My fear, my loneliness, my happiness. My blackness, my queerness, my objectness. My subjectness. I am haunted by likenesses. I’m haunted by my a self. _ _ _ _ like a _ _ _ _ _. Smile, Simile. Messages, Massages. (Crater Speak) is the title of a catalogue I published with Midway Contemporary Art. It is an unreliable guide of materials that influence my artistic and musical practice. There are several associative chapters that dance, outlining a perimeter. The steps draw the rim of a crater. An old absence present. Here by unimaginable heat, scale, speed, and violence. Collision to disintegration to... (see The Thing, 1982). “The rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet’s equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed...” - W. G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn. To become a star is to become certain death. Of stone, of (s)tar, petrified. R U SCARED? Of mud, muck, ivory, oil, and bones. A New World by refined old old oooold Death.
produced by JPEGMAFIA written by JPEGMAFIA mixed by JPEGMAFIA mastered by JPEGMAFIA compilation of all single's released this year. mix of young and old. thank you for listening. i love u all 💕stay safe. and be you always.
The old aphorism goes that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but trying to convey in words exactly what London duo Jockstrap sounds like might be even trickier than that. Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye met while studying at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama (Ellery studying jazz violin and Skye electronic music) and formed after they noticed via Facebook that they’d both been to the same James Blake show. Their 2018 debut EP *Love Is the Key to the City* introduced their idiosyncratic approach to music, taking in classic, dreamy pop songwriting—echoing everyone from ’50s jazz singer Julie London to alt-pop including Broadcast or Stereolab—and obtuse beats from Skye that could easily have come from the PC Music stable. The EP won them a fan in Björk, who came to a 2018 show at Iceland Airwaves and eventually helped them sign to the iconic Warp label for this, their follow-up EP. “It’s a bit more of everything,” says Skye. “It’s funnier, it’s definitely a bit more ridiculous at some points, but it’s more serious too.” “I think it’s a lot more confident and we pushed ourselves creatively a lot further,” adds Ellery. “This is new to us and it’s really exciting.” Read their track-by-track guide below. **Robert** Taylor Skye: “All the tracks on the EP are in the order we made them, and this one went back and forth for ages as it just kind of felt like the dregs of the last EP. The idea to put a rap feature on it came almost immediately, but we had to spend ages finding the right person.” Georgia Ellery: “We used Groggs from \[Arizona hip-hop trio\] Injury Reserve. We met them at Iceland Airwaves a few years ago and then they invited us to support them on their UK tour. We got something from them and then Taylor really manipulated and distorted the vocals so it feels more like an instrument on the track or part of the mix than standing out as a rap on the track.” TS: “They already had the rap recorded, so it wasn’t made specifically for the song, which was quite nice. It felt right for the rap to not mean anything specific. I think you have to make a rap feature a little ridiculous, too.” GE: “The track’s inspired by the American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. I got really obsessed with his work for a while.” **Acid** GE: “This song’s about my brother. We went through a period of not having much of a relationship, so I was just kind of figuring that out through song, I guess. When Taylor sent over a version which was quite close to this final version, I remember feeling like he was telling a different story through his production to the story I was telling, and it just sounded crazy and awesome and really helped shape the song.” **Yellow in Green** GE: “All the songs start with me writing a poem, and this was written on a train from Glasgow to London. I got an early train and it was really frosty and I sat and wrote this.” TS: “This track was a case of Georgia writing a song and then me producing it in a way that is right and not trying to make too much of a different statement from what it was in the first place. We got a friend to record the piano for it, and it really came together when we put a sub-bass note underneath the big piano chords. That was the big moment!” **The City** GE: “Usually with songs I’ll pick away at a progression and come back to it day after day, but ‘The City’ just kind of poured out of me, and it’s rare but amazing when that happens.” TS: “The first and second half of this song are quite different, and in some senses it falls into a bit of a trope of ‘girl does nice piano ballad and boy does big angry stompy thing’, but I actually did something much softer first, which Georgia didn’t like, and then came back with something harder, which she *did* like. It’s my job in Jockstrap to add a decent amount of production to it and do something that’s reasonably radical. Sometimes that can be something quite subtle and sometimes it’s quite big.” **City Hell** TS: “This almost feels like the whole EP in one song. There’s about ten specific people that influenced moments in this song, and we’re happy to admit that.” GE: “For example, the guitars at the beginning are influenced by a couple of tracks on the first Beyoncé album. I was like, ‘Taylor, can we have that sound?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, they’re reversed MIDI guitars.’ We were inspired by Roxy Music, too, with their glamorous marriage of synths and guitars on their early albums.” TS: “There’s a bit in there that really reminds me of Panic! At the Disco too. It was a really meaty piece to tackle and get the structure down. Mixing it was difficult as it was all these different elements, but the vocals helped tie it all together.”
