Instant Jackpot, Clown Sincerity, Screamo Lyotard
Welcome and thank you for reading this, the eighth issue of 2020 Music Group. Here we recommend two new albums and a philosophical detour into Screamo.
Recommendation: ear - The Most Dear and The Future
I stumbled upon ear’s new album The Most Dear and The Future on the Nina Protocol front page. Despite participating in the platform since its first days, I’ve never actually used Nina to find or listen to new music. First try—instant jackpot. Respect.
ear is the Upstate NY/London-based electronic duo of Yaelle Avtan and Jonah Paz. They broke out with their single “Nerves,” revealing a production style that sutures together many strands of emergent feed-driven musical moods. There are dexterously cropped and closely panned blips that embed themselves into breakbeats and breakdowns—some percussive hits containing their own woody reverb, some directly etched into the space of the headphone cans. And, most strikingly, there are explosive raw bass synthesis moments often presented “as is”—without much treatment—given the entire room of the mix-field to assert themselves. Their sound contains both a light touch and careful consideredness, toiled over and simultaneously allowed to rest.
The Most Dear and The Future’s overall bedroom, bloghaus sound contains a pathos that’s helped to invigorate my millennial malaise into a musically-induced optimism I haven’t felt since “peak indie” in 2009. At that moment, I remember feeling like we were on the precipice of something that would define my ensuing life. That’s kind of what happened. That “mass indie moment” certainly did influence the ensuing decade and its various achievements, platitudes, and deconstructions. Looking back at the wreckage, it’s fascinating to remember how things arrived, how things disappear—what’s been left behind, and what remains. I’m kind of on my Eat, Pray, Love shit while listening to The Most Dear and The Future. Brother is healing.
I’m recommending this album to also consolidate a current of thought that’s run through a few contributions in past 2020MG issues: “Adolescent Listening” and the music of Julia Wolf, a recent experience seeing 2hollis live, and re-listening to The Books. These artists—and perhaps most completely ear—express themselves directly and uncomplicatedly. Through them, I’ve experienced a transparency of sentiment and its engineering. I’ve been able to reindulge in a cognitive utility of music supported by melody, production, and emotion. I guess this is all really basic stuff—I’m ultimately just saying “I like listening to this music”—but given a compulsive drive to theorize music, and the at-times unpleasant effects of that exhaustive theorization, I’ve kind of found myself needing to rebuild how I’m listening to music. The immediacy of ear’s music sums up this project of reconstitution. Through it, I’ve felt regenerated.
It’s easy to hear a deep referentiality evident on The Most Dear and The Future—Postal Service’s “Brand New Colony,” The xx’s “VCR,” Phoenix’s “1901”—and yet it doesn’t really matter. ear seems to wholly understand the synthetic nature of reference, presenting their music confidently and ambivalent to any trickery in how the mechanics of such novelty are employed. In this way, the music feels complete, of the moment, and new. The tracks can be ahead of themselves, with incoming moments anticipating their arrival not unlike Chanel Beads. However, unlike that band, the tracks are spherical and whole. Their architecture doesn’t bottom out and the foundation is solid, not wispy or fading in linear runs. On “Give Way,” we hear field recording fidelity, birdsong, and whispers erupt into a synth run dripping with swagger—pushing towards a breakdown that displays the full extent of their producer-powers. I recommend listening to it.
The most direct comparison to ear is the band NEW YORK, the duo of Gretchen Lawrence and Coumba Samba, one of my favorite bands of the last few years (listen here to an interview Max Ludlow, Kari Rittenbach, and I did with them on Montez Press Radio). This is most clearly heard on the album’s eponymous track, as well as “Dogs,” in its hushed vocals, general style, and shared production vocabulary. However, the swag doesn’t feel like it’s being copped. Instead, with both ear and NEW YORK, we hear the sound of what’s been formulating now fully arriving—a beautiful thing.
It is our great opportunity in 2025 that so much is not needed at the moment. Internalizing that thought, I think I need this music.
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Audrey Hobert - Who’s the Clown?
This album accomplishes a few things that turn out to be mutually complementary in unexpected ways. First of all, the songwriting is incredibly good. The lead single is called “Sue me,” and the chorus goes: “Sue me, I wanna be wanted.” A reckoning with the admonishment of one’s desires – a litigation – but where does the reproach come from, who is the prosecutor? A sense of right and wrong, the murmurings of one’s friends and family, an intrusive thought detailing shameful accusations, or a rational inner voice? The articulation is more resonant for the way it side-steps self-seriousness, indicating balanced realism about the messiness of things; after all, the album is called Who’s the Clown? In an interview with People magazine, Hobert offers: “I feel pretty bad sometimes late at night, but not really besides that.”
