic project that caught the eyes of blogs and internet trawlers in 2014 to one of the most hyped electronic acts in recent years.
practice is beloved in deep corners of the internet, it can also lead to some dangerous assumptions. “Because we hadn't given out any information, people started writing all these ‘facts’ about Amnesia Scanner that weren't true,” Haimala says. “When the project started, there were a lot of alternative internet spaces which were present in the aesthetic, back when those were much more innocent places. When stuff like the alt-right and that sort of imagery appeared in those spaces, we wanted to make sure people knew this is not an alt-right troll.”
When I tell you their studio is small, I'm not kidding. But with merch samples strewn across surfaces and shelves lined with colourful silicone skins to sheath the animatronic singing mouth they had commissioned back in the autumn, it's certainly not dull. “We were living in Helsinki, Finland, where we're from, and ended up working in the same architecture office,” Kalliala says of the group's origin. Their bond was solidified when they designed a nightclub together, and soon after, their first project was born: a techno outfit called Renaissance Man. “With the Renaissance Man stuff, we just got extremely bored. You know with techno-house, blah blah blah, there's a certain kind of format, there were certain kinds of spaces we had to be in, and [the music] had all these functional requirements,” he explains.
In a way, Amnesia Scanner is a time capsule. Where Another Life was a rampageous bomb of anger and panic, expressed through dense maximalist sound collages and processed bionic vocals, their next album TEARLESS captures the more sobering zeitgeist of 2020. “We want to make art that's an expression of, or exaggeration of, the contemporary experience we're living through,” Kalliala says. Haimala adds that, in response to the world's impending doom, Amnesia Scanner has become more of an emo project. “When we write music we want to capture that real emotion. [TEARLESS] is a continuum of [Another Life], more into this sort of weird realisation that things are deeply not good right now,” says Haimala before Kalliala cuts him off insisting, “But in a fun way!”
The switch to Amnesia Scanner, an anagram of Renaissance Man, came naturally. They turned the formats and culture they'd grown bored of inside out, taking glee in poking holes and amplifying the garish parts. In those early AS days, they advertised themselves as “xperienz designers,” keeping their identities hidden behind a wall of helter-skelter sounds and foreboding YouTube videos. “[The anonymity] was just to let this world develop on its own rather than us somehow being the voices or the face or imposing some kind of narrative,” explains Kalliala. The two laugh about how they didn't want to do the “corniest thing ever” and become masked DJs like Claptone or Deadmau5. So around the time their 2018 album Another Life came out, they broke the spell with an interview published in The Fader. While anonymity comes with its perks if your
I see what he means; tracks like Tearless and Labyrinth still maintain that tongue-in-cheek mimicking of today's trends while poking at the sinister like a petulant child. But for every dance-until-the-world-ends moment, there's another where the duo reveal themselves to be less ironic than ever before. The album's closer U Will Be Fine is an excellent example of this. Haimala sings with comparatively little vocal manipulation, somberly howling “You will be fine/ You will be fine/ If we can help you lose your mind.” It feels like an exercise in self-soothing, as midi string plucks wash over you with the compressed dread of a thousand Sunday hangovers. Walking around the PAN office, which shares a building with a local medical debt collector, is a funny clashing of worlds. On the one hand, there are designer coats strewn on the leather
couch, grey carpets, fluorescent lights and a Keurig coffee machine. On the other, boxes of Amnesia Scannerbranded coveralls, Beatrice Dillon records on display and two Finnish architects making nu-metal guitar arrangements in the corner office. “We're stressing this point always: we're pretty unashamed of the fact that it's a very aesthetically-driven project,” says Kalliala, who works as a design consultant by day. Playing with format and aesthetics is how the duo put this project on the map, though they both wince when I mention world-building. Amnesia Scanner certainly strikes me as an alternate universe. Shortly after Another Life came out, every music event I attended was lit up with fluorescent orange AS long sleeves, bringing the whisper of this alternate universe to the physical space. In their ample use of features over the past two releases, they work with artists like Pan Daijing, LYZZA and Lalita to populate this ominous sphere with new characters, filtering their voices through their signature wash of chaotic evil. “In the beginning it was very unclear what [Amnesia Scanner] was, it wasn't this fully formed world," explains Kalliala. "It started from this place of liberation, a blank state.” Haimala goes on to note that their approach was an idealistic one: “We really didn't want to have a structure of releases. We just wanted to upload stuff. We had this online forum, and we would get individual fans’ email addresses and decide OK, let's send that person a song. It was an experiment in how you could run an art or music project black like that.” He’s referring to the German concept of schwarz, i.e. running a business outside of bureaucracy. They've since come to terms with the fact that sustaining themselves as musicians often involves packaging things more traditionally. To keep themselves and their early fans interested, however, they still drop the occasional easter egg, like a free Wi-Fi network in London people could connect to and download a release from. “There's a group of really hardcore fans that find that stuff, and I really like that,” Haimala says. “But there's no way you can expect that to go wide. Because I think how people
search for their music is extremely lazy these days because of centralised platforms.” Despite their minimal impact, acts like these demonstrate the genuine glee Kalliala and Haimala derive from building modern, technology-clever formats to carry their ideas. When I ask for one thing they wish people would stop describing them as, both grin and say “Conceptronica!” in unison. It's a common mistake, people assuming their use of symbology and doomer-esque sounds relates to some manifesto or high falootin' conceptual framework. “If it's conceptual music, then what's the concept?” Kalliala jokes. In reality, I think the duo is more experimental, in the literal sense of the word. Haimala explains: “I like to be surprised myself when I make a song, and I can feel within me that this is Amnesia Scanner.” TEARLESS is released 24 April via PAN
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“We want to make art that's an expression of, or exaggeration of, the contemporary experience we're living through”
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Words: Cameron Cook Photography: Lucas Christiansen Photography Assistants: Max Zimmermann & Corinna Hopmann Styling: Olive Duran Styling Assistant: Fanny Kübler Makeup: Victoria Reuter Hair: Kosuke Ikeuchi Set Design: Marilena Büld
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Top: ASAI
“I ripped my skirt on stage my bootyhole was out but im black so aint nobody know lol.” That’s a tweet from Bbymutha, aka Brittnee Moore, on 1 February, 2020, the day she headlined a performance at CTM Festival in Berlin, where her floral miniskirt was subject to a wardrobe malfunction. She gleefully posted a video of the incident – tongue out, laughing, keeping the skirt down with one hand while on the mic with the other. This is Bbymutha in her element: brash, hilarious and absolutely unapologetic.