Playing video games has served as a reprieve for many during the lockdown, but for Oli Sykes, these virtual post-apocalyptic adventures also influenced the shaping of Bring Me The Horizon\'s new EP. Drawing inspiration mainly from DOOM Eternal, the Sheffield quintet tapped Mick Gordon, who composed that game\'s soundtrack, to produce this collection and capture the spirit of a big-budget video game. The angsty \"Dear Diary,\" begins the record with an airing of grievances, the LINKIN PARK-leaning \"Teardrops\" channels nu-metal\'s glory days, and tracks like \"Parasite Eve\" and \"Ludens\" build off the heavier moments from 2019\'s *amo*. The EP features collaborators that span multiple genres: \"Kingslayer\" fuses *Suicide Season*-era deathcore with BABYMETAL\'s kawaii metal stylings, while \"Obey\" weaponizes YUNGBLUD\'s raspy vocals alongside Sykes\' menacing growl to tackle societal oppression and corruption. And the haunting kiss-off \"One Day the Only Butterflies Left Will Be in Your Chest as You March Towards Your Death\" features a chilling duet between Sykes and Evanescence\'s Amy Lee, the track\'s glacial funeral march offering nothing more than a bleak look into the future.
For Chromeo, a global shutdown shouldn’t mean you still can’t get down. As the US entered hibernation mode in March 2020, the Montreal-founded duo of Dave 1 and P-Thugg opted to shelter in place together at their Los Angeles studio. And while they’re hardly the only artists who’ve kept busy by rush-releasing new music, they are the first to channel pandemic-era anxieties into the world’s only COVID-themed synth-funk concept record. The *Quarantine Casanova* EP began as an in-studio joke to keep the duo occupied and amused, but after they teased the songs on social media, the enthusiastic response prompted an official release. Overtop the duo’s signature fusion of ’80s electro and ’90s G-funk, Dave takes on the Herculean task of translating the most unsexy aspects of quarantine life—social distancing, disinfectants, sweatpants—into a bottomless reservoir of erotic double entendres. But for all the cheeky references to Dr. Fauci, Zoom meetings, and Teddy Riley’s internet crapping out during his Verzuz battle with Babyface, *Quarantine Casanova* doesn’t shy away from examining the more troubling aspects of self-isolating. Over its five tracks, the EP charts a journey that mirrors many people’s experience during the crisis, where jokes about peculiar procedures like wiping down groceries give way to more distressing thoughts about psychological survival. “I didn\'t plan it that way,” Dave explains to Apple Music. “We just put the tracks in the same order as we wrote and released them online. But when I looked at it with some perspective, I noticed that it starts with the goofy, lighthearted stuff and then it gets into the neuroses and the anguish and the claustrophobia and the more mental-health-oriented themes. And I like that, because I feel like it shows us progressively unraveling a little bit.” Here’s his track-by-track guide to navigating the new normal. **Clorox Wipe** “My fiancée has a podcast, and she was circulating this quarantine questionnaire online. It had some deep questions and some fluffy questions, and one of the fluffy questions was ‘What would you reincarnate as?\' And I was like, \'I would want to be a Clorox wipe right now, because I would feel wanted for once!\' And then I thought about that during the day and I was like, ‘You know what—that could be a song!\' Our typical Chromeo songs are always about someone feeling unwanted in a relationship, and so the Clorox wipe is a perfect parable for someone who\'s been undesired forever and then comes out on top. I just like the image of the narrator saying, \'Look, like, I\'ll just disinfect, I\'ll just wipe, I\'ll do the dishes, I\'ll wipe the groceries...\' Even though it then came out that you *shouldn\'t* wipe your groceries, I left that bit in there because it\'ll be so absurd for us to remember a time when we were wiping groceries with Clorox. I want this to be immortalized so we can look back and be like, ‘What the hell were we doing?’” **6 Feet Away** “With Chromeo, a lot of our lyrics were sort of a reaction to love songs that we would hear on the radio and that would feel very predatory and aggressive. And growing up, that\'s not how I experienced things! I definitely felt unwanted and rejected, and so I always wanted to write from that sort of neurotic, anti-heroic standpoint—that\'s how we built the Chromeo persona. And with a