by New Era
by Swagg Kids
(MP3)
More dispatches from the jerkin’ front, the music of L.A. teenagers
mocking hiphop from within, about which I wrote in the October 8
column. New Era’s “Maedae Maedae” is basically a new vocal over the
alien beat of her own “Pockets on My Pannies,” which is a
recommendation by itself, but this earns its place in your download
queue via lines such as “Call me New Era, but my name is
Steph-eye-nie/Never paper chase, money-money always find me” and “My
name is New Era, I don’t know what else to say/I been making all the
money, I don’t know what else to make,” all delivered more legibly than
the earlier song, but with equal irresistible nonchalance. As for the
Swagg Kids, they call themselves schoolyard names, boasting, “I’m a
nerd, nerd, nerd/Geek, geek, geek,” the latter of which they claim as
the meaning (one of them, at least) of that old hiphop term of
endearment “G,” over playful 808 sub-bass kicks and swirling, filtered
chimes. Hey, if rappers could reclaim epithets far more historically
freighted and socially problematic than these, then why not? Extra
points for the way that, in places, they deliberately hypercaffeinate
their flow: “Watch me work/Watch me dip and watch me
jerk.”
by Claude VonStroke
(Dirtybird)
It makes sense that in techno, the music whose entire raison
d’être is machines, the human voice would be the last frontier,
from Todd Edwards’s records as the Sample Choir (a vowel from here, a
consonant from there is very much his MO) to Matthew Herbert’s
self-explanatory Bodily Functions to Dave Aju’s 2008 gem Open
Wide, an album crafted entirely out of mouth noises. Aju’s fellow
San Franciscan Claude VonStroke’s great new single follows the same
basic idea, though I’m going to go ahead and guess the drums came from
something a little more mechanical. It’s not like you could tell the
neatly layered vocal cords themselves were human without knowing in
advance, frankly—they bump and grunt and jump around the scale
the way you’re accustomed to hearing synths do in this
setting—but once you’re aware, it adds to the pleasure,
highlights the grain, and builds to a groaning climax that builds back
up gradually when the beat kicks back in. 