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The day after the CTM performance, I find Bbymutha curled up in her sweats on a couch in a photo studio directly in the shadow of Berlin’s TV Tower. She’s scrolling through her phone, and doesn’t look up as she greets me upon entering the room – which is weird, because at the same time, she’s radiating a warmth that feels almost palpable. She has a wide, toothy grin. A tattoo of a black crescent moon adorns her forehead, behind a cascade of beaded locs. Before I even get through the first question, she casts her phone aside and exclaims: “I was just on the phone with my girlfriend, and I was like, ‘I hope that this motherfucker don't come up in here asking the cliché-ass interview questions!’ Let's do a real interview today, because I feel like I'm
always out there in my interviews, but I'm finna go hard in this one.” Duly noted. So, no questions about her choice of stage name (“I got four kids! What you think?”) or trap music (“Because I'm black and I'm from the South, they automatically assume that's the type of music I make.”) But still, as the mother of two sets of twins, balancing single parenthood and the demands of an ever-expanding career as Chattanooga, Tennessee’s premier sex-positive rapper must have its challenges. “I don't sleep. I actually stay up until 5am sometimes because that's when my older two kids get up to start getting ready for school. The older two are 12 and the younger two are six, so they get themselves dressed. I don't even be doing shit, I be doing goofy shit, I be making music just in my room. My room is my universe, and I got a cat now so I be in my room playing with my cat. By 7am everyone is out of my house and I'm knocked out until 2pm. That's my life.” Well, whatever happens in the universe of Bbymutha’s room in the wee hours of the morning, it’s nothing short of revolutionary. It takes an unusually confident artist to make eclecticism their calling card, to eschew a
signature sound in favour of a grab bag of moods, textures and flows that are both wildly divergent and exactly their own. Bbymutha’s ear for beats is uncanny. Take one of her biggest tracks, Rules, which uses a sample of a dog barking as a percussive intro, or BBC, which is built around an elastic bassline and truncated disco synths. “I think about beats the same way I think about men,” she reveals. “When I like a boy, I don't like his overall package, necessarily. I like features. If you got some nice ass lips and they fit your face, you know? In the beats that I pick, there's always a noise in it that I operate around.” She pauses. “I wish I could explain this better…” She goes back to her phone and plays an unreleased track, a slow and syrupy number called 11/11, which features a twinkly, arpeggiated piano sample. “So this beat right here. This little sound, that's what I'm rapping around. I picked that out, and that's what helps me find the flow.” During our conversation, Bbymutha’s phone is never far, and every few minutes she illustrates one of her answers with a sound clip, video or screengrab of a text convo. When she mentions Christianity (her SoundCloud profile pic is a headshot of Joel Osteen, the televangelist pastor – “I love him! He's scamming the Christians, I'm here for it!”) she stops to show me a video of her twerking on a religious protester outside an Earl Sweatshirt show. When I ask how her kids feel about having a rapper as a mom, she plays me a voicemail of her youngest daughter deriding her older brother for being broke. It’s like her brain is constantly firing information at you, and if you’re lucky, you’ll catch enough to piece together a fraction of what she has going on under the surface. “My brain never shuts up, literally,” she says. “Some people can freestyle. I
can't because my brain is constantly throwing out words and rhymes, but I can write for days. People laugh when I go to the studio because n***as really be in there for hours at a time and only get one song done. But I'll have an hour session and get six songs done. It's really fun.” Not only fun, but funny – much of the joy in Bbymutha’s music comes not only from her all-over-the-place lyrical style, but the way she delivers her bars with expert precision. The most compelling example of this is Lil’ Bitch, an incendiary track off her 2018 EP Free Brittnee. “You don’t want yo mama hanging up them missing posters/ You don’t want yo daddy all depressed and in a coma,” she raps, before informing her haters, “I can suck my own dick/ I can suck my own clit.” “I'm funny on purpose!” she laughs. “I feel like my rap style is just poetry, arguments and jokes. Like when you be in the shower and you're like, ‘Damn, that's what I should have said in the argument!’ I turn them into raps!” Bbymutha has gone on record saying she doesn’t consider her music to be political, but while discussing Lil’ Bitch, she concedes that many of her tracks could be where the personal and the political intersect. “I'm all for taking a stance,” she says, after a moment of reflection. “I went through a lot of stuff, so I'm always on defense mode. Even with my fans online, I argue with them bitches so much, and it's because they don't respect me, and I don't do anything but respect people. I just feel like the audacity of these motherfuckers to be talking to me like this when I am providing music for them. I just look at myself like a bitch that be making art. I like art!” Bbymutha appears at Rewire Festival on 3 April
STYLE
Dress: Studio Elzinga Shoes: Jeffery Campbell
054 All Clothes: Daily Paper
STYLE
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Cerrone In his own words, disco pioneer Cerrone remembers how a single mistake changed the course of his career
It was an unexpected success – this was a record that was really meant for the clubs, therefore very distant from the radio format. I didn't intend to make something that would reach a large audience; there was a nearly 17-minute-long track on the A-side, mostly instrumental, with only a few voices saying “love me”. And the drums were very loud in the mix, which was absolutely not the trend at the time. No surprise, no record company wanted to sign it. In short, they took me for a lunatic! So I decided to make 5,000 copies of the record through Island UK
