WILT_2020-12

A playlist of songs that intrigued me from Sunday to Saturday. Week of 13 Dec 2020 to 19 Dec 2020.

1. Love – Boris, Merzbow
2. Hollywood – Emma Ruth Rundle, Thou
3. Rabbit Hole – Cherry Glazerr
4. My Friend the Forest – Nils Frahm
5. Fried for the Night – TOKiMONSTA, EARTHGANG
6. City Life: I. Check It Out – Steve Reich, Holst Sinfonietta, Klaus Simon
7. Imminent – The Comet Is Coming, Joshua Idehen, Marcel Jean Baptiste
8. The Roots of Coincidence – Pat Methany Group
9. These Are My Twisted Words – Radiohead
10. Pastoral – Christian Löffler
11. Monolith – Emma Ruth Rundle, Thou

Hyperlink to Spotify playlist: WILT_2020-12

Notes

We open with with an incredibly sludgy sequence of electric instrumentation by Boris. As the first few notes of melody scream through your ears, nothing really cuts through because there’s a myriad of other noises accompanying the mix.

Oh no. We’ve entered my appreciation of heady experimental noise.

I don’t seek noise out, but when it does appear, I tend to pause and let it envelope me. To see if there’s anything there that the artist is trying to say, or tell me, or for me to interpret. A lot of this reaction stems from one of my favourite articulations on grief by HTRK:

That changed after Sean died. [Nigel’s] attitude was, ‘Make this as lo-fi as possible.’ Looking back I think grieving had a lot to do with that. All those sounds make no sense when you’re grieving. Instead it’s lo-fi, gritty and just a bit ‘fuck you’ when you’re in a lot of pain.

Jonnine Standish, Frustrated Desire, Twists and Turns: An Interview with HTRK (The Quietus, 2011)

This week’s playlist is pretty haphazard, powered a lot by algorithm. However, if there’s a red thread through all this, is that I sense a synthesis of styles and ideas that would not be otherwise be traditionally paired. For example, renowned jazz-guitarist Pat Methany’s combines the electronic elements and groove of the drum ‘n’ bass genre and smashes it together with jazz improvisation solo segments in The Roots of Coincidence. Or How neo-jazz outfit, The Comet Is Coming incorporate the UK Garage sound with the unbridled organic power of the saxophone to create a sonic layer that you don’t otherwise find in a lot of electronic music in the track Imminent.

There’s so much more, I hear famed classical composer Steve Reich combine samples and elements of hip-hop in his arrangements for City Life: I. Check It Out to create both a complex rhythm of percussion instruments with an intricate layer of sonic elements that you find in the work of some great producers.

But perhaps one collaboration that really excited me in this week’s playlist is between Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou. Rundle collaborates with so many different types of bands, lending her voice to rock, folk, dreampop, shoegaze, etc… to some extent it was also a matter of time before boundary-crossing sludge metal band, Thou, met her in the middle. And what a head-on collision of bliss this is. I’m not sure how many fucks were given when they decided to write and perform together, but I feel like the answer is zero. The music just works, and it meanders, it boils, it clubs you to death, and it resurrects.

May your feet find the friction to walk forwards.