song like \'6 Feet Away,\' it still tracks, because you can\'t get the person\'s attention, you\'re too far away, you\'re wearing a mask, so even if she tried to say something to you, she can\'t hear you. So there\'s this dual thing happening where it\'s topical to the pandemic, but there\'s also something very sweet and platonic about it, you know?” **Stay in Bed** “This song is very funny, but it also encapsulates a feeling of fatigue and frustration that we feel today from the pressure of social media: You\'ve got to work out and you\'ve got to post your recipes, and you\'ve got to post all these performative things. So the message of the song is: Do what feels right to you. If you don\'t feel like doing a Zoom meeting, don\'t do it. Like I say in the song, half the people that want to Zoom, I don\'t even like them in real life, so why would I want to Zoom with them? You know, at the beginning of quarantine, people were like, ‘This is the time where you\'re going to write your book!\' And I\'m like, ‘Dude, people are dying, who wants to write a book? I can\'t even get out of bed!’ I\'ve been very vocal about my struggles with anxiety and mental health in the past few years, and so this song ties into that theme. There\'s nothing wrong with staying in your sweatpants and staying in bed, and doing what feels right in these circumstances that, for a lot of us, are completely new.” **’Roni Got Me Stressed Out** “The narrator here is really starting to unravel. And this was very personal—P and I were like, ‘Will we tour before 2029?\' My managers still don\'t have an answer to that. You know, we\'re watching those Verzuz battles and Teddy Riley\'s internet\'s not working and you don\'t want to go to the grocery store, you\'re stressed, we don\'t know how long this is gonna last. So \'’Roni Got Me Stressed Out\' is about the confusion with all the mixed messaging that we\'re getting, and being like, ‘I\'ve got to take care of my mental health, because it\'s fragile.’\" **Cabin Fever** “Musically, this one is a little bit different for us, because it kind of opens up into more of a soul thing, and people don\'t necessarily associate us with that. We just started our own label called Juliet Records, where we\'re going to be producing for other artists, and for a lot of those projects, that\'s kind of been the sound, more of a soul-jazz kind of sound, so this is like a little hint of that. But then, lyrically, it\'s just a stream-of-consciousness ramble. And that came from talking to friends who had been quarantined in their small apartments for a long time, and some of them were telling me, like, \'Oh yeah, I made a fort just to not sleep in the same bed,’ or \'I slept on the couch,\' or \'I redecorated the kitchen 18 times\'—the things that people did to stay sane when they just couldn\'t leave their apartment. And I put in a bit about yelling at people for not wearing masks. There\'s a lot of things in here that come from our personal experiences—like, I\'ve watched every series I could find, and then I added a bit about how I\'m talking to Siri, and even Siri\'s not answering, because she\'s in quarantine too. It\'s about the delirium of someone who\'s been confined in a small space. But then I wanted to add a hopeful note at the end: If you\'re going cuckoo bananapants, just close your eyes and imagine the Funklordz in your room serenading you. I felt like that was a cozy way to end it.”
All proceeds from this sale will be donated to Know Your Rights Camp's COVID-19 Relief Fund.
Guy and Howard Lawrence, the brotherly electronic duo Disclosure, have never been shy about putting their influences on full display. Classic house, UK garage, hip-hop, and 2-step have always been central to their formula. On *Ecstasy*, an EP of club-calibrated tunes that comes on the heels of their Khalid collaboration \"Know Your Worth,” Disclosure adds a whole lot more to their mix of inspirations. They sample vintage disco from Aquarian Dream on the title track, tweak funk and folk sounds from Cameroon and Niger on “Tondo” and “Etran,” and recontextualize the soulful backing vocals of Boz Scaggs’ “Lowdown” on “Expressing What Matters.”
These four songs were done under quarantine and are about bodies, body dysmorphia and the schizophrenic dissolution of the boundary between self and other, such as the grandiose delusions of Daniel Paul Schreber. Spinoza asked" what can a body can do". Here it is asked, "where does a body end?" In the end, are not all our bodies interpenetrated by the nerves of a malevolent god?