Here are six songs
- "Heavy Balloon", Fiona Apple
"Fetch the Boltcutters" was released one month into COVID. Ah!, culture responded. How resonant! Everyone in lockdown can relate to this! Nobody noticed the fridge horror. She released it at the start of lockdown. For months or years before COVID started Fiona had already been holed up inside, teaching herself the drums and stewing about ex-boyfriends. Anyway, good album. Here's a funk song about being depressed but also angry.
- "Pop 6", Gas
This is some jangling, indistinct ambient. Sometimes it is good to listen to one meticulously-crafted sound for ten minutes. There's a bit of variation to keep things interesting but mostly this is just sort of like an atmospheric soundtrack to your life, assuming that the thing happening in your life right now is at least somewhat ominous.
- "He Turns Down", Cat Power
Cat Power was the queen of the 90s/00s indie/lo-fi "evocative" folk-rock set. This is from my fave album of hers (Moon Pix) and is actually not my fave song on Moon Pix, but it's the song that best embodies the off-kilter, off-center style of her early albums; everything feels like Take One, everything feels spontaneous and a little unstable, like the song is about to topple over and take you with it. This song's memorable for the flute accompaniment, which seems to be doing something totally unrelated to the rest of the song. I don't know what that flute means. It seems important.
- "Abalone", PACKS
This is a fun, messy indie rock jam from 2022. I actually don't know much about this band! Wikipedia says they're from Toronto? The album cover gives me a feeling of old family vacation photos.
- "verZion", Syphus AKA silo7
A mod-style tracker has a finite number of channels, and each is fundamentally monophonic; a channel could play a sample containing a chord, but could only play one such sample at once. This means if you want sounds with long tails, like piano sounds, you have to do tricks like alternating each note in a different channel so each sound gets a chance to complete before the next one starts. Sometimes this gives tracker music, when viewed in the tracker, a fascinating two-dimensional ascii art structure, like the long diagonal chains in this banger of a track.
⬇️ Click below for ominous industrial noise ambient like I normally post ⬇️
- "Distorted Ambience - Lyra-8 / Strega Into Modular FX", Brodie Peterson
Built from two synthesizers which can both be described as "a simple tone generator bolted to a powerful drone echo", this is a sublime symphony of metal sounds, clanking and banging and grinding metal-on-metal howls, "Industrial" in a very literal sense. I like how the synthesized moans punctuating the backing sound eventually line up in surprising melody, like a slowed-down pop song.
