355: lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to, by Various Artists

Various Artists
lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to (2017 onwards)
∞ tracks, ∞ minutes
Stream live on YouTube

lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to is one of the biggest musical phenomena of the past few years. It some ways, it represents a whole new paradigm of how and why people listen to music. And no, it’s not technically an album. If you’ve not yet been exposed to it, let me introduce you to the wonders of lofi hip-hop, compiled by ChilledCow:

I’ve been really excited to write about this, because there’s so much to talk about. Even the format that it takes is very much a 2010s thing: sort of a midway between an algorithmically-generated playlist and a curated radio station, a never-ending and continually updating set of tracks available 24 hours a day. There’s something I love about the infinite but unselectable nature of it. You don’t get to choose to only hear the tracks you know that you like, and you don’t get to skip any, but you can drop yourself in and out whenever you like. The tracks aren’t played in any specific order, but they are very carefully selected – a mix of the automated and the personal.

The music itself is a very specific genre with a very specific ambience. The name ‘lofi hip-hop’ may lead you to expect a little different to what it actually is. It’s an almost entirely instrumental style that is based around the marriage of off-kilter J Dilla-esque beats and samples often taken from relaxed jazz. The whole thing is chopped up and rearranged in a slightly surreal or hypnagogic way, and everything is treated with a production that makes it feel warm and fuzzy, cosy even, using vinyl-like surface noise, a strangely warped and wobbly feel to it, lots of shimmering and glittery timbres and a slow, steady tempo for ultimate chill-out vibes. Bassist, music theorist and YouTuber Adam Neely even looked into the way lofi hip-hop uses harmonies and unusual tunings and posited, very convincingly, that it has much more akin to a new field of jazz than hip-hop.

And for all its weird quirkiness, this isn’t some small niche, it is hugely popular. ChilledCow’s YouTube channel has over four million subscribers. At any given time, lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to has tens of thousands of listeners (at the time of writing – 3pm on a Saturday – it has over 19,000 people tuning in). Neither is it the only one: ChilledCow also runs lofi hip hop radio - beats to sleep/chill to (4,200 listeners right now), and there’s also the marginally differently-titled lofi hip hop radio - beats to study/relax to (2,400 listeners), the festive 24/7 Christmas lofi hip hop radio - beats to study/chill/relax (1,200 listeners) and the list goes on. The music has the same atmosphere, the names are almost interchangeable and even the aesthetic of the artwork is precisely the same – a short looping animation of a cosy but cluttered anime bedroom with a sleepy protagonist relaxing/studying. What makes these so popular? The clue is in the name. These streams and the music within aren’t really used to be listened to as much as they are to be heard. They provide a background noise that’s meant to manipulate the listener’s thinking: the chilled, atmospheric sounds of the music are interesting enough to divert some attention while being relaxed and predictable enough to still ‘fade into the background,’ meaning that any distractions from the outside world are drowned out while still allowing the conscious brain to focus on something else. It’s perfect, then, to ‘relax/study to.’ For a lot of listeners, these lofi beats don’t even really register as ‘music’ at all; they don’t listen to it because they enjoy the music, they put it on because it fulfils a function and it works. There are two particularly interesting articles on this aspect of lofi hip-hop: one on JSTOR, which takes a positive view on it, and one in the New Yorker, which is much more negative, but I highly recommend both of them.

As that New Yorker article hints at, the popularity of this style of music has also had a backlash, with people angry at the musical movement for its perceived lack of musicality or creativity, for turning the noble art of music into insipid background noise fit only to be ‘used’ like a tool, and for just being plain boring. But it’s impossible to deny its success. For me, all of these reactions are really fascinating, from the music’s quiet but incredible popularity to the venom with which its detractors attack it. Personally, I actually really enjoy listening to the music, even in an engaged, ‘active’ capacity – I just think it’s chill.

As we reach the end of 2019 and get ready to roll on to a new decade, everywhere is full of retrospectives of the past ten years, everyone looking at the best, the most influential, the most definitive. I reckon that, regardless of anyone’s individual opinions on its merits or quality, the phenomenon of the lofi hip-hop YouTube stream as exemplified by lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to is one of the most iconic musical forces of the 2010s. It’s just not something that could have existed at any other time, and certainly not with the same amount of success.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to spend the last few days of the year writing intermittently in a notebook, wistfully looking out of the window with my plump ginger cat, feeling drowsy and listening to some slightly wonky but incredibly comfortable chill af beats.

