If you're listening passively to AS LIVE [][][][][], its twenty-three minute stream of continuous music plays out like something of a timeline of recent dance and beat music trends, sort of like Arca's &&&&&. Most of the artificial thuds and klangs piece together to resemble something you've heard before but can't quite place, and most of them suggest that, yes, you should be moving your body around or at least tapping a foot and nodding a head. But it's hard to listen to this release-- the first major one from the mysterious Amnesia Scanner-- passively. It's also hard to dance to any of it, at least in a socially-acceptable manner. It's too weird. Like Amnesia Scanner's website, AS LIVE [][][][][] at first glance (i.e., for the first couple minutes) really isn't that far removed from other trendy underground internet-obsessed artworks, but keep poking around-- at both the site and the mixtape-- and you'll keep finding things that make no sense in maddening, and incredible, ways.

AS LIVE [][][][][] is available for download on Amnesia Scanner's Soundcloud.

SPF420 is an online music venue. Since early 2013, the website has curated dozens of concerts using Tinychat, a free, online video chat service that allows musicians to broadcast performances from the privacy of their own homes. Artists that have performed include Traxman, DJ Earl, foodman, DJ Clap, Saint Pepsi, Giant Claw, and many more. Beyond the sheer breadth and quality of the musicians that have played on the website since its inception, a vibrant online community has also coalesced around SPF420. The site’s obvious momentum-- this year, it hosted a packed SXSW showcase headlined by Ryan Hemsworth--  shows no signs of slowing down: clearly, many people-- listeners and performers alike-- are excited by the possibilities offered by SPF420 and other similar web-based phenomena. In order to attempt to discern the significance of the “online music venue” and discuss its implications-- both for the lay listener and for the creator or performer-- one must first trace the roots and history of the venue up to the present.

SPF420 was founded by Chaz Allen and Liz (who goes simply by her first name). Despite the fact that Chaz is from Chicago and Liz hails from North Carolina, they were able to first make contact through a room on turntable.fm, a now-discontinued website that functioned as a sort of early online music venue in its own way. Turntable.fm allowed its users to create “rooms” in which they could DJ by curating and then live-streaming a playlist to others in the same room. An integral aspect of turntable.fm was its textual chat interface-- users in a given room were able to message each other while listening to the music-- something that would also become a vital component of the SPF420 experience. 

The first SPF420 event took place in January 2013, featuring performances by several artists hailing from the internet-based electronic microgenre known as “vaporwave.” I leave the term in scare quotes as a recognition of the genre’s transient, somewhat ungraspable character; articles have been published on its origin, history, and characteristic aesthetic qualities, but for many, it still retains an air of inscrutability. At the risk of being reductive, vaporwave essentially draws from capitalism's aural detritus: its artists' preferred sample sources include the soundtracks for corporate training videos and elevator music. Vaporwave appropriates and disembodies the generic, MIDI-heavy sounds of 1980s-era Muzak, music with an explicit use-value. Some of the artists that performed at this first SPF420 included Luxury Elite, Prism Corp. (one identity of the enigmatic, Portland, Oregon-based producer known as Vektroid, who has released some of vaporwave’s most emblematic and iconic works under a variety of other names, including Macintosh Plus, Laserdisc Visions, 情報デスクVIRTUAL, and New Dreams Ltd.), and Metallic Ghosts, the musical alias of SPF420 co-founder Chaz Allen himself.

Two years since his EP on Software-- a collection of smooth digital jams and a hyper-vaporwave album cover-- Napolian returns with his first proper full-length album, Incursio. In the interim, Napolian collaborated with Airbird (aka Joel Ford), and helped out with A$AP Ferg's Trap Lord and one of Ad Hoc's favorite albums from last year, Kelela's CUT 4 ME. The first track off Incursio, "1 Peter 1:3-4" is marked by an irresistable bounce, complete with 808s and some synth lines that sound like they could have been transcribed from Boyz II Men vocals. Don't ask me about the Bible stuff in the track's title though.