and tried to sell them here and there in various shops. Then, a dealer in Paris sent, by mistake, a cardboard box of 300 copies of Love in C Minor to a US wholesaler. The wholesaler listened to the record, and he loved it. So he started playing it in a club in New York. From that point, the buzz spread very quickly and… well, the rest is history: three million copies sold, and my first Grammy Award! The unexpected success taught me to be a professional. I had the opportunity to work with great producers and musicians – Jerry Hay, Toto, Nile Rodgers, Lene Lovich, to name a few – which greatly enriched my life and career. I thought that this success would only last a few months but I’ve been living my passion for almost 50 years now without giving myself any dictums or limitations, neither in life nor in music – and I'm thankful to all the successive generations who’ve arrived since the 70s, who’ve remixed and sampled my catalogue. It also taught me self-confidence and belief. I feel that, whenever there's an obstacle, the best way is not to avoid it nor let it stop you, but rather use it as a springboard to go higher, to go beyond. I think an artist should always be wary of asking themselves too many questions and instead inhabit a certain form of megalomania. Because any success begins with one bold and daring step. A little luck never hurts, too. DNA is out now via Because Music
MUSIC
My most important breakthrough was, of course, my first solo LP, Love in C Minor.
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Releases
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Zebra Katz LESS IS MOOR ZFK Records
REVIEWS
Has the world caught up with Zebra Katz? When the artist, songwriter and producer released his first single, the acerbic Ima Read, way back in 2012, the lexicon of the queer black experience was not nearly as ubiquitous as it is now, and the track’s shady spitfire was unlike anything to hit the club in a long time. Fast forward to the present day: RuPaul is hosting SNL, Pose is snatching awards left and right and, for better or for worse, those once-fullyunderground aspects of queer culture are as entrenched in the mainstream as they’ve ever been. For his debut album, you’d almost expect Zebra Katz to rest up on those laurels and casually release Ima Read Part 2, but instead, LESS IS MOOR is a rage-filled, brain-throbbing collection of bangers that culls equally from techno, industrial, hip-hop, drum ‘n’ bass and post-punk. Zebra Katz’s flow is still as exacting and staccato as ever, reaching military-grade levels of precision on songs like standout single ISH. His ability to seamlessly shift cadences and tempos carries the album through its many moods, while maintaining the same unsettling-yet-enticing atmosphere. Eight years after introducing himself to the world, it feels like Zebra Katz has finally arrived, and LESS IS MOOR is as incendiary and indelible a calling card as any. !
Cameron Cook
06
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Little Dragon New Me, Same Us Ninja Tune
Daniel Avery & Alessandro Cortini Illusion of Time Mute Records Illusion of Time is the first-time collaboration between UK electronic producer Daniel Avery and long-time Nine Inch Nails contributor and synth connoisseur Alessandro Cortini. The 10-track ambient album is the result of several years of long distance exchanges of sounds across multiple time zones before the two met in person – a process indicative of the album’s title. Illusion of Time moves, almost track by track, from the cold and gritty to the warm and fuzzy, journeying between these extremes with an oscillating intensity. It gives the album a frantic motion, as though the record is constantly moving in search of answers. The album’s standout track is the mind-warping, eightminute-long Water, which delicately nestles celestial textures against euphoric synth pads. But it’s only here, on the album’s longest track, that Illusion of Time truly settles, succumbing to a meditative state best compared to high points on Harmony in Ultraviolet by Tim Hecker and Fennesz’s Venice. From the distorted drones and scruffy noise on Inside the Ruins to the melodic modular synth patterns of the title track and time-stretched guitar feedback loops of At First Sight, Illusion of Time offers a rich and varied landscape, but its volatility proves to be its biggest weakness. !
Sebastian Gabe
07
Nazar Guerilla Hyperdub While Angola’s 27-year civil war officially ended in 2002, its effects are still felt daily by those living there. Income disparity in the country is extreme: the majority of Angolans survive on just $2 a day, and yet the country also boasts the perverse accolade of producing ‘Africa’s richest woman’ – Isabel dos Santos, daughter of former ruler José Eduardo Santos – who made headlines earlier this year after prosecutors asked her to explain where exactly she got all her money from. Over 100 million square metres of land in the country remain contaminated by landmines. And despite the 2002 ceasefire, fighting is ongoing in the oil-rich exclave of Cabinda. It’s this brutal reality, and that of the war itself, that Angolan producer Nazar aims to illustrate with his music. Now based in Manchester, having moved from Belgium, he coined his own ‘rough kuduro’ descriptor as a means of distancing his work from the otherwise upbeat, dance-focused rhythms of Angola’s homegrown pop music. He deploys antagonistic combinations of blissful field recordings (birdsong, waterfalls) alongside unsettling reversed vocal samples, bursts of white noise, distorted blips, and jagged rhythms that stumble drunkenly over themselves. This is not easy listening by any means. Like 2018’s Enclave, which focused on the events of the civil war, Guerrilla is a tense affair. Based on his father’s 2006 memoir, Memorias de Um Guerrilheiro, as well as conversations they shared while driving through Huambo and Luanda, Nazar recreates scenes from the war and its latent aftermath in complex sonic collages. As such, uneasy contrasts abound. On Retaliation, icy rave synths slice through the chatter of tropical birdlife and a looping Ovimbundu folk song, while Diverted hikes up the tension with flashes of noise mimicking gunfire. Then there’s the disorientating swirl of organic, synthetic, and somewhere-in-between sounds on Immortal, recalling hazy rebel ceremonies in which witchcraft was used in an attempt to imbue fighters with superhuman abilities. Some respite – cause for hope, even – comes in the album’s softer moments. Album closer End of Guerrilla reflects on the elation that followed the end of war: a warm low end refigures the ghostly synths that have spliced the album to this point, before disembodied calls of “yeah” trail off into a chorus of birdsong. And on Mother, Nazar’s mother recounts leaving home as a teenager to fight for the rebels. Here the plush synths, harmonised vocals and ambient field recording make the track feel more like a cathartic requiem than a grieving for lost time. It's a fitting close to a record that, in demonstrating the power and importance of remembrance, holds a mirror up to the present and asks what the future should look like too. !
