Genius #11 - Nov '24
Mount Eerie & The Microphones. Ambient bird chirps; new stuff from The Body & Venus Twins. Haley Heyderickx live. EXCLUSIVE: a little electronic track that I wrote for you.
Yeesh, November. It’s been a rough month — no point in lying! Hoping that 2025 is a more stable year and that the horrors we face don’t overwhelm us from our sensibilities.
You may have noticed that this issue is a couple days late, let’s talk about it. 1. the holiday. 2. I was sick1. 3. I actually didn’t have a lot of different bands to write about because I got stuck in a loop of only listening to The Microphones & Mount Eerie (see below), 4. As an act of charity2, I wrote and recorded a little track for my readership and in an act of ego I refused to release the issue until I was happy with the mix.
Ok. Let’s listen to some tunes.
Capitalism:
I can’t be helped, I am a simple person: I see Fors.FM releases a new plug-in, I pick it up. Their newest, Dyad, is a digital drum synth for Ableton Live Suite that is remarkably similar to the Moog DFAM — two oscillators, two note sequencers, and four more sequencers per oscillator (tied to each others’ lengths) for most of the other parameters. This thing is a polyrhythm machine & can do some pretty interesting melodic sounds. With the purchase, Fors throws in a couple extra components: Para (a simple mono synth that is the basis for Dyad), Retur (very crunchy delay), Jolt (one-knob distortion), and Modul (another weirdo sequencer). Fors.FM is run by a team that includes Ess Mattison, who was one of the lead architects of the Elektron Digitone, one of my favorite synths.
In a Genius Dot Com first, I made a little electronic track in Ableton Live using as close to only the new Fors tools as possible (see notes in Garbage Corner). Feel free to roast in the comments.
Album Recommendations:
Rafael Toral - Spectral Evolution (Moikai, Feb ‘24)
Ecstatic, blissful ambient composition
This is a very special long composition ambient piece from the master guitarist and instrument builder. Over the course of the 47 minute journey, the central motifs return under different circumstances — the first minute or 2 introduces the major players: a bright & clean guitar, ambient synth chords of jazz standards at quarter-speed, and euphoric raw voltage birdsongs that chirp and squeal. Hearing the classic “Rhythm Changes” unfold through each other so slowly has this ecstatic quality that really buzzes my brain. Following along with the timeline on the bandcamp page provides the most insight into how the composition is structured, it’s worth checking in as you notice the ambience shift around you while listening. The highlights for me are: the raw voltage chirps and burbles during the “Take The Train” segment (14:38), when the glistening and clear guitar comes in during the “First long space”, and the talkbox guitar solo for “Your Goodbye” (36:19). If you’re not the kind of person who would normally listen to a 47 minute long ambient piece, this one that you should try.
The Body - The Crying out of Things (The Flenser, Nov ‘24)
Absurdly heavy
Every 6 months, the PDX-by-way-of-Providence duo releases a magnum opus dedicated to heaviness and desolation. I’ve already written about their February release with Dis Fig. Where that album leaned into their collaborator’s electronic production, this one simply borrows it (and her voice) into some of the compositions. Crushingly heavy, every sound is pushed to the absolute maximum that it could be — at times touching on post-metal, sample-heavy industrial, borderline hip-hop. The addition of horns is at times a little goofy, but The Body’s sincere belief that there is no hope in this world creates an inescapable well that you can fall into with them. “I can’t have sorrow if what has been is worse than what will come / Wearied of “love” / Wearied of “hope” / Dreams are worthless while in the hold of what we now know.”
Venus Twins - /\/\/\/\/ EP (Three One G, Nov ‘24)
Wildly inventive and chaotic noise rock from the Brooklyn duo. Weird start-and-stop telepathy stuff, but also some sick Sissy Spacek-esque digital processing of the recordings. Catch these guys live if you want to see 2 identical twins play loud and fast. I have “fame and fortune for the venus twins” on my 2025 bingo sheet. You want to get in on this on the ground floor. Look — they’ve already been in a Mr Beast video, their star is rising.
