Bomarr – “Strugglebus” from Bomarr on Vimeo.

Scene which most lends itself to tenuous metaphor: right at the start, where the dude hits himself in the head and then, much to the viewer’s delight, falls the other way. If there’s one thing I can say about anticon’s body of releases, and of Bomarr himself, it’s that the music always falls the way you don’t expect.

Oberhofer – Dead Girls Dance

And now it’s time for prosaic whiplash, as is always the case whenever there’s a point to be made, and mine is the scattered mind that makes it.

We’ve seen a lot of thrashy, all-mess-preserved acts cropping up lately. No Age comes to mind as the band that triggered the latest wave of retro-punkers, and I always thought they (plural) were pitching their acts with a Mona Lisa smile: “I’m paying homage and I want you to know it, and aren’t we having a grand old time?” There’s a reason the audience for this micromovement heavily concentrated around the 20-something demographic, and it’s because anyone older was around to experience lo-fi crazy culture the first time around, and imitations/revival movements are infinitely easier to digest if you never lived through the period to which they’re paying homage. I’m 22, so I’m also an outsider, but I’m old enough to know that when Pitchfork says “new,” they mean “hasn’t been done in the past five years.” No one’s really at fault here, it’s just that our collective short-term memory and itchy nostalgia finger might be what keeps the music industry alive.

Oberhofer isn’t a punk artist, not even remotely. But it brings up a point about genre. All the legitimate music I’ve encountered stems from something intrinsic – you can’t make art by replicating the surface of what you idolize. You can’t paint yourself blue and call yourself the fucking ocean. Aesthetic exists to reflect the core of artistry behind it, and copping the aesthetic while dropping the core – no matter what someone does to “make it fresh” – is not interesting. Here’s why I like Oberhofer: he isn’t the first, or best, to do what he does. But it plays like it’s coming from him, and no one else. He has character, rather than an image – the latter of which results from an actor pantomiming the former. This manifests itself in subtle ways (frustratingly subtle, as someone who wanted to review him – took me an hour to find this example) – when “I Could Go” punctuates its hectic repetition with hesitant steps forward in lyrical content, it’s the sound of a singer trying to figure himself out in song. When the artist is – all at once – lost, confident, jittery, messy, simple, and open about really being confused as fuck – the music should be all of the same. And in this case, all of those traits carry through. Pick it up, put it down, you know I’ve been living low within the ground, in the ground, in the ground, in the ground / and I don’t have a clue what that look on your face is all about, all about, all about, all about / and I could walk for miles – I don’t know where to…

Oberhofer – I Could Go

It’s not lost on me that I have the pleasure of “breaking” Oberhofer, a guy who I believe could gather a following with the right publicity machine behind him, and it’s also not lost on me that that pleasure tends to lure critics into exaggeration. I know that I am speaking in absolutes, that I am perhaps lionizing his importance. But if you know me, you know that I am a man who is built for absolutes. In the face of a generation and a cultural movement that specializes in detachment, I want to be the type of person who praises what deserves to praised, who feels in wholes, even if it means my peers perceive me as an idealistic fool. Oberhofer is by no means the first artist I’ve admired for authenticity, but he’s the one who set off this essay: so that’s worth something.

Here it is: sometimes you go to a bar and run into a vain bitch, like the hundreds of vain bitches you’ve condemned in your mind before, but this time you tell her the fuck off at the top of your lungs while the whole bar is watching, because she tipped you over the edge, and she fucking deserved it. And sometimes you walk down the street and pass a gorgeous woman, not unlike the hundreds of gorgeous women you’ve passed before, but this time (for some reason) you posses the courage and spontaneity to start up a conversation, and you end up in the most glamorous relationship (the type you’ve idealized for all these years). There’s no difference between this time and the rest, except this time you’ve acted – and I know that Oberhofer’s the catalyst for an opinion I’ve been trying to mold into words for a long, long time. So, Bradley Oberhofer: enjoy your pedestal, however wobbly and tiny it is. You’ve got a long way to go as an artist, and you’re going to have to battle some wicked forces to preserve your authenticity – but if you can manage the balancing act, the pedestal is yours to keep.

Oberhofer – Away FRM U

To celebrate, I’m asking everyone to send me a link to 1-2 of their favorite artists on the site. I’ll compile all the links here in a long list of time-devouring aural radness – eventually I’m hoping it’ll expand into dozens upon dozens of fresh pages to get your jam on (most of it will be electronic). Starting with what’s been featured:

Bankai
Eim Ick
proj::echts
mUSER (recommended by rd3k)
DP (recommended by phoenixwright)
Kegaska (recommended by phoenixwright)
m0nk (recommended by phoenixwright)
Color Theory (recommended by phoenixwright)
EEPROM (recommended by Bankai)
Turbo P (recommended by Bankai)
Beautiful Unicorn (recommended by Bankai)
The Tremulance (recommended by John)
StereoBit (recommended by John)
Station X (recommended by Beautiful Unicorn)
Kap10Kurt (recommended by Beautiful Unicorn)
JAHBIL (recommended by Beautiful Unicorn)
PurpleWonderful (recommended by Beautiful Unicorn)
Rain Rain (recommended by Brian Hazard)
Odd Year (recommended by Brian Hazard)
Sekeraj (recommended by Burro Music)
Old Detroit Radio (recommended by Burro Music)
Wierzbowski (recommended by Burro Music)
RYKARD (recommended by Burro Music)
ULTRNX (recommended by EEPROM)

Artists who have been repped should leave a comment and return the love :). I’ll update about once a day.

