Spring 2000
First quarter highlights, part two: pop excavations.
Like a reflection of music that has been smoldered, decomposed, and then stitched back together, Cutting Together Apart finds Gajek reconstructing the possibly imagined memories of his GDR childhood. Highlights such as "Hardcore Dis-Continuum" and "Slightly out of Joint" recall the viscous, melted electronics of mid/late '00s Black Dice, except that what's being melted isn't the broken radio data of the late capitalist urban jungle, but rather the echoes of the early stages of the shock-therapized post-Berlin Wall East. Ukrainian sound artist Nikolaienko achieves a similarly archaeological, if more abstract, effect on his latest, Love-Fidelity Or Hiss Goodbye, with looped samples borrowed from Bryozone's Ganna Bryzhata, Memotone, and Mykola Lebed.
African-American Sound Recordings' Be Somewhere Twice is a mammoth 22-track fever dream of washed-out melodies and decaying samples, and loops bubbling beneath the surface of an ambient album whose mood ranges from sunny to slightly unsettling. Memotone's latest, Pruning, sounds like a melted beach album, while Quik-Melt finds M. Geddes Gengras at the top of his slow and stretched new age balearic game.
The Copenhagen label and platform s̶͈̓̏̀̇̈̎͊̓͝ummon kicked off the year with two very tight 15-minute releases, Kil Marcel's Dorthea/Thorsen and the lovely Wilt by cleo walks through glass. The latter delicately distills a couple of decades of indie-electronic tradition into gems like the gentle miniature "snow" and the AnCo-esque "Shotgun." Singer-songwriter LA Timpa blends all kinds of influences into his lo-fi hypnagogic pop, and his fifth album IOX finds a perfect home on Lolina's Relaxin Records. Both bizarre and catchy, the songs float seamlessly between trip-hop beats, noise, fuzzy guitars and dreamy vocals.
On their latest releases, U.e. and Lucy Liyou both find the emotional weight in allowing their compositions plenty of room to breathe. Hometown Girl, Ulla's first release under the new alias U.e. and on their own label 28912, is a collection of soft, minimalist sound sculptures that project a comforting yet slightly distant warmth. Lucy Liyou's latest, Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name, is a sparse but intense affair. Focusing mainly on piano and vocals, the tracks unearth and relive glimpses of past feelings, finding immense expanse in negative space.
The most straightforward release in this post is an actual dug-up gem, released just in time for the new crush season (i.e. Spring). Except there are no apps in sight, just young people living in the moment and memorizing each other's numbers. Allegedly concocted at a sleepover, X-Cetra's Summer 2000 [Y2K 25th Anniversary Edition] proves that there isn't a world of difference between the deliberately sterile fantasy of twee pop and the wisdom of actual 10-12-year-old girls. The funny thing is that a track like "Summer 2000" sounds less like the Spice Girls and more like Le Tigre having fun with the idea of a girly pop song, while "Conversation" is full-on riot grrrl material. All in all, there are a lot of great messages here – whether you're in your dating era or you've “got to lose that dude” – expressed in a manner free of the poetic constraints adults place on themselves (ahem, "You're so idiotic" <3). And truly, who better to articulate these kinds of concerns than a pack of preteen girls?