Upcoming December albums to look forward to:
December is a quiet month for releases — bands hoping to make it on year-end lists usually get their albums out before too late. There will probably be some exciting surprise releases, but only 2 albums are on my radar for December:
Experimental electronic project Kassie Krut (the new proj from the 2 Palm singer/guitarists & the producer of the final Palm album) is finally issuing a proper EP release after a parade of incredible singles. Their self-titled EP will be out on 12/6 via Fire Talk.
LA rapper K-the-I??? has a collab with producer Kenny Segal out on 12/6 for Independent Records, features a slew of Backwoodz guests (Armand Hammer, ShrapKnel,Fatboi Sharif, etc.). Genuine Dexterity should be a banger.
Replay: (Something)
You may have noticed that there are few recommendations above this month.. that is because I am on a big Phil Elverum kick again and dedicated most of the month to listening to the sprawling Microphones/Mount Eerie discography instead of checking out new stuff. Elverum has been releasing kaleidoscopic missives from the Pacific Northwest for decades – his vision of folk music pushes the boundaries of audience connection to the artist & rumbles with all of the force of the natural world. If you’re not already familiar, now that it’s autumn (and nearly winter), it’s time to drink deep from the well of his prolific output.
For the uninitiated, Phil Elverum’s first releases for this project were under the name The Microphones in the late 90s and began as a solo endeavor with some help from other local musicians before changing the name of the group to Mount Eerie around 2004. Elverum does all of the writing, arranging, producing, engineering, album art, and personally ships out online orders. He also plays most (if not all) of the instruments on each album. All of his releases feature similar themes exploring Zen Buddhism, what it means to live in nature (solitary isolation vs communion with the world), life and death.. but after his wife died suddenly in 2016 after giving birth to their only child, he began releasing incredibly vulnerable and personal songs as he processed his grief. Really ugly, beautiful stuff. He briefly remarried to actress Michelle Williams and was suddenly a mainstream figure appearing in tabloids, before their separation and his return to relative obscurity. In 2020, he returned to the more esoteric work – and returned to The Microphones as a band name, before returning (again) to Mount Eerie in 2024.
His music is free-wheeling and untethered to typical melodies and folk compositions. His soft voice is always tuneful and a little sing-songy, sometimes it’s in-key and sometimes charmingly just a little flat. He whispers, whimpers, whines — but he also coos and deadpans. The compositions of his songs all borrow from the same language: double-tracked acoustic guitars beat-back against each other, buried drums break into black metal blast beats, the distortion bubbles up from an overdriven console, etc. It’s exhilarating to listen to these albums through and see how ideas that started a long time ago continue to take new shape in the future.
There is a ton of discography here – Elverum released 4 albums as The Microphones before 2004 (then 1 more in 2020) and 11 albums as Mount Eerie (as well as countless EPs, outtakes, live versions, etc.). It can be a bit daunting! I’ve set aside some highlights if you’re trying to jump in:
The Microphones - “The Glow” Pt. 2 (2001)
The Glow Pt 2’s a huge swing: a wide stretch of themes (martial arts movies, nature, relationships, the way ones body is part of nature), enormous sound, and the knotted up song structures that still retain their clear folk-rock influence. This is the last “early” Phil album and online seems like it is the generally agreed-upon favorite. Acoustic guitars have a shiny sharpness to them, Phil’s multitracked vocals & and hyper-compressed drums bring a very cozy vibe. A good straddle point before the more esoteric releases to follow.
The Microphones - Mount Eerie (2003)
My personal favorite from this era, Mount Eerie was enough of a jump from the earlier records to warrant changing the band’s name. The themes here are cosmological – the recording is crazy, the whole thing is a triumph of experiments. The entirely of “I. The Sun” blew my mind when I first heard it, the way the sounds were perfectly captured to match the lyrics, the sound of the parade coming by. Each song’s vibe is completely different, including the odd 2010s dance punk passage in the title track. Really something else. This album is something of a North Star to me personally.
Mount Eerie - Lost Wisdom (2008)
This album featuring Julie Doiron and Frederick Squire is a special collaboration – their voices merge beautifully into a well of sound. Plus: the songs are all great! Nice big harmonies & thoughtful composition. The highlight for me is “Voice In Headphones” with an interpolated Bjork lyric. Unbelievable, haunting and pure — the first time I heard it, it really caught me off guard.