Will Pritchard
Thundercat It Is What It Is Brainfeeder Thundercat is floating in space. The beginning of It Is What It Is sees his voice come through from the far reaches of the galaxy. “Hello, is anybody there?” he sings in that trademark floating falsetto on cosmic opener Lost in Space/Great Scott/22-26 before segueing into the Afrofuturist jazz of Interstellar Love. If previous album Drunk saw Stephen Bruner strutting Earth in his own indomitable fashion – foolishly leaving his wallet at the club; playing Mortal Kombat while brooding over being caught in the friend zone – It Is What It Is connects him to the stars, the spirit of Sun Ra coming through clearer than ever before. Don’t get it twisted: this is very much a Thundercat album. Those squelchy basslines still congeal into throwback funk knockouts – none more satisfying than Black Qualls, which features the generationconnecting line-up of Steve Arrington, Steve Lacy of The Internet and Childish Gambino. Thundercat’s delivery remains defined by a conversational style: Overseas is a horny plea to his girlfriend to join the mile high club. Yet It Is What It Is represents his most full-bodied and confident set to date. Take the wicked Unrequited Love, which manages to sound both doomed and sexy. This might be a shorter and more svelte set than Drunk, but it’s the best inventory of Thundercat’s bohemian artistry. !
Dean Van Nguyen
Little Dragon are clearly onto something. In the two decadesplus the Gothenburg quartet has been churning out their illusory blend of electro-pop they have reaped international success, a Grammy nomination and storied collaborations with everyone from Gorillaz to Flying Lotus. But in spite of their string of standout hits and consistent quality, they have yet to really crack the album format, thriving thus far as quintessential single-queens. New Me, Same Us, their sixth full-length, may not have the instantly replayable bangers of their past projects, but as a unified whole, it is an immediate contender for their strongest album to date. Self-described as their “most collaborative” LP with a focus on going back to basics, the album emerges as the beating heart of the entire Little Dragon sonic ethos. Charging out of the gate with house stomper Hold On, the band spend the ensuing 10 tracks oscillating between this propulsive energy and the luxuriant downtempo soundscapes of Kids and New Fiction. Sadness manages to be both at once, arising from a barebones pairing of upbeat percussion and vocalist Yukimi Nagano’s inimitable coo which blossoms into a tropical disco free-for-all, pivoting again in the subsequent Are You Feeling Sad? to a more crisp, kinetic strut. No one is rewriting the rules on New Me, Same Us, but Little Dragon’s ability to hunker down and produce a work so effusive of their strengths is reward enough. !
Jake Indiana
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Sammy Maine
Waxahatchee Saint Cloud Merge Records Katie Crutchfield’s thrillingly scathing last album, Out in the Storm, started with a pile-on of abrasive guitars and a direct address to a loser ex-boyfriend. Latest offering Saint Cloud, on the other hand, begins with a meditative drumbeat and a dreamy, knowing chant: “I want it all”. This juxtaposition of opening intents signal that Crutchfield is feeling more like herself than ever. Why sing about other people when you’re on a journey all of your own? Saint Cloud didn’t come easily, however. Katie recently told Rolling Stone that she went sober and moved from Philadelphia to Kansas City in order to be in the right headspace to write it. And while her output as Waxahatchee has always been brave, this album possesses a new kind of strength. Crutchfield’s knack for celestial storytelling comes into its own when she narrates her own struggle for self-acceptance. This includes harking back to the genre that formed her relationship with music: country. From the elegant and wistful guitar riffs on tracks like Can’t Do Much to her Alabama accent flying high on Lilacs, hearing Crutchfield lean into her Southern roots feels her most natural expression yet. !
Sammy Jones
Stephen Malkmus closes a run of three albums in three years not with a scuzzy synth whizzbang but a pedal steel whimper. The beloved Pavement frontman pivots away from his ‘first electronic album’ – 2019’s Groove Denied – with the aptly-titled Traditional Techniques, a beautifully composed, if altogether more conventional foray into proper folk. Billed as “new phase folk music for new phase folks”, Malkmus casts a wide net of international sonic influences; surely it is the sole entry in his discography that counts rubab, kaval, udu and daf alongside guitars in its instrumentation. Much to his credit, these influences are subsumed into his jangly alt-pop without coming across as forced or exploitative. The rolling undulations of an Indian raga solidify the foundations of Shadowbanned, while What Kind of Person gorgeously blends indigenous wind instruments with classic Americana. While no one can dispute the quality craftsmanship at work, it ultimately fails to capture the imagination the way that Groove Denied does. The latter still crackles with inspiration, constantly subverting the listener’s expectations and emerging with some of the most memorable tracks in Malkmus’ solo career. Traditional Techniques is polished and expertly musical, but it sounds more interested in catering to the whims of Malkmus himself than engendering any response from us. !