Incursio is out May 27 on Software.

DJ Rashad at 285 Kent, photo by Erez Avissar

Signalling a trend which will surely continue for at least the remainder of 2014, Sleigh Bells has shared a remix made in part by the late DJ Rashad. It seems inevitable that Rashad's unheard work will continue to surface post-humously, and that is a great thing. The shock of Rashad's death has yet to subside, but the music is still as tight.

In this ninth installment of Who Has Tapes Anymore?, Mike Haley, Ian Franklin, and John Pyle of Tabs Out brings you some of their favorite cassette releases of the last month.

Tredici Bacci: The Thirteen Kisses Cassetta (NNA)
Ad Hoc readers, I don’t know what stargate I walked through to end up in a world where this is being released on a DIY cassette label, I’m just so happy that I made it here. You’d expect to find The Thirteen Kisses Cassetta on an old, dusty import LP, perhaps a soundtrack for a forgotten 1970s Italian film, but nah. It’s a tape on NNA, which makes it even better than it already is. Which is saying something. Tredici Bacci is a squad of 14 musicians under the guidance of Guerilla Toss’ Simon Hanes. They make elegant, exhilarating, and beautifully composed/performed/recorded soundtrack-inspired music. Trumpets and percussion gush luxurious sounds. Gorgeous voices, spirited strings, and an ability to spring through emotions mark each track. Seriously, I am in awe. This one is a must!

L.A. County Morgue/Pleasure Bros: Split (Mazurka Editions)
“Rotten, swollen fruit fallen from obscene, petulant trees.” Unclassifiable and saturated in dank basement ambiance. Sold out from the label but still available stateside from Analog Worship and Skeleton Dust.

On Amen Dunes's first two albums, principal member Damon McMahon gave us sloppy, dark swathes of psychedelia-- lo-fi and freeform but with clear reverence, nevertheless, for the American folk and rock traditions. On McMahon's third outing as Amen Dunes, Love, he both cleans up and spreads out, putting together longer, more detailed songs that are at once gorgeous and deceptively heavy. (Check "Lilac In Hand," below, for instance.) To help us make sense of the record, McMahon made a list of the songs and musicians he dug while writing and recording Love.

Love is out May 13 on Sacred Bones. Keep reading to see what McMahon has to say about people like Charley Patton and Pharoah Sanders.

H.R. Giger's passing doesn't mean that all nightmares are dead. With Black Pus, Brian Chippendale-- drummer of Lightning Bolt, not heir to the erotic dance fortune-- has night time terrors on lock. On "Blood Will Run," you will find Black Pus's trademark incessant pounding, ratty synthesizer, and for the first time, undistorted vocals. Keeping his voice clear, Chippendale sings about the collective bad dream that was the Florida shooting of the seventeen-year-old Jordan Davis by Michael Dunn. Throughout Lightning Bolt's work, as well as Chippendale's own as Black Pus, there has always been a life-and-death sense of urgency, but it's rare to be privvy to the literal message being conveyed since they usually treat the human voice as something to mangle. "Blood Will Run" appears on a coming split with thrashers Oozing Wound, making for a particularly raucous piece of vinyl. Play it real loud, because fuck 'em.

The Black Pus/Oozing Wound split is out June 16 on Thrill Jockey.

While his fellow Grasshopper Shingles is off making soundtracks for non-existant giallo flicks, Josh Millrod is scoring his own future. It's rare for Millrod to release solo material under his own name (he has in the past gone as Dads Against Vietnam), so it makes sense that Seeking The Millenary Kingdom is a very personal work. The tape was recorded the day after Millrod left his 9-to-5 to pursue a career as a sound therapist, and the optimistic, progression-centric vibe here lends the impression that the work was a bit of therapy for Millrod himself. The excerpt provided by the label, "Cutting Out Its Silhouette" is pure forward motion, with modular synth pulses pushing ascendent trumpet lines to a peak that is never actually revealed. Suppose you'll have to purchase the tape to find out of Millrod ever found the kingdom that he sought.

