Mixtape 198 • Everybody’s Gone to Sleep
“New music from Sparklehorse” sounds like something from a fever dream, and it sounds like something from a fever dream.
“New music from Sparklehorse” sounds like something from a fever dream, and it sounds like something from a fever dream.
As it happens, if yours truly has a Valentine’s gig, it’ll be followed by one on Pi Day. Except on leap years. But the point here is that I thought about doing a show themed on circles, spheres, and other such expressions of the number and decided against it, but keep your ears peeled for some future incarnation of a “Round and Round” playlist. Instead, tonight we kick things off with the sort-of eponymous track from The Nude Party’s latest release, and wrap things up with about 30 seconds of Railroad Jerk, because technical difficulties.
You might think Juanes is some sort of reference to a collective of people named Juan, but it is actually a single Juan, more accurately a Colombian named Juan Esteban Aristizábal Vásquez. Here he is singing along to Elvis Costello and the Attractions as part of the fascinating Spanish Model project.
Like pre-teens throwing every liquid into the kitchen blender and daring each other to drink the results, Woody and Jeremy fuse all manner of sounds legitimate and profane into some murky concoction that tastes surprisingly good.
For a quarter century, Deerhoof have been a benchmark for the contrasting dynamics of sweet and sour, spiked and pillowy, and all manner of sounds that should not get along but quite obviously do.
For quite some time, Mommyheads have delivered the sort of complex pop and lyrical insight that fills in the cracks and gaps in your musical thinking with new ideas and sounds.
It's a celebration of Pat Fish, also known as The Jazz Butcher, who passed away unexpectedly last week, on October 5. We kick things off with another one of my favorites, the Asylum Street Spankers, taking on his "D.R.I.N.K." to glorious heights, followed by a couple of sets drawing from his 20th century material.
Tonight started out with an hour of the sickest music around, which is to say songs about illness, medication, and other health-related issues. The following two hours were the usual incomprehensible mixture of genres and bad attitudes.
It’s like a solo bedroom funk-pop project, with all its trappings (spur-of-the-moment compositions, absurdist themes, flashes of intense brilliance), except it comes from two people. These songs will quickly settle into your head and raid the fridge.
Some bands are obscure, others are sporadic, but The Mabuses are downright enigmatic. Their music is hard to describe, and while the word "psychedelic" has become a commonplace and devalued label to put on something these days, in this case it would apply as a feeling of existing in a disjointed but entirely fascinating musical reality rather than a genre.