What I’m Into This Week (6/12 – 6/25)

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Aphex Twin laying in grass

The past two weeks rolled with dark gravity, anchored by the massacre in Orlando that saw 49 people killed in an LGBT dance club. It may be only the latest in a nearly constant string of mass shootings in the US, but it’s the most devastating in my lifetime. I’ll never forget the gut punch of hearing the news.

It’s important to seize on the image of us at our worst, not just to examine how and why, but so we can truly appreciate us at our best. Still, it’s just as important to grasp the good news when we have it. With that in mind, I want to share the great musical discoveries I made in the past couple weeks.

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Aphex Twin – CIRKLON3 [Колхозная mix]

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Aphex Twin - CIRKLON3

Aphex Twin has released the first single off his upcoming Cheetah EP and it’s… well it’s fantastic. This is par for the course, considering the high quality of work he’s been dropping since returning to the world in 2014 with the monumental Syro.

The video is a whole new experience for fans, though. Watch the weirdly psychedelic clip here:

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Boards of Canada – Dayvan Cowboy

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Boards of Canada

I’ve been a fan of Boards of Canada for almost 20 years now. Ever since being introduced to much of the Warp catalogue by coworkers at Circuit City in high school, I’ve considered this mysterious duo to be one of those bedrock favorites, the kind of group that I’m always happy to hear.

While I consider 2002’s Geogaddi to be their true masterpiece, beating out landmark debut Music Has The Right To Children by an avant-garde hair, it wasn’t until much later that they had any sort of official visual accompaniment to their music. When they dropped The Campfire Headphase in 2005, Boards of Canada finally released their first music video.

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Ballroom [mixtape]

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Ballroom Art1

This is the first time I felt compelled to make a mixtape for people I’ll never know.

Ballroom is dedicated to everyone who lost the fight of their lives when someone tried to silence an entire culture. It’s also a dive through my own personal history with dance music, exploring the deep end of the electronic ocean, the sounds that come out as everyone’s going home.

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Dam-Funk – DJ-Kicks

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dam-funk - dj-kicks

Studio !K7’s long-running DJ-Kicks series has always been a great opportunity for artists to show off their tastes, often far broader than their own music implied. It was a chance for your favorite indie rock band to say hey, we listen to hip-hop and early drone music too! But the most interesting sets always did something more powerful.

For his entry, Dam-Funk offers a free fall down the rabbit hole of his own work by exploring artists that sharply reflect the edges of his own productions. It feels like an archeological dig into the distant past and unknown present, unearthing insight into a man whose work seemed to have sprung out fully formed so many years ago.

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Gaussian Curve – Clouds

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Gaussian Curve - Clouds

Clouds is, simply put, one of the most addictive albums I’ve heard all year, despite its relaxed attitude and understated charm. This thing slid into my brain and refused to leave.

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What I’m Into This Week (6/5 – 6/11)

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Witcher 3 Ciri and Geralt

This week has been as busy as ever so I didn’t have a ton of time for new music, but I made up for that with deep enthusiasm for what I did discover.

Thanks to Dam-Funk’s excellent new entry in the DJ-Kicks series, I’ve been looping a certain new-to-me album half a dozen times over the past day alone. I’ve also spent time in one of the most sublime virtual worlds ever created, in The Witcher 3.

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