New Music Mondays: 1/22/18

Ergo Phizmiz PLC: Nibiru!

Ergo Phizmiz, sometimes also known as Dominic Robertson, is one of those musical chameleons who straddles the line between poppy and really, really weird. His newest offering, a psuedo-radioplay about the end of the world called Nibiru!, is definitely in the latter camp. Part spoken word, part sound collage, with  several samples from YouTube conspiracy theorists, somehow Nibiru! is a magnitude stranger than Phizmiz's legendary 15-hour The Faust Cycle. Nibiru! is dense and inscrutable, an album that demands your full attention, and one that keeps revealing layers the further down the rabbit hole you go. We're in strange times, and Phizmiz may be the facilitator we need to worm our way through the flotsam of real life.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: The Kid

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith commands a shocking array of synthesizers, and she has used them to make a cosmic soup in The Kid. Similar to Radiohead's masterful (and similarly-named) Kid A, The Kid dabbles in no small amount of naivete, with passages that recall nothing so much as incidental music for rotting '70s classroom programming. Smith's synths bubble and shimmer and her sweet voice belies a certain innocence, a lack of range that enhances her art rather than detracts from it. Smith's melodies are hidden by her innocence, but with repeated listens they raise up from the richness of the instrumentation and she shows herself to be a much stronger tunesmith than you may have realized at first.

New Music Mondays: 1/8/18

Welcome to the bi-weekly New Music Mondays, where I use a little of my barely-disposable income to buy a couple new records every paycheck. See if you can find your new favorite band.

Yossarians: Fabric of Time


Yossarian's self-released Fabric of Time starts off with two arresting art-punk beauties in the near-motorik "I Have Eyes" and the snarling, vicious "Suffer Me", which together almost sound like a new Birthday Party. The album starts really showing its chops afterward though, subtly mutating and giving us moments of surprisingly sublime beauty, exemplified in the near-ballad of "No Closer" and a cover of Angels of Light's "Rose of Los Angeles". A smart find that shows how many gems there are in the world of self-released music.

Riddlore: Afromutations


And now for something completely different, with Los Angeles emcee and DJ Riddlore providing beats and reworkings to African field recordings. I've always loved world music, and this is a fascinating spin on traditional folk music that could probably turn a lot of new listeners on to music they wouldn't normally be obliged to check out. Riddlore modernizes the field recordings without pandering and creates something bright and new while at the same time traditional and reverent. If you're a fan of hip hop or electronic production, Afromutations could be something you've never heard before.