Jake Indiana
U.S. Girls Heavy Light 4AD Heavy Light, the seventh U.S. Girls album and her second on 4AD, continues where 2018’s critically cherished In a Poem Unlimited left off, smoothing out her once-DIY sound into something more pop-aligned but no less potent. Intriguingly, this time around the mood seems to be reflective rather than outright angry. She invites an army of her musicians to share personal memories on three interludes (Advice to Teenage Self, The Most Hurtful Thing, The Color of Your Childhood Bedroom). The result is delicately mournful, as each voice turns over the past, and taken together these fragments form a kind of emotional anchor to the album, framing Heavy Light as a record preoccupied by time, and by hindsight. Remy’s righteous rage isn’t entirely dissipated. The album sees her confront capitalism (4 American Dollars), the capacity of the state to deceive the masses (And Yet It Moves/Y Se Mueve), and the relative insignificance of the human experience (The Quiver to the Bomb). If last album In a Poem Unlimited helped Remy broaden her audience by taking aim at the patriarchy over a disco beat, Heavy Light feels more theatrical, pinning her politics to piano melodies and gospel choirs. The result is no less impactful. !
Katie Thomas
TOPS I Feel Alive Musique Tops
Session Victim Needledrop Night Time Stories
Montreal four-piece TOPS have honed an invigorating take on a familiar sound: nostalgic AM pop woven into themes of contemporary romance. Across four records, the band have refined their songwriting – drawing influence from Fleetwood Mac and Harry Nilsson to 80s French pop – to near perfection, providing a starkly honest platform for singer Jane Penny’s most personal stories. If 2017’s Sugar at the Gate was a lament of a relationship gone south, I Feel Alive focuses on what comes after. Opener Direct Sunlight, a breezy, buoyant exploration of new love, sets a sunkissed tone for the record’s first half as Penny sings: “Sunshine in LA/ We play shadow games/ I play with you night and day”. Ballads and Sad Movies momentarily returns to Sugar at the Gate’s wistful, downtempo mood, providing the album’s most emotive moment. But it’s Colder and Closer that remains the highlight, featuring David Carriere’s gleaming, effortlessly catchy guitar hooks and Penny’s dreamy soprano at the height of their powers. Does I Feel Alive largely stick to an established formula? Sure. However it's so well crafted that it feels like a strength, not a flaw.
With the steady stream of softly orchestrated releases on the Night Time Stories label – sister of LateNightTales – and the rerelease of Nightmares on Wax’s seminal Smokers Delight, the mellow spirit of the mid-90s is riding strong as we head into the 2020s. Session Victim has always trod a gentle path to the dancefloor. With dreamy, sample-heavy house and disco compositions on suave labels like Delusions of Grandeur, their back-catalogue has a kind of timeless appeal. On their latest release though, the material is situated somewhere very specific, with a cameo from Beth Hirsch – the vocalist who brought another seminal 90s album, Air’s Moon Safari, to life. Hirsch’s contribution on Made Me Fly is one of the album’s highlights: the delicacy of her delivery lifts the downtempo production that at other points, like the sub-Motor City Drum Ensemble swoon of The Pain, feels strangely non-committal. High points, such as the melancholic swirl of the title track – built around a sample of the Bossa Nova standard Corcovado (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars) – only heightens the sense that the album spends too long hugging the middle of the road.
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Steve Mallon
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Adam Corner
REVIEWS
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06
Stephen Malkmus Traditional Techniques Domino Records
Porches Ricky Music Domino Records Aaron Maine first came to attention with Slow Dance in the Cosmos, a record that set out his stall with a sound that was brash, irreverent. His approach has since softened: 2016 album Pool and follow-up The House allowed Maine to refashion himself as a master of melancholic electronica. Harnessing ideas of uncertainty, beauty and anger, new album Ricky Music doesn’t deviate from the emotional palette of his recent work. But while these big themes are tackled with a heightened sensitivity, Maine’s continuous soul searching begins to feel a little one-note. “Do you wanna cry? I do too,” Maine asks on Hair, a song whose reliance on a few brooding chords gives it the air of an undercooked demo. Elsewhere, I Wanna Ride offers an awkward spoken narration while Lipstick Song comes off like an adolescent mimicry of the Twin Peaks theme. However, there are some successes. Warped guitar rager PFB provides 33 seconds of pure catharsis. The playful instrumental textures throughout I Can’t Even Think and Fuck_3 hint at a more expansive, experimental direction while lead single Do U Wanna is a sad pop bop masterclass. But capturing Maine at his unabashed best is the beautifully distorted closer rangerover, with its squeaky, pitch-shifted vocals. Still, for all these flashes of magic, Ricky Music fails to truly captivate.