Mount Eerie - A Crow Looked At Me (2017)
Look.. you listen to it one time, it stays with you for the rest of your days. I listened to this record one time in 2017 when it came out and it’s still hard to write about it. Accepting this gift from Phil, you will fully understand what Genevieve meant to him & it might reorient the way you speak to and treat your loved ones. Phil lays it all out: what it’s like to throw away your dead spouse’s toothbrush. How it feels to receive a small gift in the mail that was ordered before she died and arrives from seemingly beyond the grave. The horror of having planned ahead together & being suddenly alone. Aching and startlingly raw.
Mount Eerie - Night Palace (2024)
Just released earlier this year, this 26 song album feels like a perfect merger of Phil’s older esoteric writing and experimentation & his more recent hyper-real works and simple pared down songs. A good smattering of ~1min songs, each one a paintbrush stroke connecting longer compositions. A perfect mix of folk songs, black metal freakouts, haunting piano songs, beautiful jangly pop songs. Lyrics cover what it’s like to be a single parent, how nature still electrifies him after all this time, what it’s like to chat with a fish. Of all the albums that have come out in 2024 that I’ve recommended, this one maybe the top. Let’s just enjoy the lyrics to “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization” together:
So scared of a moment of discomfort now
we turn away from the obvious:
All we have is stolen and can't be ownedThis America, the old idea, I want it to die
Non-metaphorical decolonization
beneath the one sky
Let this old world shatter
and transformAllegiance to nothing at all
but the burning present moment
I cut the cord connecting then and now
and start again
I show the kid how to give up everything
Garbage Corner:
I didn’t do much work this month on music stuff until the very end of the month and put all of my thoughts for this week’s garbage corner into that Dyad demo above. My thinking was:
Use Dyad as much as possible. Only the bassline was done using Para (mono synth voice from Dyad), since I had trouble getting a cool bassline tone from it — probably just needed a little more time. Anyways, every other sound in the song is a Dyad instance — the chords, the drums, the arps.
The main chord/melody thing is a C phrygian repeating pattern — the notes repeat, but in different divisions: one note plays on 1, 3, 6, and 10 in a 10-beat cycle / the other’s pitch is based on the first note & plays on 1, 7, 13 on an 18-beat cycle.
This was kind of a blessing & a curse — if i were doing this again, I might pick 10 and 8 so that they line up more often? Or I’d be more careful with my pitch selection.3
For the main drum part, I asked myself: what would Autechre do?
I’m not as good at abstract music as they are4, but I figured making the snare & kick slightly melodic so that the drums fill in most of the sound & then sending it all to a delay would make the subdivisions a little kookier.
The blissed-out arps were fun — I created two Dyad instances with the same notes, but slightly different lengths & panned them hard right/left & used Modul to occasionally jump to identical patterns that play twice as fast.
OK I cheated some: I used a little time stretching to get the chords to ring out for longer in different parts of the track & also used some filtering to get the sounds to overlap less.
Scene Report:
Haley Heyndrickx @ 9:30 Club (11/16)
Lifetimes ago, LL & I went to see Heyndrickx perform solo in Portland on the same night that the Washington Nationals won the World Series and she hinted that there were new songs being written — now it’s almost exactly 5 years later and we got to see them performed in Washington DC. How about that for full circle?
Earnest folk music that refuses temptations toward melancholy, Heyndrickx’s new batch of songs document communion with nature and rejection of consumerism, while still plotting a course for living in society. The setlist was the whole new record, with a few older songs to round out.
Her band has a wide sound, with each instrument taking different sonic ground — the band lined up in a straight line on stage to demonstrate their equality: drums, bass guitar, Heynderickx on acoustic finger style guitar, electric guitar, cello, and trombone. In between songs, the rest of the band would banter bits or swell on a single note and HH would offer a simple “2-3-4” to sync everyone up to the next song. Portland earnestness really warms my heart these days, so when she asked everyone in the band to offer a fun fact, I was charmed — in 2019, I might have rolled my eyes so far into my head that they never returned.
