utilitymonstergirl | Entries tagged with music

An album's opening song should be a loud and all-consuming stretch of madness. The thing that drags the listener to the edge of a cliff, holds them over, and asks them to choose what they think is safer: the unknown of floating to the bottom of some endless height, or the known chaos of solid ground. I like my albums to start by asking me what I think I can stand.

—Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil In America

Ada Rook's UGLY DEATH NO REDEMPTION ANGEL CURSE I LOVE YOU is a dialup modem bellowing the wrath of God. Her voice can already turn on a dime from whispers to screams, so when it frays into digital distortion I have trouble accepting it as post-processing. When you’re this good at conveying the painfully human through the painfully synthetic, I assume you just unlock FL Studio in your vocal cords.

Rook has spoken about not wanting to be pigeonholed as a Transgender Artist making Transgender Art. She’s also said of UGLY DEATH, “I hate narratives, messages, and themes, so this album is completely hollow. There is absolutely nothing inside of it.” I respect these views, though while I won’t reductively boil it down to identity, I’ll have to go death-of-the-author to have any analysis at all. I see it as a successor to the post-breakup Black Dresses albums, tackling the exhaustion of both acclaim and harassment, yearning for a freestanding sense of self.

The first words of the opener, im cis, make this clear:

“FUCK IT / I’M NOT SICK I’M NOT GAY I’M NOT TRANS I’M NOT TRAUMATIZED”

She disavows her last traumadump album, 2,020 Knives, as she commences something half as long and twice as angry (the perfect length and tone for decompressing on the bus home from downtown.) Next up, 999999999 IN A DREAM, introduces samples from the trashy OVA Ice that wind through the tracklist like Shaw Brothers samples on a Wu-Tang album. Its punishing, apocalyptic beats are counterbalanced nicely by the brass on PURGATOR3Y MODULATION ENGINE, then TRU U splits the difference with bouncy synths around a crackling howl of rage. (The live version is spectacular, and I continue to be surprised that she can't actually bitcrush her voice in realtime.)

GRAVITY WEAPON is a rave-ready banger, setting up COWARD 2 COWARD's accusatory gut-punches:

"I will become whatever you think of me / I will be nothingness or disgusting dreams"

"If you look up to me, I'll find you / and I will fucking end your life"

This is the Rook of Forget Your Own Face:

"Being cute was a mistake / Being likeable instead of insane: / A straight line to ruin."

UNDERNEATH IT ALL brings in Ash Nerve as the only guest vocalist, whose pop vocals next to Rook's shrieks are a delight; they've got the same "virtuoso singer/Just Some Guy" chemistry as Dengue Fever. (Angel Electronics, their collaboration on Ash's home turf, is also excellent.)

VANISH/DOOM is another song of condemnation, aiming less at parasocial fans than at the whole structure of unaccountable social exile. I won't speculate on any specific things it might be based on, but I don't need to - we can all name a dozen accounts of this exact playbook. She knows that overbearing fandom is a key part of the machine, holding stars to an absurd moral standard and level of scrutiny that cannot end well. Fame always sucks, but far more when it's uncoupled from wealth and power.

XANAFALGUE is one of the harshest tracks, and the one it took me the longest to warm up to. I still can't say I fully get it, but I trust it's the default track on the Bandcamp page for a reason. The (mostly) gentle outro flows well into the gentle reprieve of night in a secret world. In an intimate soundscape, Rook promises:

"We'll shed our agony and anxiety, obsessions / And the remnants of the light of goodness / Choking out our hearts."

The merciless angels of VANISH/DOOM are dispelled, if not beaten, and in this enclave we can return to being our honest, problematic selves.

5H4D0W H34R7Z is the perfect closer. It's a thunderous ode to being a messy bitch who'll still get hurt, but in novel and cathartic ways. Partying, hooking up, oversharing - it's an adolescent view of freedom, but freedom is meaningless if you can't fuck yourself over with it. Rook was even considerate enough to highlight the thesis in the lyrics:

*** I WANNA LOOK AT YOU / AND SAY THE THINGS / THAT I'M TOO EMBARRASSED TO WRITE ***

I strive for the same thing, making raw and honest art while knowing what to hold back for my personal friends. I wish her well on the quest for that balance.

//

ADDENDUM: THE COVER ART

I love the open-ended koan of "what does a piece of music look like?", but in this case, there is one right answer and Porpentine nailed it. It's juvenile in the most playful and off-putting ways, it's neon-green and pitch-black, it's the intimate warmth of a stab wound. It's the shards in your brain forged into a razor-sharp mall katana. It promises exactly what the music delivers, channeling one's ugliest impulses with artisanal precision. Truly, a perfect wrapper for a master class in estrogen dick music.

hhhgregg, Panasonic Blu-ray ninety-nine dollars
32" LCD TV two-ninety-nine
LG 42" HDTV four-eighty-nine
Everything's on sale during Christmas in—

—HydroDalek, doin

Girl Talk's All Day is one of my favorite pop albums ever made, with 372 samples perfectly assembled across seventy-one minutes. I can't fully speak to the technical side of why it works, but the emotional side is clear. It's a pure collage that still conveys a unique artistic voice, the dream of every art-culture nerd. It takes the craft of joy seriously - while it's not outright absurd like Neil Cicierega's Mouth quartet, there's a clear music-nerd playfulness to it even though you could plausibly play it at a party.