312: La Grande Folie, by San Salvador

San Salvador (France)
La Grande Folie (2015)
4 tracks, 26 minutes
Bandcamp
This is the only real release that San Salvador have made, and it’s an EP. I’ll also recommend you take a listen to Choeur Populaire – Massif Central, a four-track live recording from 2016 EP – it’s available to listen on Soundcloud, and the two sets only double-up with one song, so if you put them back-to-back you’re even getting near album length, huzzah!

So, about the band themselves. Well, sometimes – and I know it’s very hard to believe, but it’s true – sometimes, I’m wrong. Shocking, right? But I am. The first time I heard San Salvador was about a year ago at WOMEX in Gran Canaria. Their write-up in the programme sounded vaguely interesting – voice and drum music from the Occitan region of France – but when I saw them, it left me completely cold. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that the sound system was incredibly loud, to a painful degree, or maybe I just wasn’t feeling it. I left before long.

Thing is, afterwards, almost everyone I talked to was raving about them, to the degree that they sounded like one of the successes of the event. I was baffled, but okay. They must have heard something I didn’t. Then the next summer rolled around, and San Salvador were scheduled to play at WOMAD, and on one of the biggest stages, the Siam Stage, too. I thought they would surely not be able to command a stage that large, but I decided to check them out nonetheless, remembering the hype that followed their show last time.

It was jaw-dropping. I finally heard what everyone else did and I’m so glad. They are just six voices – three men and three women – who between them play two floor tom drums, a tambourine, a small pair of cymbals and lots of handclapping, but it’s completely gripping. These young musicians have taken a polyphonic tradition that is often dour and usually performed with austere expressions and turned it into something electrifying by the sheer weight of their performance. The music itself is still largely traditional, but there is such an energy to San Salvador that brings it fully to life, whether their voices are skipping and jumping in and around each other, creating interlocking melodies, singing in complex harmony or thrashing out thundering polyrhythms with palm, drumstick and cymbal. Performed live, their pieces are very long – I think they only managed to fit in five or six over their hour-and-a-quarter set – and it allows them to develop themes and motifs slowly, create a slowly evolving shape and to refer back to earlier material throughout. It is an amazing live show, and it left the WOMAD audience (and myself) completely entranced. One of the top highlights of this year’s festival.

I was wrong. The crowd had it right at WOMEX: San Salvador change the game for Occitan music. The recordings that they do have, such as this EP, give a glimpse of what they can do, but don’t quite capture the raw energy of their live show, so let’s all hope that there’s an album on the way soon that will explode out of the speakers just as the band do on stage. The most important thing is to give artists second chances – you may never know what you’re missing otherwise.

202: Vignettes EP, by Lee Westwood

Lee Westwood (United Kingdom)
Vignettes EP (2017)
6 tracks, 20 minutes
Bandcamp

I knew Lee Westwood’s music from his work with Dizraeli. As part of Dizraeli and the Small Gods, his expert acoustic guitar playing straddled the line between folk-baroque and jazz; knowing this, when the Small Gods had disbanded and Westwood released some of his own material, I expected to be at least somewhat like that, or perhaps more on the jazzier side of things. I was wrong. Vignettes is one piece of music split up into six short movements. It’s an experimental classical work for a duo of flute (played here by Philippe Barnes) and oboe (Suzie Shrubb).

Because they’re both melody instruments (that is, they can only play one note at a time instead of chords), there is no space for either instrument to play a secondary role to the other. The whole piece revolves around the relationship between the two instruments, and across the 20 minutes, they both develop as characters, with distinct personalities. It’s a little as if this piece is a dance, but instead of bodies, the physical movements, shapes and gestures are reflected in the travels of the two woodwinds. And it does feel like travels, or journeys or adventures. Each instrument has their own melody line that are sometimes very close to each other, in harmony or even in unison, but sometimes they can be far apart from each other, playing seemingly unrelated tunes before coming back together again. Sometimes they are close, but separate, their timings slightly out of sync with each other, or their usually complementary lines clashing in dissonance occasionally. It’s bizarrely easy to anthropomorphise these two intersecting melody lines, and I find that so impressive.

The music itself shows quite a lot of influences in its short duration. While its performance is in the Western classical idiom, there are plenty of harmonies and small melodic quirks that are actually quite jazzy. There are portions that are quite Debussy-esque, but also parts which must surely have been informed by styles such as gagaku, the elegant and dramatic Japanese court music.

It is really amazing how effective – and affective – just a relatively short duologue between a flute and an oboe can be. From tensely cinematic to lightly playful, there is so much to hear here. Come on this adventure and experience it yourself.