07
SAT 23 & SUN 24 MAY
(a>z)
Afrodeutsche / AMELIE LENS Ben Klock / Call Super Fatima YamaHA / DISCLOSURE Floating Points / HUNEE Jayda G / Leon Vynehall Marcel Dettmann Or:la / Overmono palms Trax / Paula Temple Ross From Friends sassy J / skream Slam / Squarepusher (live)
(live)
(live)
(DJ SET)
(hybrid live)
(live)
+ much much more
DISCOVER THE FULL LINE-UP AT riversidefestivalglasgow.com
065
Shabaka and the Ancestors
continuous “sonic poem” by Hutchings and poet Siyabonga Mthembu, its 11 tracks form an impassioned, if impressionistic, narrative of spoken word poetry and music which demands that we reform our relationship to masculinity, to the earth, and to our treatment of each other. It’s a grandiose undertaking and one that opens itself up to potential pitfalls, yet the record artfully avoids being overwrought or unconvincing. Instead, each track title is taken from a line from Mthembu’s lyrics – exhortations like They Who Must Die, You’ve Been Called and Behold, the Deceiver, all calls to action which buffet the listener like Hutchings’ relentless phrasings. This double-breath of vocals and reeds serves to create an energetic communal expression, backed by the interweaving of horns from Hutchings and Mthunzi Mvubu. Shabaka and the Ancestors We Are Sent Here by History Impulse! Records
Words: Ammar Kalia
Saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings has spent the past few years questioning our ideas of what constitutes history and why we shouldn’t just blindly accept the narratives we have been given. From his 2018 release Your Queen Is a Reptile with his band Sons of Kemet, which posited a series of notable women of colour as “alternative queens”, to the psychedelic collapse on his Comet Is Coming albums, Hutchings has been channelling otherworldly jazz futurism to create new musical understandings of our past and collective visions of the future. On his latest record, We Are Sent Here by History, with his South African-based group The Ancestors, Hutchings’ work on reframing and rewriting experience through the force of his saxophone reaches some of its fullest expression. Written as a
Opener They Who Must Die provides landsliding washes of sound to jolt the listener into attentiveness, the melodies overlapping like a panning stereoscape while Mthembu calls upon “genes and spirits to keep us in time”. In fact, the call to “genes and spirits” acts as a refrain throughout the record, punning on their presence keeping us in rhythmic time, and linking Hutchings with a sense of his own genetic and spiritual history. Throughout the record, the doubling of reeds pushing up against the rhythm of percussionist Gontse Makhene with drummer Tumi Mogorosi creates the teetering sense of things falling apart. We are ultimately “kept in time” but both the rhythm section and harmonic choices create a tension that challenges a simple, linear progression
on tracks like Go My Heart, Go to Heaven and Finally, the Man Cried. There are, of course, ample moments of musical beauty interwoven amongst the narrative; compositional elements like the plaintive clarinet and sax harmonies of Behold, the Deceiver, which call to mind the deeply-felt work of John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, or the sloppy, languorous swing of Run, the Darkness Will Pass, and the percussive concatenations on We Will Work (on Redefining Manhood). Here, Hutchings shows his mighty capacity as a composer and arranger, as well as ideologue. A record of this complexity can appear an obtrusive or difficult undertaking, and this involvement is part of its beauty. Hutchings shows that to recreate our narratives, we must delve into nuance, encounter ambiguous and confounding lyrics and different modes of interpretation. Since, the very thing he is trying to avoid is one overarching idea consuming all else. Life is more complicated than that. Once you let go and embrace this enveloping and sometimes overwhelming sense, We Are Sent Here by History opens up to reveal its depth and beauty. There is a freedom in the swirling chaos, a space to roam amongst the noise of this raw creation of drums, sax and voice. Hutchings’ message may be grandiose and his visions lofty, but his expression is nonetheless heartfelt and captivating. On We Are Sent Here by History, he makes it apparent that change – the lifeblood of jazz music – is necessary, lest we descend into stasis and merely accept the damaging history we have been given.
REVIEWS
09
The bandleader regroups with the Ancestors for an album that questions the narratives written for us
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Madvillainy Madvillainy unlocked the promise of the rap album as a living document Words: Gary Suarez
Commercially successful and critically adored, Madvillainy merged esoteric interests with broader themes, both insider nods and approachable punchlines folded into the mix. An unlikely highlight, track Accordion evokes the titular instrument as a melodic device over which Doom delivered his comic book baddie bars. While previous record Operation: Doomsday had introduced MF Doom’s supervillain persona, it took Madlib’s wildly inventive production style on Madvillainy to make the character iconic, echoing the work of revered comic book writers Frank Miller and Alan Moore. Twelve years after Madvillainy, Kanye West garnered attention for his approach towards updating a previously released album. That record was 2016’s The Life of Pablo. Spurred on by a combination of listener feedback and his own creative whims, a month later he made modifications to the then-exclusively digital product, defending his right to do so by declaring the project a “living breathing changing creative expression” via Twitter. Among the noticeable updates
Madvillainy 2 arrived in 2008 billed as a remix project, but in reality it was more than that. The ever-prolific Madlib had taken it upon himself to graft Doom’s vocals onto completely new beats, building something standalone as a result. At the time, many took an immediate dislike to Madvillainy 2, due in no small part to the sustained adoration for the original. Appalled by the rejiggering of a work deemed “borderline perfect,” Pitchfork panned the sequel as an inferior work, chiding Madlib for excising the comic book cool of the first installment. Aware of the purist devotion of Madvillainy’s fans, even their label Stones Throw anticipated the backlash, going so far as to use the word ‘sacrilege’ in its marketing materials for the release. They still made a limited box set version out of it, nonetheless. With respect to West’s digital tweaks, few hip-hop artists have endeavoured to do anything as sweeping as what Madlib did on Madvillainy 2. One exception, and a testament to Madvillain’s legacy, is Ghostface Killah. In 2013, three years before The Life of Pablo, the Wu-Tang icon dropped a grisly mafioso concept album called Twelve Reasons to Die. With music composed by Adrian Younge and
executive production from The RZA, the project was his most heralded in years. Shortly thereafter, a second official version called The Brown Tape emerged online, swapping out Younge’s organic production for that of modern boom bap artist Apollo Brown. While not as widely heard, this evil twin of a record earned a cult following, an indication that perhaps breaking the mold and rebuilding, as Madlib did with Madvillainy and its successor, allows the work to be greater than a fixed moment in time. As a result, the door is now open to reimagine nearly any rap album as a living document, unlocking an exciting future for the genre and format in our digital future – and that’s all thanks to Madvillainy.