The whole project exudes a deadpan democratic spirit. All Day isn't trying to elevate pop music or save it from itself - this is the work of someone with a deep love and understanding of the form as it is. Critical darlings share space with one-hit-wonders and pop-culture punchlines, and plenty of iconic songs only appear in subtle supporting roles. Lesser mashups treat explicit rap as a punchline in itself - "aren't we so wacky for combining Biggie and Thomas The Tank Engine?" - but All Day says, "of course Juicy J's Twerk goes great with Mr. Blue Sky, why wouldn't it?" It's a party where the bouncer's only question is how fun are you to strip for parts?

After taking in All Day a few times, I checked out his previous albums and found that they're largely just "All Day but not as good." They’re still well-assembled and worth checking out, but they just don’t feel as airtight and the peaks aren’t as high.

This isn't all his fault - the nature of being a mashup artist is that the pool of material grows greatly over time, and All Day draws the most from the era I'm nostalgic for. They were also necessary practice to make something as taut as All Day. There’s very little sample reuse among his work, and while I’m sure Girl Talk and I would both love to see some of these combos revisited, I respect moving on with new variations on a theme. The Twerk/Mr. Blue Sky segment on All Day feels like an evolution of the New Soul/Shake That mix on Feed The Animals, more cleverly blended and painting a better picture of joyful, goofy eroticism. The same goes for the thunderous War Pigs/Move Bitch fusion that opens All Day, building on FTA's Roc Boys/Paranoid Android mix. Even if a certain hybrid didn't reach its full potential, it's still valuable as a marker of his taste and style in the moment.

I'm glad that Girl Talk has found work doing original production, and maybe he's content to have passed the torch to a million mashup artists. But if he still feels he has something to say in this style, I'd love to see another megamix diving into all the classics and trash of the past fourteen years.

Brockhampton - BUZZCUT FEAT. DANNY BROWN (Music video)
I love the way this uses CGI and Deep Dream-style image morphing to convey the queasy, everything-in-a-blender feel of internet culture, an evolution of how clipping. used grainy GIFs for their wriggle video. They've made good use of image-morphing in other videos, too: what is the range of People Who Do Not Exist who still read as Kevin Abstract or JPEGMafia? This is the kind of art culture I want to see around AI art, and hopefully we can get more once there's less hype and money around it all.

Femtanyl - CHASER (Album)
A tight, harsh jungle EP that leaves me excited to see whatever she does next, and early signs of that are promising too.

HEALTH - DISCO4 :: PART I and DISCO4 :: PART II (Albums)
Two great industrial-metal albums stacked with guests that range from Perturbator and Nine Inch Nails to Backxwash and Ho99o9 to Ada Rook and 100 gecs. It's fascinating to see how they play off of HEALTH's sound and each other; MURDER DEATH KILL (HEALTH, Ada Rook, PlayThatBoiZay) whips absolute ass, and makes me excited for more cross-pollination between hip-hop and Bandcamp trannies. (See also: Backxwash, CENSORED dialogue, and SOPHIE's production for Vince Staples.)

(God, that was a lot of weird capitalization to track.)

Hexi Wing (Devi McCallion) - In The High Towers Of The Black Quartz Castle (Spoken-word recording)
A lovely erotica piece with fun sensory details, goofy tangents, and smooth production. I’d love a sequel, but am happy to see what else Devi has done in the intervening time.

Porpentine Charity Heartscape - Cunt Toward Enemy (Web serial), Cyberqueen (Browser game)

A toxic gay romance expressed through creating and defusing bombs. It's set in roughly the same world as Serious Weakness (discussed here), but with a different emotional flavor to its torture-yaoi - we're in airport-thriller land, with all the tension and terror that entails.

Like Asscastle (discussed here), Cyberqueen is an old cut that's nasty, short, and formatively important to a lot of people. I love how there's one token bit of text-adventure puzzle-solving at the start, before the only choices are the order in which you'll be defiled and rebuilt.

Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep (Prose novel)
This novel has a delightful sense of “how about Make-Believe Land can have whatever I want” - Physics and cognition work fundamentally differently in regions of the galaxy! A medieval society of psychic wolf-aliens who can Voltron their consciousnesses together! A galactic internet that’s formatted exactly like early-90s Usenet! I’m midway through and excited to see where everything’s going.

Vince Staples - FUN! (Music video)
The dead-on recreation of Google Earth Street View is brilliant (note "Norfy" and the "Call the Police" button); a master class of editing with very sharp points on his hometown's surveillance and commodification.