Now, to contradict myself entirely (Whitman would be proud), here’s an artist I’ve been sitting on for weeks. Six days out of seven I advocate subtlety, complexity and detail in music. On the seventh day there is Bankai. And though all of that shit is present in Bankai’s jams, the difference is they take a backseat to genuine, relentless, old-fashioned ass-kickery. Yep, this is the type of shit you dance to so hard you wake up in the morning with a hangover and a self-inflicted concussion. “PARTY HARDER” is club-ready, start to end, from the thwomping kick drum to the absolutely unchained repletion of “raaaaaaaave oooooooon!” – screamed and glitched out (in that order) on the tail end of the track. Everything he pushes out is extraordinary psych-up music. I’d have the discussion with you about how incredibly technical and complex his production is, but fuck, when have you ever been good at dancing and carrying a conversation at the same time? I thought so.

Bankai – PARTY HARDER

Bankai – Strut

For more Bankai (there is tons – don’t miss “Faun”), check this.
Bankai is running an incredibly innovative, awesome croudsourced tour. Check it out.

Eim Ick: Painting Luft (stream only by request)

Christ, it’s like a tropical forest with sun shining through the canopy, exotic birds landing on your shoulder, and all that other magical shit. Over the course of two EPs (his self-titled EP under the CLOUDC moniker and his forthcoming Eim Ick EP), this man has not missed, and his style has not been matched. Highly recommended.

I’ve discovered a fair number of excellent artists in that particular section of the internet tubes (so many, in fact, I organized a t61-exclusive electro compilation – more on that in a future post). One of the raddest blips on my radar is proj::echts (did I stutter?), and his latest effort may very well be the song that graduates him from “promising” to “arrived.”

proj::echts: Flash Flood

It’s kind of dreamy, kind of sleepy, and drenched in liquid, like an insomnia-driven walk through a persistent drizzle in the darkest hours of the early morning. You’ve got about three different pads sharing space at the outer edges of the mix, ducking in and out to provide a drony, atmospheric feedback, while the stutter-step drum beat starts out confident but trails off like a daydream near the ends of certain bars. Ten or twelve listens in, I’m starting to notice the subtle details that pull this whole song together – like the near-demure wobble that brings the entire track back into focus, seemingly snapping the drums awake again. In this case, I can’t say much more than what’s felt – grab the mp3 and pay him a visit for a few more looks at an artist I hope to hell will make the step into the public view soon.

Pictureplane – Goth Star

Bout zero-point-one seconds into “Goth Star” I’m all turning my shit way up to hear some synth greetings at proper volume, then, bout two seconds later I’m “holy fuck!”ing at the explosion that blasted my ears, like a levy just broke and a dam full of thunder came rolling out. Pictureplane was off to a pretty good start for me, but those first few unexpected seconds were like a brilliant opening line to a novel that bore the burden of demanding 300 pages of glorious prose behind it to prove all the author’s originality wasn’t irreversibly sucked into one black hole of a hook. (“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. Uh, the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog…”)

It didn’t take long to prove PP was well capable of Hunter Essing my whole world up. Hitting “Goth Star’s” 39 second mark popped something rad and irrational off inside of me, like I was a sixteen year old girl who just kissed a hunky dreamy model dude for the first time and went home that night, heart all aflutter, and planned the oceanside white wedding and named all of our future kids. :39’s when the vocal chops in over the top of the track, spouting off in such vivid bursts I had check to make sure I wasn’t listening to Four Tet’s “She Moves She” – the last time I remember a producer handling sliced vocals and wild volume disparities to such immediate effect. Rare as it sounds, that’s the point down to the second I decided to pick up the album, Dark Rift.

The rest of the honeymoon’s no different than what you would expect – a jittery compendium of near-retro jams which full well deserves to be chronicled in the oversensationalized language of music criticism – synths always sparkle, melodies are always glorious, and no noun escapes without three fawning adjectives draped over its back, like a mink coat. (And don’t forget the exquisite similies, ho ho!) I’m most impressed by how nonmediocre Dark Rift turned out to be – heaps of producers are capable of carving out a niche, but most find that niche filling with quicksand by the fourth or fifth song, and by then it’s too late to climb out of the sludge. Pictureplane is cogent but flexible, and the album consistently performs some downright odd feints into uncharted territories – like the time a kick-heavy house beat grinds to a halt to make room for little Animal Collectivey arpeggio trills underneath a scratchy blanket of distortion. This fine moment comes on the tra—hold on, a friend just cut me off to tell me something. He says I have to stop comparing shit to Animal Collective all the time or it cheapens the magic and delegitimizes my clout as a critical authority. Ok, fine, please accept my apology and this informative venn diagram as an absolution of my sins:

Anyway, yeah. Dark Rift is sick. You can check Pictureplane’s myspace for some more goodies, and nab the disc wherever discs are nabbable. Here’s your outro:

Pictureplane – Cyclical, Cyclical (Atlantis)

Four Tet – She Moves She

A grab from the softer of their two EPs, Maybes, William, Vertical & Taps:

Mount Kimbie – Taps

bless.