REVIEWS
The seismic team-up between Oxnard producer Madlib and New York polymath MF Doom gave underground rap the kind of album that changed the course of the genre forever. Springboarding off the respective strengths of the former’s Blue Note Records reworks and the latter’s multimonikered post-KMD efforts, the duo – aptly named Madvillain – got together and made something greater than the sum of its parts; an undisputed hip-hop classic for the new millennium.
were adjustments to Famous and Wolves, and he would go on to make three more rounds of changes to the album, some more obvious than others. Music critics and fans hailed West’s The Life of Pablo updates as genius, having taken advantage of the new artistic opportunities presented by the streaming landscape. Yet eight years earlier, Madlib already preemptively outdid his future collaborator with a complete overhaul of the Madvillain album. Label: Stones Throw Original release date: 23 March 2004
When Madlib and MF Doom dropped Madvillainy in 2004, hip-hop shook.
Design: CokeOak Words: Rachel Grace Almeida
Downtime:
Little Dragon Welcome to Downtime: a regular series in which we ask our favourite artists for their cultural recommendations. This month, we catch up with Little Dragon. The Gothenburg four-piece first formed in 1996, back when they were school friends bonded by their shared love of De La Soul, Alice Coltrane and A Tribe Called Quest. Their weighty studio output might not necessarily cleave close to their influences, but Little Dragon have carved a path of their own. Seven albums in, including upcoming release New Me, Same Us, the group have become synonymous with joyous electro-pop, shimmering disco and earworm melodies. Here, they take us on a similarly cheerful tour of their favourite hometown spots. Skatås and Delsjön nature reserve and Lilla Sur Skatås and Delsjön is a beautiful nature reserve near a few lakes and woodlands. A great place for reflection, any time of year. I sometimes make the climb up to the top of Brudarebacken hill, where you can slide down snowy slopes and look over the city to the horizon. In Gothenburg itself, I love to relax at café Lilla Sur – this place does the best bread in town, their sourdough is addictive. – Yukimi Nagano Saltholmen Kallbadhus, Slottsskogen Park and Botanical Gardens I love to visit the winter swimming bathhouse and sauna out by the Saltholmen area. Located at the start of the Swedish archipelago, it’s been open every day for the last 100 years. I recommend going in for a winter dip in the ocean, followed by a hot sauna. It’s something I never regret doing. Don’t bother bringing swimsuits – do it Swedish style.
A.
I also love to wander around Slottsskogen Park (and free zoo). Go meet a moose, have a beverage and ponder what the penguins and seals think of their minuscule domain. One really hopes the little cuties are blessed with a rich inner life. I often get coffee at the Glasshouse café nearby... but don’t go there, it’s my spot! So instead, check out the exotic and domestic plants across the road at the botanical gardens. A multisensory extravaganza.
B.
– Fredrik Wallin Gothenburg’s outdoor (and indoor) concerts There are a lot of free lunchtime concerts around the city which I like to spend time at. Hagakyrkan is a church where you can sit down and listen to acoustic music. In the middle of town, there’s also a fantastic garden, Trädgårdsföreningen, where you can find peace, have a coffee and, of course, enjoy all the fantastic plants. If I plan a little bit, I like to get a ticket to the Gothenburg ballet. World class moves.
C.
– Håkan Wirenstrand Fika, Skansberget and Dirty Records Gothenburg is a city of cafés, and without a fika (a coffee break with perhaps a cinnamon bun to go with it) you haven’t had the full experience the town has to offer. As a result of too much coffee, it’s advisable to get some fresh air. Luckily, Gothenburg is also a city full of hills and one of my favourites is Skansberget. In the old neighbourhood called Haga you will find a challenging set of steps that will take you up to the top. There you will find the old fort Skansen Kronan, built some 400 years ago. The view is epic.
REVIEWS
Afterwards, I like to head to Dirty Records, a longtime destination for crate diggers like myself. The shop has managed to survive over the years and, since moving closer to Järntorget and introducing their baking and coffee skills, they now have a solid group of music nerds visiting and keeping the love of vinyl alive. – Erik Bodin New Me, Same Us is released 27 March via Ninja Tune
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2O QUESTIONS
In 2012, it was hard to escape Zebra Katz’s infectious track Ima Read. The song quickly shot to viral fame for its pounding bass, slick vogue beats and scathing bars: “Ima read that bitch, Ima school that bitch/ Ima take that bitch to college, Ima give that bitch some knowledge.” Zebra Katz – real name Ojay Morgan – soon became a mainstay in New York’s nascent queer hiphop scene, springing up alongside of fellow scenesters Cakes Da Killa and Azealia Banks. Some eight years on, he returns with full force on upcoming debut album LESS IS MOOR, taking industrial electronics, hip-hop and pop through uncharted territory. We caught up with the elusive innovator for 20 Questions.
1.
Best survival tip for 2020?
2.
What’s your biggest fear?
3.
Being denied abduction by ancient aliens in the near future. What’s the weirdest DM you’ve ever received?
I can honestly say I haven’t received any weird DMs, but: @zebrakatz.
4.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
“Quit playing small.”
5.
I love anything with cheese that takes longer than an hour to make.