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

With my birthday in three weeks, I wanted to compile a list of the media I've found in the past year that's lodged itself in my brain the most - not necessarily the best, or even things I would widely recommend, but whatever's done the most to shape how I create and think about art. (Starred entries are explicit.)

( So, without further ado: )

(A continuation from here.)

I really value the strategic use of ugliness in art - it is underexplored, says a lot about the culture that deemed it so, and can serve as stark proof that artistic skill can look like anything. My current favorite maestros of ugliness are Black Dresses, the semi-defunct band of Ada Rook and Devi McCallion. They're clearly well-aware of how to make conventionally-pleasant hooks and melodies and vocals, and so the many times they don't are intentional and striking. Even in their harshest songs, there's a level of care lavished on structure and composition that makes them fascinating case studies of pop songcraft from people who will likely never chart on Billboard.

Admittedly, I had a bit of a learning curve to appreciate them, and there's still some work of theirs that I just can't quite get into yet. The first step for me was hearing Rook's screams on the title track of Backxwash's I Lie Here Buried With My Rings And My Dresses, where they worked beautifully in a context of metal-tinged horrorcore. (And circling back to it now, they strike me as very iconically Rook Screams.) One of their first songs that really clicked with me was Cartoon Network - it's about as close as they've come to conventional pop music, but still full of dissonant synths, spoken-word interludes, and screaming on the bridge. (The brilliant video was also my introduction to Jonni Phillips, who may be discussed here later.) I dug into more of their work, and once I heard the fist-pumping chorus of Damage Suppressor, I was hooked.

Relative to Patricia Taxxon, they use fairly little distortion on their voices. They sometimes play with recording fidelity, whether through peaking screams or bitcrushed drowning, but different singing styles provide most of the variation. Devi's vocal-fry understatement and desperate yelps mix well with Rook's whispers, sonorous melodies, and harsh screams. Although the balance of styles is surely carefully planned, it gives their work a raw, intimate style to match their lyrical themes of trauma, insecurity, and hard-won hope.

If this article has piqued your interest in them, I recommend Peaceful as Hell as a relatively accessible album, and both of them have whole constellations of solo projects and other collaborations ranging from melancholy bedroom pop to jagged screamo manifestos on trauma.

(I have no formal musical knowledge, and this is primarily about trans women because that's just who I've found so far, but I welcome additions in both areas.)

In my traipses through Weird Abrasive Trans Girls Of Bandcamp, I've noticed some interesting patterns in how trans musicians approach vocals. Due to a range of factors - dysphoria, lack of formal singing lessons or recording space, not having conventionally-gendered voices - it's common for them to use pitch-shifting, vocaloids, and samples (generally extremely uncleared). However, these styles aren't purely born out of lack or insecurity - all of them are used by musicians from all walks of life, and all are tied to modern digital cultures that trans people are often embedded in already. To be clear, unfiltered trans voices aren't absent at all - they're often just used very specifically.

Patricia Taxxon uses her unfiltered voice alongside all three tools. Sometimes they mix in the same song, like Spiral Staircase, a love-song duet between a Martian colonist (herself) and a rover (the vocaloid Bert Gotrax). On the intensely-processed album Gloria, her unfiltered voice shows up only at the end, singing a round with her pitch-shifted self on Girls. (These songs are also doing fascinating things with inserting trans women into love ballads and empowerment anthems, but that's another post. She's also done a great behind-the-scenes explainer of how and why Spiral Staircase sounds musically strange.)

Her latest album Agnes & Hilda has her voice on every track in some capacity, her first such album in a long time. She uses varying degrees of pitch-shifting and filtering on most of the tracks, to different effect each time. She contrasts with the featured vocalists on Your Throat Belies and I'll Be, slides between gruff intensity and bubbly pride on Bocce, makes sharp AI-art jokes on By Greg Rutkowski, and supplements her unfiltered voice on With My Tail To The World. The opening and closing tracks forgo distortion to make a clear artistic statement and powerfully deliver on it - Agnes & Hilda invites us to fuse the cerebral and indulgent sides of art, and Like is a guttingly-good love song about reaching out to a classmate in special ed.

The Flowers of Robert Mapplethorpe sparingly uses samples and distortion on an intensely-personal concept album. It uses chapter-break interludes from a documentary on Mapplethorpe, some of the only samples here (though a friend spotted a bit of Ringside in Rawr.) The tracks with Taxxon's vocals intermix her filtered and unfiltered voice, but all the pitch-shifting distortion stops after Our Father. At this point, the narrator realizes that her relationship has to end, that her lover is happy to be a dad in the kink sense but not at all in the emotional one. The final act is full of despair, regret, and introspection with no comforting artifice.

She tends not to heavily use obvious samples outside of plunderphonics projects like Victory Lap, which just makes it hit harder when she samples Not Just Bikes in a murder ballad.