The new record is great. There’s no pretense to any of it, just well written songs and sung beautifully. The earnestness is mitigated by her impulse to offer an objective opinion to every subject — she appreciates her cat, but makes sure to note that he’s “an asshole;” she breezily wonders if she might get a little free time sometime soon. Her vocal delivery dances around her songs — at times reminds of the way Joni Mitchell would play with speak-singing her vocal rhythms against her guitar playing and then jump into a beautiful melody. Incredibly, her voice is even better live than on the record and even her banter between songs was melodious.
The orchestral flourishes on the album bring some gravity to these acoustic-guitar led songs, but do best when they stay out of the way — in the live setting these flourishes are revealed to simply be free moments; adlibs the band filled space with. On stage, that context demonstrated that what I took for overwrought composition was simply a good, old-fashioned looseness.
The last song, “Swoop” is a touching ode to a grandmother who immigrated to the US from the Philippines — through cascading guitars & wonderful close harmonies, she warns “Well, don’t tempt me with longing / Don’t tempt me with marketing / I won’t buy it today / Cause there’s an artistry in the day to day to day to day.”
She closed the set with her only certified banger, “Oom Sha-La-La" which has the rallying cry that is the title of her debut record: “I need to start a garden.” Hearing 2000 people scream it along in the 9:30 Club right after the election was strangely moving, a little cathartic. We move on & we take these moments with us.
December upcoming shows
I’m going to try to get better about updating this in the new year — but since moving out of NYC there’s just fewer shows that I’m excited to get to. Ok here’s what’s coming up:
DC
12/2 (Mon) A night of solo guitar: Anthony Pirog / Mike Gassman / Jonathan Morris / Kenny Pirog / Kiyan Saifi @ Rhizome
12/3 (Tue) Uniform & Pharmakon @ DC9
12/3 (Tue) Aimee Mann & Ted Leo @ The Birchmere (Alexandria, VA)
12/4 (Wed) Aimee Mann & Ted Leo @ The Birchmere (Alexandria, VA)
12/6 (Fri) Quelle Chris @ DC9
12/6 (Fri) Experiential Orchestra - Schoenberg at 150 @ Library Of Congress
12/8 (Sun) billy woods & Kenny Segalv w/ ShrapKnel @ Union Stage
12/14 (Sat) The Jesus Lizard @ Black Cat
12/15 (Sun) The Jesus Lizard @ Black Cat
NYC
12/2 (Mon) Jeff Parker ETA quartet @ Public Records
12/3 (Tue) SML @ Public Records
12/4 (Wed) Anna Butters, jeremiah Chiu, Alabaster Deplume @ Public Records
12/4 (Wed) Wadada Leo Smith & Amina Claudine Myers @ Roulette
12/4 (Wed) Thurston Moore Quartet @ The Stone
12/4 (Wed) Model/Actriz @ TV Eye
12/5 (Thu) Model/Actriz @ TV Eye
12/5 (Thu) Fred Frith/Thurston Moore duo @ The Stone
12/6 (Fri) Lydia Lunch, Tim Dahl, azumi O E @ Chemistry Creative
12/6 (Fri) Fred Frith @ Roulette
12/6 (Fri) Lee Ranaldo/Thurston Moore duo @ The Stone
12/10 (Tue) Kassie Krut & Chanel Beads (DJ set) @ TV Eye
12/11 (Wed) Kalie Vandever Quartet @ Roulette
12/12 (Thu) Ikue Mori quartet @ The Stone
12/13 (Fri) The Blood Brothers @ Irving Plaza
12/13 (Fri) William Parker @ Roulette
12/13 (Fri) Ikue Mori quartet @ The Stone
12/14 (Sat) William Parker @ Roulette
12/14 (Sat) Ikue Mori, Craig Taborn, Tomeka Reid trio @ The Stone
12/17 (Tue) Tim Berne @ Lowlands
Philly
12/6 (Fri) No/Mas @ Kung Fu Necktie
12/6 (Fri) Aimee Mann & Ted Leo @ Scottish Rite Auditorium (in NJ)
12/10 (Tue) The Blood Brothers @ Union Transfer
12/13 (Fri) The Jesus Lizard @ Union Transfer
Cheers,
LM
boo hoo
Read: putting my money where my mouth is
Or I’d actually write a melody like a real musician would lol
As noted by my big melodic ending, which they would absolutely stick their noses up at