Phantogram – “Make a Fist”
Nightlife
Somehow combines the mystical, rhythmic insight of Gang Gang Dance with the best aspects of today’s electropop. Every buzz, echo, tomtom, and break in this song is placed with extreme care and precision, manifesting in unremitting urgency and variation. (insound)
A Sunny Day in Glasgow – “100/0 (Snowdays forever)”
Autumn, again
The last track on this album epitomizes it well, and is perhaps also the best one, assembling a truly broad assemblage of tones and instruments into a cohesive and powerful whole. The bass is great, the keyboards sharp, the random synths, echoes, and breaks well-placed. They also successfully make a minor key upbeat and ebullient. Still, their “klangy” noise-pop isn’t for everyone. (insound)
Opening microchips (to find their surprisingly beautiful internals)
Nico Muhly and Nadia Sirota – “Part I: Material In D”
Drones & Viola
Part of a series of short contemporary chamber music EPs by Muhly and collaborators, this track is perhaps the most listenable (some of the pieces are a little— bangy), yet is also fundamentally elusive. The “drone” aspect acquires different tones throughout the piece despite remaining in essentially the same key, causing an interesting tension: Are the ever-present strings or the itinerant piano driving the melody? (insound)
Far on the right, her dogs foul Scylla hides:
Charybdis roaring on the left presides,
And in her greedy whirlpool sucks the tides;
Then spouts them from below: with fury driv’n,
The waves mount up and wash the face of heav’n.
But Scylla from her den, with open jaws,
The sinking vessel in her eddy draws,
Then dashes on the rocks. A human face,
And virgin bosom, hides her tail’s disgrace:
Her parts obscene below the waves descend,
With dogs inclos’d, and in a dolphin end.
‘Tis safer, then, to bear aloof to sea,
And coast Pachynus, tho’ with more delay,
Than once to view misshapen Scylla near,
And the loud yell of wat’ry wolves to hear.
Glitch art from Hismajestytheguru