At the level of production and arrangement, the album frequently turns to millennial indie pop conventions. Yet it moves beyond a certain cliched template familiar from the pages of Pitchfork twelve or thirteen years ago. Although the lyrics are frequently lighthearted, this is intense, almost unrelenting music. Rhythmic dynamism and an insistent use of the refrain align in such a way that the density of musical information recalls nightcore, speed garage, or even PC Music; on several songs, Hobert essentially treats her own voice as a sort of Splice sample, copying and pasting along the grid. It is affectively persuasive to hear this formal approach adapted to an instrumental that sort of sounds like a Taylor Swift song.
Among the record’s most persistent themes is the desire to get away. This is in response to a psychic and social milieu wherein one feels inadequate and out of place while also craving attention and a sense of belonging. One of the record’s strongest songs is “Phoebe,” where binge-watching the show Friends provides the relief of parasocial escape and a mediating screen through which to negotiate some sort of truce between aloneness and relation. “Drive” is also great, and more straightforward. It’s “another disappointing night,” so Hobert grabs her car keys and makes an escape, uninterested in picking problems apart at five in the morning.
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: The Blood Brothers (live) at Locust House, San Diego, 2002
This week I was obsessively watching early 2000’s screamo and post-hardcore house show footage. This has always been a huge blind-spot for me historically, and I’ve been curious to learn more. Growing up with a classical musician Dad, my “Dad-rock” obsessions were with Bach and Coltrane rather than AC/DC (yeah, yeah…); and so, my adolescent meanderings in transgressive music were oriented to the north star of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Charles Ives and so on, more than any iteration of punk or hardcore. The closest exposure I had was hanging around block parties with the older brothers of friends out in Fuquay-Varina where there was some kind of emo scene, in peak Warp Tour years. I burned CDs of Between the Buried and Me, but as compelling as that was, I spent my prime angst years studying the cluster chords of the Concord Sonata. It wasn’t until after I realized how brutal and sort of impossible it felt to pursue composition for classical ensembles in 2012 that I retreated into Noise, computer music and free improvisation, and in some way completed the horse-shoe effect of my radicalization. Me and my young colleagues terrorized coffee shops and bar and grills, spamming granulated Bobby McFerrin samples on midi guitar and playing dumbass clean telecaster and clarinet sets through a volume pedal and lone subwoofer. Looking now from this vista of my particular, insane music behavior, I can’t help but look across the valley at the DIY twin peak of hardcore music, and wonder: what’s going on there? With the eager and humble curiosity of a total n00b, I will reflect on that question here, and make a recommendation to you:
I happened upon a performance of The Blood Brothers playing “Set Fire to the Face on Fire” on the Henry Rollins Show (which aired on IFC between 2006-2007). Two squealing vocalists with a consciously snotty, girlish affect singing a manic anthemic pastiche, a single trebled-out, exposed guitar part, aggressive repetitive, detuning distorted bass, drumming that practically speeds out of phase with the band, and a funny, clipping keyboard part playing a dembow rhythm to close the song. I recommend following that link. It immediately scratched an itch from memories of my 12 year old, screamo-curious brain. In my present mind, the raw performative intensity and high degree of stylization captures my imagination in a way that’s more consistent with my own experimental music inclination.
There’s a connection here that really fuses my enjoyment and fascination. The performance has a very acute, specific sensibility that I only sometimes observe in conceptually and sonically aggressive music. It contains a rarified element in the periodic table of fuck you-related aesthetics that isn’t in any way a product of noise, dissonance, density, or the other basic elements. This is a form of a deeply felt, lived attitude, expressed in the mechanizations of style, and which becomes almost a musical metaphor for the decimation of identity itself through its mediatization. This stylish meltdown is not triggered by force, but by a more advanced kind of existential nuclear chemistry.
In his short but incredible essay Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics, Jean-François Lyotard describes both the physical sound and metaphorical quality of “stridency:”
“Along with [the] nightmare that causes listening to writhe, when the entry of death into the life of understanding is imminent, a fear that is essential to the ego is suddenly touched off: the fear of being violated. Stridency awakens a latent repulsion, that dozes within hearing, at a scream that might penetrate it – an exorbitant scream, incommensurable with its faculty, indecorous. The sarcastic screeching rails at the ear’s misfortune at being tethered to the sonorous world in which anatomico-physiological chance determined its destiny. And in doing so it nearly rends it. Overcome as much by suffering as by humiliation, corporeal identity in its entirety trembles at and for its finitude.”
I love how demented this passage is, as it reaches for an explanation of, I believe, the same type of cursed cultural and corporeal embodiment that The Blood Brothers seem to apprehend within their music. This stridency completely subsumes the meaning-makings of genre and history, chewing them up and spitting them back out repeatedly with a deafening “silence of redundancies” (as Lyotard later says). The energy of this performance (and by other artists in this style) is only further enhanced by how strikingly “normal” the guys look – reflecting the same musical principle of stridency in visual form, where no element of culture can even begin to represent the feeling or sense. In turn, the music “scene” becomes a shared stage for the aestheticized abuse of the social contract of conformity in-itself: embracing what Lyotard suggests as a natural trajectory toward “humiliation,” but where humiliation and humiliated blur together in the speed of the transaction, and disappear when the music stops.
—Alec Sturgis