This quarter: hip hop, dungeon synth, dreamy folk rock, and more!
Fall has fallen, and so it's the perfect time to grab a hoodie and settle in with a cup of tea and some name-your-price tunes (before Bandcamp implodes). We wrap up the third quarter of 2023 some hip hop and hip hop-adjacent jazz before moving on to some more lush, ambient tunes and, finally, some noisier psychedelic mischief.
Android No. 23 - Room
I initially came to this project while hunting down jpegmafia instrumentals (don't ask). Android No. 23's 2019 EP Room popped up during my search, and while the Baltimore rapper's flow started off a bit slow for my tastes, I quickly warmed up to his mix of self-deprecating humor, ironic bragadoccio, and clever references. The instrumentals, including the aforementioned jpegmafia beat, are consistently great, perfectly matching Android's cadence on every track.
New Jazz Underground - the MF DOOM SUiTE.
Best known for their fiery reimaginings of jazz classics and provocative Youtube thumbnails and titles (e.g. a rendition of "Jazz is a Four-Letter Word" presented as "f**k/s**t/c**t jazz"), the young upstarts in New Jazz Underground is a group of Julliard-educated musicians who make some impeccably groovy tunes. Their latest release is this collection of four MF DOOM tracks lovingly rendered as funky jazz numbers. Madlib-produced "All Caps", "Meat Grinder", and "Accordion" are endowed with a reverent and nostalgic glow, and closing track "One Beer" off Mm...Food swings like you wouldn't believe.
Video Dave & Controller7 - ArticulatedTexTiles
I wish I knew about Video Dave and his former group the Third Eyelanders much sooner. My first exposure to his relaxed and disarmingly frank rapping was Open Mike Eagle's excellent 2020 album
Anime, Trauma, and Divorce, specifically the track
"Headass (Idiot Shinji)". Here, on his latest album, Dave playfully flows around Controller7's snappy beats, recalling De la Soul and Hieroglyphics as he drops humorous yet relatable bars like "Did ya sneeze or cough? / do you even want gods blessing? / It don't always sound right / But what the fuck would I look like / tryin to say 'gesundheit'". Despite the lighthearted tone of the album,
ArticulatedTexTiles is bursting with personality,
Damon & Naomi with Ghost
No, not that Ghost. On this record, former Galaxie-500 members turned alternative duo Damon & Naomi join forces with the Japanese psych rock band Ghost for a lush and lovely alternative folk album. All of D&N's material is available as name-your-price on Bandcamp, with the group going so far as to include an apocryphal Ezra Pound quote with their debut album: "Nothing written for pay is worth anything: ONLY what has been written AGAINST the market." So is the music any good? Well, if it wasn't, I wouldn't be writing about it here! Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang provide a solid foundation of gently strummed chords and tender vocals, with members of Ghost (including frequent Boris collaborator Michio Kurihara) gracing the arrangements with additional acoustic guitars, whimsical keys, and soulful guitar solos.
Erreth-Akbe - A Lantern Swathed
I finally started getting into dungeon synth recently after having only dabbled in the genre in years past. This may come as a surprise to those who know how much I love all sorts of ambient music, but for the longest time, dungeon synth just sounded kind of hokey to me, and I could never shake the mental image (however straw-manned it was) of some nerd in a cloak recording twinkly synth music for their latest tabletop RPG session. But y'know what? There's nothing wrong with any of that, and I was an idiot for thinking that there was.
Let me correct my mistake by featuring the enigmatic
Erreth-Akbe, an artist
whose epic dungeon synth is inspired by the fiction of Ursula Le Guin as well as kosmische pioneers like
Klaus Shulze,
Tangerine Dream,
Vangelis, etc.
A Lantern Swathed immediately hooked me with its warm orchestral chords, gentle harps, mighty organs, and sparse but thunderous percussion. With each new track, a rich, fantastical world comes to life in which magic, adventure, and danger can be found on the other side of every hill, in the dark recesses of the forest, along the moonlit, knife-like coast where land meets the wine-dark sea.
Noyades - Go Fast
Get ready to--uh...well, it's right there in the title! Noyades, an instrumental power trio from France, make some pretty rollicking and raucous psych rock that, as previously discussed, can have a real sense of speed to it. Album opener "Replique" features looping cascades of guitar arpeggios and howling leads over the rhythm sections increasingly insistent pulse, while "Melvanna" begins as a kaleidoscopic thrill ride before mellowing into a brief and sedated bass solo. Not every track moves at a blistering pace, but Noyades' music crackles with intensity, and even in quieter, more sedated moments, there is always the promise of righteous, fuzzed-out mayhem in the near future.
Want something heavier? Check out the metal edition of Cheap Thrills over on Invisible Oranges:
