Alex G is now (Sandy) Alex G—putting to rest long years of confusion between the Alex Giannascoli we know and love, and a very different, west coast singer-songwriter who also goes by Alex G, and, of course, restauranteur and my personal favorite Chopped judge, Alex Guanarschelli. The (Sandy) prefix isn’t too unusual anyway. It’s been part of the URL of Giannascoli's Bandcamp for a long while. The announcement is accompanied by a new single from his forthcoming record, Rocket. “Proud” continues the folksy, country-inflected sound explored on the previous single, “Bobby.” It’s a handsome song, with a lazy shuffle and a Floyd Cramer-style piano that dances around the mix. (Sandy) Alex G’s sweet vocal melody belies the complex, ambivalent relationship the song maps out—one that mixes admiration and resentment in equal measure. In the chorus, Giannascoli ruminates on the possible consequences of his own failings, a train of thought that proves too difficult to follow by the end, when he lets the last line, “if I fuck up,” trail off into the fade out.
Andy Molholt, member of bands like Speedy Ortiz and Very Fresh, pursues his own particular musical vision as Laser Background. Under this moniker, Molholt explores the affinities between psychedelia and childhood. “We Trust,” the opening track to Laser Background’s eponymous, debut EP, features a Spongebob Squarepants-style sea shanty chorus amid waves of flanged guitars and laser blast synth washes, while follow up record Super Future Montage’s “Fantasy Zone” sets Prince-like pitched up vocals against a Mega Man-core backing track.
“Climb the Hill” is the second single from Dark Nuclear Bogs, Molholt’s forthcoming record. If you have an affinity for anagrams, you might’ve noticed that Dark Nuclear Bogs is an rearrangement of Laser Background—a play on mid-career self-titled records that refine or subvert a band’s vision. If “Climb the Hill” is any indicator, then this trope will bare fruit. Not only is it one of Molholt’s most fully realized pop songs, it simultaneously pushes his music and production towards more textured, out-there, and evocative territory. It’s centered around a sparkling, nursery-rhyme keyboard line that’s rhythmically a little unbalanced, dropping a couple of bars here and there as it loops. The effect is something like the musical interpretation of a psychedelic crib mobile. It’s a compelling backdrop for Molholt’s pretty, hazy vocal melody, which relates what he has described as a “bit of psychedelic fiction”— a story about “a bell that you can ring” but can’t hear unless “you are pure.”
Being a kid, when a good chunk of what you experience every day is new and weird, is probably pretty trippy. The wooziness of psychedelia in music has often been used to explore hazy ambiguity between pleasure and terror; presence and non-presence. By connecting this ambiguity with the susceptibility to experience that comes with childhood, Laser Backgrounds makes psych-pop that’s remarkably affecting.
Check out the track below. Dark Nuclear Bogs is out on April 28 via Mutual Crush/Endless Daze. Moholt and co. will be on tour throughout April and May, performing in Ridgewood, Queens at Trans Pecos on April 28.
Miniature intimacies—from lingering family portraits shakily-camcorded pickup basketball games—constellate the sumptuous video accompanying Hand Habits' "Book on How to Change." The flickering graininess of the film casts a somber pallor over the gorgeous shots of snow-capped summits, RV lots, and domestic assemblages—conjuring the "world so grey" in which "the colors fade into another" that Meg Duffy's hushed lyrics envision. Capturing glimpses of the small-town "quotidian moments," as director Chantal Anderson describes in her artist's statement, the video documents a departure delicately unfolding into a gentle self-actualization. As the peripatetic protagonist arrives at a rocky outcropping just beyond city limits, she regally position herself atop a small summit and grasps the deep blue air around her, relishing a chance to start "messing" with her very own "dream." Like the song, a highlight from Hand Habits' recent Wildly Idle (Humble Before The Void), the heroine appears at ease upon her radiant perch. The rugged alpine landscape, ghost town urban decay, and spaghetti western closeups all attest to the sheer emotional intensity seething beneath the pattering drums and lilting vocals of Duffy's muted epic.
Wildly Idle (Humble Before The Void) is out now on Woodsist. Hand Habits is currently on tour with Mega Bog. See their dates below.
Brooklyn's Forma congealed into a three-piece outfit nearly a decade ago. Ever in flux, the synth collective has undergone lineup changes and stylistic renovations over the years, coalescing most recently into its current configuration of George Bennett, Mark Dwinell, and John Also Bennett. Forma’s 2016 Kranky debut, Physicalist, saw the band wading even deeper into the murk of psychedelic modular synthesis, while introducing flute, piano, and even traditional drum setups. AdHoc caught up with the band around their show supporting Cluster alumnus and kosmische heavyweight Roedelius this March. They disentangled the cosmic richness of Physicalist, outlined their compositional methods, and staked their claim as devotees of a krautrock genre tracing its roots back to archaic folk traditions.
AdHoc: Reviewers tend to describe your work using lots of visual metaphors—I’ve definitely seen a lot of terms like “pointillism,” “spectral,” “rippling,” “bubbling,” “fluid,” and “rich.” Is your music this visual to you? Do you think in terms of sight and space while composing?
Mark: Maybe people [gravitate] to visual metaphors [because] we don’t give people a lot to grab onto in terms of lyrical content. Using visual metaphors is just a short way of dealing with how to talk about the material without having any lyrics to go on to talk about what these guys [at Forma] are actually talking about. Personally, my experience of how we function at Forma—I would say it’s a lot more emotional than visual. The visual component really has nothing to do with it. To me, there is an ocean between the audial and the visual.
John: I understand why reviewers use visual terms to describe Forma's music, but I don't think we're envisioning a particular place or space when we're composing music. For me, Forma has always been more about feeling out a process between the three of us. One of the major tenants of the so-called "minimalist" music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass was that it wasn't representative of a specific emotion, place, or thing. The music was representative of only itself. In Reich's case, it was a process playing itself out; with Glass, it was a series of intervals gradually changing. I'm not saying that Forma's music doesn't take on some emotional capacity or evoke something visual—I think it absolutely does, and we put a lot of thought into the visuals and titles surrounding the latest album, which certainly evoke a very particular sense of place. But it's kind of interesting that with Forma those things tend to emerge afterwards, after this process of group improvisation [and] composition under constraints has played itself out.
George: You could imagine situations where improvisational musicians would use visual metaphors or visual devices to ground or guide their activity. We do not do that. There are visual constructs that I do use in my own playing, but they are things that are very practical, like a sixteen-step grid. We’re working with a lot of gear, and a lot of our premises are around gridded-out step sequences and really long, repetitive patterns, so I would say that such imagery has a functional role in Forma, but not necessarily a thematic input into how we compose.
In the same way that we don’t have any visual imagery to guide our creative process, we don’t have any input saying, “Now we’re going to do this sad song, now we’re gonna do this happy song,” or whatever. It’s all sort of emergent. All forms of meaning are just emergent within our music; we don’t go in with a lot of pre-established parameters, especially thematic ones.
Mark: It’s like the beauty of math, and how math turns into poetry and art. Music is sort of the most direct art of math, and relationships between numbers We’re not noise musicians, you know, and we’re not free jazz musicians; by using ARPs and sequencers, there’s a fairly balanced construct that we work inside of. Hence, this idea of a grid. And we’re always trying to figure out ways to fuck that up a little bit, but not enough to completely sidetrack us. Just trying to find some balance with it.
