Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0011

Hey folks — busy one over here, so this is coming out a little late, but thanks for lookin’. Hoping to do some basic formatting of this thing sooner than later, and working on some new features that you will hopefully find value in. At some point before the end of this year, much of the content of these newsletters is going into a subscriber-only model, so I want to make sure you get what you want and then some for such an ask.

See you at the Mountain Movers show in Chicago tonight, maybe? Cafe Mustache, evening hours.

Keep on sending in music: PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA // [email protected]

Also, send this newsletter to someone else, maybe they’ll subscribe. Imagine that, being told responsibly about new and life-changing music from a reliable source.

On with it…

ZULI Lambda LP (Subtext)

Zuli’s output is rare and severe, close-cut and charred; the Berlin-via-Cairo producer’s work has been somewhat unevenly split between bangers so real few clubs could contain them, mostly on singles and EPs (“Trigger Finger” being the most logical starting point), and two studio albums that eschew that approach almost entirely. Zuli’s output comes at a slower pace when compared to some – Lambda comes six years after his last full-length Terminal for Lee Gamble’s UIQ label – but you can feel where that time went when it hits. The strain to pull further away from the dancefloor into something transcendent can be felt in every rush and breath on here. Beats have been filtered out into textures, heavily overmodulated sounds presented with a dominance that fills the space, from bow bounces on strings to beats mutated beyond tempo and consistency, to contortions of the human voice that will never be mended. It’s 38 minutes in a stitched-up chamber of sampled/glitched/redlined recombinant anxieties, dragging you through it face first across every rough surface and singed bit – ambient pulses with no chill whatsoever, rhythms that go completely slack, chords bigger than the equipment that made them, and no given form or technique to bore the listener into complacency. Another bucket in the same waterspout that twists up Mica Levi, Tirzah, that movie Annihilation, and a number of others, but Lambda has a secret weapon in vocalist MICHAELBRAILEY, whose lyrics and performance on “10,000 (Papercuts pt. 1)” hits a high mark for the torture of life in 2024, and I haven’t been as affected by a composition in a good long while. One of those times when writing about music fails almost completely because there are so few ways to convey what’s actually going on in here, but all that really needs to be said is that this is a singular work from a perspective half the world takes pains to ignore.

KHÔRA Gestures of Perception 2xLP (Marionette)

A massive and estimable work into a world that conjoins all manner of culturesounds with electronic and rhythmic embellishment, densely layered and centered sounds of a deeper zone. It’s the product of Toronto musician/producer Matthew Ramolo, who has made it difficult to tell what he added and what was sampled/field recorded, but he’s got an ear for the traditions of Eastern and Global South traditions and what can be applied to them in the context of presentation for meditation, movement, and immersive listening. One imagines if This Heat kept going, with scope wider than Flaming Tunes or Lifetones, as a band that could have potentially landed in a space like this, where the technology has caught up to the imagination. Everything is embellished a little beyond the intent, everything looped to levels of intrigue, everything speaking to a melodic imperative beyond either formal electronic music or the world sounds dancing around it. “Boards of Canada with a gamelan” sounds so cheap, and this is in a different league anyway. At 72 minutes this has the runway to accomplish everything it sets out to, and only at the beginnings and ends of this set do we feel the tentative steps into and out of this world and the real. Thanks to Brooklyn’s best dressed engineer Steve Silverstein for bringing this to my attention, so I could bring it to yours.

BELONG Realistic IX LP (kranky)

(Out August 9^th ). Some 13 years after their shattering Common Era album, NOLA duo Belong returns with new work, ready to meet the moment of generational shoegaze/power ambient with a monochromatic, historically adequate response. Fried at the edges and up all night, they stick to the K. Shields ideal of choral smear and hazed vocals, but drop in a drum machine that’s right up against the edge of it all, providing that additional layer of trip fuel and itchiness that most modern outfits in this zone will never appreciate or understand. Realistic IX runs at a 50/50 split between the kind of riffs you’ve been missing and the drone interstitials required to ground them, and both sides of this sound mesh like hands folded into prayer. My patience to not talk about this one has run out. I’ve listened to this a lot in its pre-release reverie and never once has it faded into the background; rather, it integrates into the process of whatever I’ve been doing while it plays, especially on more leftfield tracks like “Crucial Years” and closer “AM/PM,” while the ric-tic reverie of “Souvenir” links up Neu! with MBV-esque chordal shifts and curtains of distortion. The right music becomes a part of the listener, even if for a brief moment. For anyone looking to turn their bedroom into a crypt, here’s the wallpaper.

WATER DAMAGE In E 2xLP (12XU) 

Fourth missive from this monolithic septet out of hellish Austin, continuing their intense study of musical notes, their weight/stress limits, and other conditions of duress. In E is not the same as “on E,” though I think this might be too harsh for the serotonin hit you’d be coaxing out against the sort of maximalist large-party psychic war effort undertaken here, four sides/four pieces of unrelenting . Steady, pounding drums underline serious guitar/bass/violin screech in the same glorious key, repeated until you really, truly, unquestionably get on their plane of being. Technically the side 4 cover of Shit and Shine’s “Ladybird” leaves E every fourth measure, but do you wanna take it up with Thor Harris? Thought not. It looks like their earlier records are starting to pick up in price on the aftermarket (while only the blessed have their tape on Sophomore Lounge), and from the standpoint of the band that seems unfair. Yet pressing more records has its own setbacks. What seems correct is to extract heavy penalties from those who were able to follow but chose to do something else. The payment to rectify being late on this – this is more like community service hours-level debts, like clearing a median along a busy highway in a heat dome, emptying a condemned hoarder house including that VW bus-sized hornet’s nest that’s merged with the old newspapers, or giving seven or eight of your nine pints of blood to those who need it, so that you never forget how you got these records. 

RATED EYE s/t LP (Wax Donut)

Rated Eye hails from Pittsburgh and its rhythm section is part of a great old band called The 1985, so great that some other band from Pittsburgh is also calling themselves that now. They’re joined by a riff rockin’ guitarist and a vocalist doing a John Brannon meets the skeleton guy from the canister in Return of the Living Dead. US Army Corps of Engineers! All selling points, as this is the sort of solid, necessary weird blues noise that’s keeping a vital and unseen America alive, which we’ll get to later. Specific involvement from Dead Rider/US Maple guitarist Todd Rittman coaxes out these sounds in their implied directions, a keepsake of attending decades of local shows and pitch-ins, and you better be glad all parties involved are doing it. Why? First the specific: Rated Eye, from where I stand, plays music that non-locals can reasonably interpret as a warning not to get out of the car in any towns between the western/southern borders of Allegheny County and the state line, lest you see nimrods burning car batteries in a trash barrel, or worse. Second, the bigger picture: there are bands like this dotting mid-sized and small towns all over America and they are the reason small venues, tiny labels and the raison d’etre of an American underground haven’t given up yet, why there’s still a means for bands that do it for the doin’ are able to get to other cities and spread it around. You’ve seen how weird people can get when they don’t have hobbies other than guns and grievances. Rated Eye makes a case for social salvation in the world you don’t always see, and a lot of the people reading this know exactly what that means – any way we can make what could be a hellscape slightly more interesting from a cultural perspective – not even an artistic one, but the kind of actions that create a scene, allow people to meet and share something meaningful, is beyond welcome.

Keep it freaky,

Doug Mosurock