Seeking The Millenary Kingdom is out tomorrow on Solid Melts.

Brooklyn-based Teklife members Tripletrain-- aka flyboys Drew Conley and Eddie Sergi--are no strangers to the possibilites of footwork's playful side, and they pull it off far better than most. The duo's lean on hybrid organ/synth riffs and more recent R&B samples plainly marks their NYC roots. Conley and Sergi have been actively involved in Teklife since the movement began to migrate from its native Chicago to New York, and the pair managed to forge prolific friendships with the usual suspects: Rashad, Manny, Earl, who will feature on Tripletrain's forthcoming LP. For a small summary of what they do best, look no further than the title track on their new EP. The gorgeous vocals on this tune were not originally part of the plan. The pair was sought by Berlin vocalist Chiara Noriko, who passed her acapellas along and essentially told the tunesmiths to do whatever with them. Their drop into the instrumental is a feat of lazy precision and the vocals are chopped around an amazing organ riff. This is beautiful stuff.

The EP of the same name is out today via Tripletrain's Bandcamp, and also is streaming in full below. The duo will be playing multiple dates in New York this summer, starting with Modern Love's Jack Dice on May 17. 

All Kinds of You, the debut full-length from Chicago's Ryley Walker (out now on Tompkins Square), is a stunningly beautiful, intimate, wintry folk record. The snow on its cover blows its way into the songs, rendering everything nice, cool, and sedate. Walker's intricate guitar-playing and laconic-but-inviting voice stay close to the brake pedal, only letting go for a quick shuffle on "Twin Oaks, Pt. 1" and "Great River Road." People have made a big to-do about Walker's influences, namely British folk from the late '60s to mid-'70s. And while his music does often resemble that of, say, Bert Jansch or John Martyn, there's an unmistakably contemporary spirit-- and an unwillingness to be pinned down-- present in his tunes and personality.

As much as Walker makes use of the sounds of 1970s England, he tosses in subtler cues from things that've piqued his interest over the years, from Bob Seger to Merzbow to "far-out jazz." If those influences aren't audibly obvious, they're there in his penchants for jamming, making lyrics up on the spot, using strange chords, and, well, using words like "far-out." His punk and noise roots show themselves not in abrasive music, but in resistance to trends, be they "American Primitive" or simply tuning the guitar to DADGAD, both of which are popular among fingerstyle guitar players. Ryley Walker's a punk, a head, a goofball. But he's not afraid of the delicate, or of the unadulterated.

AdHoc: You just wrapped up a tour with Cloud Nothings, right? Any favorite stops along the way?

Ryley Walker: It was interesting because we played places I didn’t even know had shows, like Orlando. And Orlando was sick, man. We had the best, like, Colombian food I think I’ve ever had in Orlando. Super dope. I was like, “Whoa.” The show was good, the venue was good-- I forgot what it was called, but there were all these, like, adults there. I think they won tickets because they were at Disneyworld, and people were like, “Here’s tickets to the rock concert.” So there were all these dads in Hawaiian shirts there, and you can still smoke at the bars there, so we lit up, like, a thousand cigarettes.

AH: Never been down there.

RW: Yeah, it’s weird. You don’t have to go, but apparently there’s some great shows.

AH: You toured Europe, too-- what’s the reception like over there?

RW: Oh, the Euro crowd-- they’re the best, they love it. They’re the coolest. They come out, to all the shows, have tons of fun, buy a lot of records, tell you about really weird sandwiches you can get when you’re there. And you’re like, “What the fuck?” And they’re like [affects Northern European accent], “You have to try this sandwich!” And you’re like, “Whoa.” And they always wanna get you real drunk. I love it over there. Everybody’s the coolest. Didn’t really have a bad time over there.