As Egyptrixx, Toronto producer David Psutka trawls the depths of sonic possibility. His latest album, Pure, Beyond Reproach, is a stark work contrasting serene, natural cinematics with a mangled, post-industrial grit. It clanks and sputters, but is firmly grounded in a world that humans and machines have saturated with waste. A longtime affiliate of the pioneering post-club label Night Slugs, Egyptrixx has evolved his sound far past the dancefloor, onto another planet entirely. In 2015, he founded his own label, Halocline Trance, as an outlet for mostly beatless productions that didn’t quite fit in with the woozy, DJ-ready template of Night Slugs. Just last year, Psutka unveiled a new project as Ceramic TL, where he painted paranoid and scathing noise-scapes that pointed to his fascination with ecological destruction. One of his tracks “Life on Earth,” is a scathing assault of noise which doesn’t allow room for any life whatsoever. We caught up with Egyptrixx to get a break down of his influences, and what to look forward to in his show in New York.
The warm sensations of Wanderings, Alix Hyde's debut album from Elestial Sound seem to crawl to the far reaches of the mind, creating a diverse dialog between sound, and silence. The artist crafts a particularly heart-churning composition on “Myriad Tears"—enveloping your soul, pulling you into a soothing realm. Hyde's sparse, sparkling piano melody drifts as though it were floating through space, colliding within the rhythms of a meteor shower. The video for “Myriad Tears”, made in collaboration with Tristan Whitehill of Euglossine, accentuates a mirroring of inner and outer space in the body, and mind. The phenomena of mental and physical dualities become a counterpart to the vast complexities of the human brain, and the universe. Bubbling pulsations are carried in a cosmic echo, visual, and sound begin to intertwine. The calming spaciousness of Hyde's music melds together the vividly palpable sensation surrounding the human form, and its relation to the atoms that are shifting around it weaving throughout space and time. Finding its home in a space where the difference between the two is uncertain.
All That is Solid, Lea Bertucci’s new album for NNA Tapes, begins with a breath and a whine, a slow distant emergency smothered in smoke and hiss. Throughout the course of this first side—entitled “The Cepheid Variations”—a troika of live tape collage, viola, and cello unearth a massive sound. From the churning tape reels to the Pendereckian wails of the strings, this 28-minute opener is only outdone by the immensity of Side B, a 33-and-a-half-minute closer called “Double Bass Crossfade.” Two double bassists weave dolorous tones through a fabric of feedback recorded in a 50,000-square-foot former glass factory—their sound can be as deep as whalesong in the abyss, others times treading vibrations imperceptible as infrared.
Bertucci’s compositions are stark, resonant, and certainly something to behold in person. I was able to catch the original performance of “The Cepheid Variations” at Brooklyn's ISSUE Project Room in 2015, where her live tape collage was accompanied by Leila Bordreuil on cello and Jeanann Dara on viola. Hearing the music again immediately thrust me back into the old ISSUE Project Room theater at 22 Boerum Place, where the cream moulding was moldy and peeling and a good part of the vaulted ceiling was ripped apart, the HVAC guts spilling out like cables. It was an incredible show, so I was excited to speak to Bertucci about it’s "second life" on the new album. Of course, she’s been busy since 2015 with a variety of projects—including a collection of experimental graphic scores as well as a composition involving a 20-child children's choir—so I had to ask her about those as well.
All That is Solid is out March 24 via NNA Tapes. Catch Bertucci at Pioneer Works with GRID, Greg Fox, and Multa Nux on March 28.
AdHoc: Can you talk a bit about "The Cepheid Variations"? It is a few years old now—how does this piece fit within your larger sound and your practice? Is this a track you find yourself coming back to often?
Lea Bertucci: I wrote this piece in 2014 as a way to approach my interest in harmonics and resonances. At the time I had just been selected as an ISSUE Project Room artist-in-residence and had free access to their space, which is an amazingly resonant McKim, Mead & White building in downtown Brooklyn. The resonant nature of the room was the perfect excuse to write a piece of music specifically for that space. Because my background as a musician is as a woodwind player, string instruments have always held a particularly exotic appeal to me. I was also interested in writing a piece that combined live acoustic instruments with pre-recorded collage material in a seamless way, where the two elements obscure each other. I am constantly questioning the boundaries of what I do as an artist, and am always looking ahead to challenge myself, whether it's doing sound design projects, composing for large ensembles or working with unfamiliar instruments.
