This week in music features a big dip into the past, plus something super new. I also need to mention the movie I watched instead of the Oscars, because it’s the best I’ve seen in weeks. All I know about Sunday’s ceremony is that Ennio Morricone finally won and so did Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s a good thing; this music is more interesting and important.
I’ll start with the new music because it’s the most deserving of attention.
I feel like I’m going to start doing a weekly post about the albums I’m listening to. That way, even if I don’t end up writing something lengthy about a given album, I’m still spreading the good word.
So here goes.
This album changes everything for the Dream Catalogue mastermind.
With last month’s deep-dive into the Dream Catalogue roster, I became aware that label co-founders telepath テレパシ and Hong Kong Express had each released an incredible amount of material in the past year. Their output rivals that of every other artist on the label combined, and incredibly, most of it is top notch. Sure, a handful of them tread in the same ultra-drifting waters, but somehow there’s a fascinating diversity of styles between the pair, all lit with the signature cyberpunk glow of the burgeoning label.
This isn’t a review because I’m just listening right now myself. I’m just letting everyone know that, despite all the Kanye hype this week, Future is the rapper you can actually listen to today.
I’m also publishing this because, as of one full listen, EVOL is fucking fire.
Dream Catalogue has quickly become one of my favorite music labels. Their aesthetic is a utopian ideal for tomorrow’s world. The music they release is futuristic, wrapped in a warm emotional embrace, full of nostalgia and hope. Everything I’ve heard is, naturally, painted with a deeply dreamlike palette. Edges are blurred, time vanishes, and the listener becomes unmoored from tactile reality.
“Where the fuck did Monday go?”
David Bowie is actually dead. It feels strange to say this. More than any other artist on the planet, Bowie always seemed to move beyond mere mortals. To the world, he was larger than life. His work was timeless, always a step ahead and off to the side from everyone else. Even his most popular songs felt beamed in from another place, with a unique sensibility that could come from no one else. He is universally beloved by entire generations, despite remaining as weird as a man can be.
Infinitely more important to me, however, is the space he occupied in my life. David Bowie is the one and only artist to have been there all along. I mean this in the most literal sense.
He starred in one of the first films I can remember watching, Jim Henson’s dark fantasia Labyrinth. Despite playing the villain, he was a magnetic attraction. Enigmatic, beautiful, always a touch removed from the teenage heroine and the viewer alike, he was the spectral vehicle and its destination in one. As the Goblin King, he invited my young mind on a journey with the promise of adventure, tinged with a little fear and weighted by potential loss. There were high stakes for reaching out to take his hand, but the rewards unfolded past the horizon. I was smitten before I knew it.
Growing up in the 80s and 90s, past the peak of his commercial popularity, I swam in the echoes of David Bowie’s legacy. He was so far ahead of the game that I never quite caught up. My earliest radio memories were filled with older icons like Roy Orbison, The Beach Boys, and of course, Bowie. I would bicycle around my forested neighborhood singing Pretty Woman, I get Around, and The Man Who Sold The World. I had no grasp on time, never differentiating between oldies and current hits. The music simply was what it was, the soundtrack to my childhood, the intangible spirit in the air.
Optimistic Underground 