Drink water.
What makes you feel nostalgic?
12. 13.
had to do?
14.
What’s the weirdest party you’ve ever been to?
An afters in Yekaterinburg, Russia, after one of my gigs. My host walked through a glass door and didn’t even flinch.
8.
What’s the biggest realisation you had in 2019?
That next year is 2020 and it’s time to really make ish happen.
9. What’s your worst habit?
15. 16.
11. Words: Costanza Chiavari
Favourite song of all time?
Ima Read because it changed my life and helped me reach where I am today. Signature dish to impress at a dinner party?
I’ve been making lasagna and chilli most winter.
R&B or hardcore punk, for the rest of time?
Favourite city?
New York because it’s a city that will always have a wicked little heart Weirdest thing you’ve seen happen in a club?
Lil Jon throwing wedding cakes at the Fontainebleau in Miami. This night I also managed to crowd-surf on an inflatable raft through the crowd.
17.
What would you want written on your tombstone?
“LESS IS MOOR.”
18.
What’s your favourite verse you’ve ever written?
“Ima write a dissertation to excuse my shit.”
19.
What piece of advice would you give young Ojay?
Making mistakes are all a part of the process.
Watching reality TV.
1O.
What’s your earliest childhood memory?
I'm genre non-conformist.
Learn how to pick the right battles in order to win the war.
7.
Summer Walker and Megan Thee Stallion.
Applying for the theatre program public arts school I attended and playing lots of Nintendo.
Listening to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
6. What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever
Who’s inspiring you right now?
2O.
What instantly cheers you up?
Watching classic YouTube clips from Detroit’s The New Dance Show. LESS IS MOOR is released 20 March via ZFK Records
Remembering Andrew Weatherall It’s bewildering to imagine a world without the contributions of Andrew Weatherall. Known for a decades-long career as a pioneering and hugely influential producer, remixer and DJ, his legacy reaches well beyond the boundaries that constrained many in his generation. Where some of his former peers have found themselves placed on pedestals as ‘legends’ – dusted off every few years to remind us of their former glories – or have been confined to relics of the acid house era, Weatherall remained ahead of the beat, whether that beat was disco, half-time or so slow it melted into non-existence. His work and longevity, often the result of a near-mythological desire for complete independence, is as defined by the roads he chose not to take as the mountains he repeatedly conquered. A DJ of exquisite taste and technical talent, his open-minded, curious nature led to a journey less travelled, one through music, art, literature and everything else that one might turn to when trying to make sense of a loss like this. Born and raised in Windsor, Weatherall found himself in “the right place at the right time” for Britain’s second summer of love, driven by the arrival of ecstasy and Balearic house in the UK. Already the proprietor of an expansive and eclectic record collection, he was invited to play clubs such as Shoom, where he soon became resident, as well as parties run by Paul Oakenfold and Terry Farley, with whom he’d found Boy’s Own, the legendary acid house era fanzine devoted to football, records and fashion. Although Weatherall easily matched the taste for hedonism amongst his peers, he remained an esoteric fringe figure, somewhat unconvinced by the Balearic charms of Ibiza and the bubbling promise of vast commercial success. Nonetheless, he still became something of a household name, albeit
in households littered with novels, records and pungent grinders. Until his death, he remained one of life’s great enthusiasts, as yet another generation has discovered via his NTS residency show, Music’s Not for Everyone, or under voluntary hypnosis at his A Love from Outer Space parties, a celebration of patience and pay-off alongside Sean Johnston, at which the tempo was “never knowingly above 122bpm.”
Words: John Thorp Photography: John Barrett
We bid farewell to a hero of underground music, who defied convention at every turn
Music’s Not for Everyone is a quintessentially Weatherall title; a little barbed, a little enticing. Although he had scant regard for the banality of much in popular culture, his approach to music and production wasn’t rooted in intellectual superiority but left a door ajar into a psychedelic, sometimes challenging world. Some of his best-known work – his collaboration with Primal Scream on 1991’s Screamadelica, remixes of Saint Etienne, Future Sound Of London and My Bloody Valentine that arguably became the definitive articles, the wistful Smokebelch II (Beatless Mix) as Sabres of Paradise – connected far above the underground he was content in inhabiting. Waving away their cultural significance, he attributed these early successes to a sense of naivety, one that he would somehow conjure again and again as he boldly expanded his discography to encompass not only a significant dub influence, but rockabilly, folk and on 2013’s excellent collaboration with Timothy J Fairplay as The Asphodells, his own surprisingly gentle singing voice. His sense of humour and generosity informed his approach to everything. Close friends of The Guv’nor have written that he would be able to pick up threads of conversation years, even decades later. He saw and presented culture as a reassuring continuum, a cycle marked by indulgent nights out in which centuries-old traditions of mind-altering took place
in grubby clubs, soundtracked without judgement by his sublime taste. Weatherall’s passion and ability to trace the invisible lines between genres and styles and his talent for recontextualising records is occasionally equalled, yet rarely beaten in contemporary ‘selector’ culture, though I would suspect the term is not one he’d favour. Over the years, he exhibited bafflement towards the notion that he was a sort of figurehead, often undercutting his legendary status with self-aware humour and stories at his own expense. To his converts,
these defences were entertaining but useless. Nobody sounded like Weatherall. Avowedly secular, Weatherall nonetheless sought enlightenment, finding meaning not only in music and collaboration, but in literature and history. Away from the DJ booth, he regularly used his work and words to pay generous tribute to his influences and inspirations, a studied lineage of bold eccentrics, generous raconteurs and those occasional, genuine visionaries. What a tragedy to lose yet another.
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