Dead Horses, a three-piece experimental cowpunk band from the Ferrara province in Italy, have nailed deconstructed blues. Their new track “No Wahala” from Ballad For Loser is like Keiji Haino’s Black Blues gone country. The group's three players—Agnese, Zufux, and Mauro—employ a minimal drum kit, an acoustic guitar, and an electric guitar—that’s it—but simple instrumentation in no way indicates simple composition. In the song, a plodding rhythm propels spindly, precise guitar work as incanted vocals float atop the track’s aggressive swagger. Dead Horses have been called the Italian Butthole Surfers more than a few times, though it's less about their exact sound than, as they say, their "mix of influences and live show." Which is to say, if you like the Butthole Surfers, you will probably like this. (As for "influences," no, I would not rule out the influence of drugs.)
Swet Shop Boys is the duo of former Das Racist member Heems and actor/rapper Riz Ahmed or Riz MC. Last October they released their first full-length album, Cashmere, made in collaboration with British producer Redinho. The album drew influence from the Sufi devotional music Qawwali, a genre which is popular across India and Pakistan, and often uses hedonistic themes as a metaphor for spiritual longing. The spirit of Qawwali, which bridges the gap between politically divided communities, serves as an inspiration for the the album highlight “Aaja,” which features Pakistani singer Ali Sethi, as well as the track’s new video. Directed by Sofian Kahn, the video is at once playful and sweet, showing a teen cycling between Flushing and Coney Island (home to large Indian and Pakistani populations respectively) to flyer for an upcoming Swet Shop Boys show, all while nursing a crush. The video concludes with a sample from Qandeel Baloch, a Pakistani internet celebrity and activist who was the victim of an “honor killing,” to whom the video is dedicated.
This interview between Meg Duffy of Hand Habits and Girlpool will appear in AdHoc Issue 19, coming later this month. Catch Girlpool at AdHoc’s unoffocial SxSW showcase on Wednesday, March 15. If you can’t make it to Texas, they’ll also be playing at Warsaw in Brooklyn on June 9. Their new album, Power Plant, is out May 12 via Anti-.
About two years ago I was eating a meal inside a festival’s hospitality tent somewhere in the Netherlands. I remember being very psychedelically tired from a drive with the Kevin Morby crew—it was around two weeks deep into a tour. I have no recollection of playing a set that day.
While eating bread soaked in some sort of chicken juice and noticing the conversations around me, I spied a tall redhead bopping around the cutlery zone with a blue-haired accomplice. I admired their fashion. I recognized them both but couldn't remember from where.
To my surprise, the two sat down at my table! Soon I learned that they were Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad, aka Girlpool. We had many mutual friends back on the East Coast. I didn't catch their set at the festival, but during our time there, our crews merged. We climbed a jungle gym, ate delicious Belgian waffles and ice cream, and talked about jet lag and how strange it was to be at a festival very far from home with so many friends of friends.
Since that day, Cleo and Harm moved back to Los Angeles (where I also live), made a new record called Power Plant (that I love), and expanded their live band to include two new collaborators. They also each have one new pair of pants, which I know, because recently we all went shopping together. This winter—while I was in a van on tour with my band Hand Habits, and while Cleo and Harm were in their respective homes in LA—we spoke on the phone about friends, feedback, and collaboration. —Meg Duffy
Meg Duffy: So you guys live in Los Angeles now. What are you doing out there?
Cleo Tucker: We’ve been rehearsing with the new band; we’re gonna go to SxSW and then hopefully have some time to record a ton of music. And then we’re gonna hit the road at the end of May for like a month, and then we’re gonna go to Europe.
Who is in the new band?
Cleo Tucker: It’s Miles Wintner from Traps PS on drums, and Stephen Steinbrink on synth and guitar. And then… us.
Photography by Tonje Thilesen
Photography by Natalie Piserchio
Photography by Lena Shkoda
Photo by Andy Hardman
Photo by Molly Matalon