157: Sacred Riverside Gathering @ Monasterio de Santa Cristina, Galicia, by Davide Salvado, Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė, David Rothenberg and Miguel Hiroshi

Davide Salvado, Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė, David Rothenberg and Miguel Hiroshi (Spain/Lithuania/USA/Japan)
Sacred Riverside Gathering @ Monasterio de Santa Cristina, Galicia (2014)
9 tracks, 53 minutes

This is another Album that is not really an album at all. It was a concert that was live streamed and – wondrous! – has been archived in full on YouTube. You can watch and listen to the entire performance there, together with some interviews and speeches, or, if you prefer, I have also turned all the musical sections into an mp3 album that you can listen to on the go. Get in touch and I’ll send you those files.

This album/video/stream or whatever you want to call it is the record of a unique musical meeting. Organised by the eco music platform Wapapura to coincide with that year’s WOMEX event, the concert was held in the beautiful 12th century Monastery of Santa Cristina along the banks of the River Sil in Galicia, Spain. In the monastery’s cave-like church, four musicians and a very small audience gathered for a one-off collaboration.

Two of the musicians come from traditional backgrounds – there’s Davide Salvado, a Galician folk singer, and Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė, a Lithuanian singer and kanklės (zither) player – and two come from the world of experimental music – David Rothenberg is a jazz clarinettist who is most well-known for his work with naturally-occurring music, most recently performing with nightingales in Berlin, and Miguel Hiroshi is a Japanese-Spanish percussionist who works with rhythms from all over the globe.

Together, the musicians take turns performing pieces from each other’s repertoire and expanding their own traditions to accommodate the particularities of their collaborators’. They take part in collective improvisation in a calm and relaxed manner; although one musician may lead a particular section, none takes a precedent over the others. In the hushed church, every smallest sound is crystal clear and reverberates around the space for a long time, meaning that the barely amplified music often plays with dynamics of quietness as opposed to the dynamics of loudness that we usually expect. In the ancient, holy surrounds, it all gives the concert a meditative, even mystical feeling, and one that is obviously shared by the audience, who click their fingers rather than clap at the end of pieces so as not to break that spell. It’s the perfect music for the perfect location.

I can only imagine what it must have felt like to experience this concert in the flesh. Although I was nearby at the time, in Santiago de Compostela, I unfortunately couldn’t go – I was working instead. It’s really great that Wapapura not only live streamed the whole event (using only solar power, no less) but continue to host it online for us all to enjoy this magnificent one-time collaborative event.

156: Farka et Haïra, by Ali Farka Touré & Khaira Arby

Ali Farka Touré & Khaira Arby (Mali)
Farka et Haïra (1986)
8 tracks, 63 minutes

I compiled an eight-track version of this tape (in mp3 form obviously) from the downloads available at both Voice of America and the worldservice blog. Check out those blogs and all they have to say about the tape, and if you want to download the whole tape directly, let me know and I’ll send it over.

Really, those blogs tell you all you need to know about the background of the tape, and any information about it that I could tell you would just be rewording their own research, so please do check them out – I’ll just give my own thoughts of the tape here.

When this tape was recorded at a live concert in 1986, Ali Farka Touré and Khaira Arby were both famous across Mali, but this was before either of them attained the international fame they later achieved. These recordings give you an idea of what both musicians sounded like without having their sound tempered towards an international audience, either in their way of playing or the sound quality that comes with it. Because that’s a big part of this record’s charm: it’s obviously been copied and recopied so many times across many decades of cassettes that everything sounds super crunchy. It really suits Ali’s guitar playing, and Khaira’s voice cuts all the way through the noise, so that the poor quality of the recording doesn’t affect the appreciation of the music it contains in any way.

It’s also interesting to hear their repertoire before they both brought the influence from the blues to the fore. With Ali’s heritage as Songhoi and Khaira’s as mixed Hassani-Tamashek, their music together bares elements from all of these cultures from the north of Mali, as well as the music of the Bamana from the south of the country. On top of all that, it just sounds like a totally relaxed gig, with the musicians taking everything at their own pace while making some absolutely stellar performances.

Really, I just included this as a little-known early recording of two great musicians who went on to have worldwide success, and I reckon more people should hear it. So if you’re a fan of Ali or Khaira, or any Malian or Saharan music in general, get those blogs linked at the top read, and definitely get these amazing sounds in your ears.

123: Feel Like Going Home, by Martin Scorsese, dir.

Martin Scorsese, dir. (USA)
Feel Like Going Home (2003)
110 minutes
I’m having trouble finding anywhere to watch this online in the UK – legally or otherwise – but if you know anywhere, please let us know. Americans can probably watch it on the PBS Vimeo page, and non-Americans can watch the trailer there instead. However, it is really cheap to buy on DVD second-hand on Amazon.

Okay, controversial: this isn’t an album. It’s a film. But it’s a film about music, with tons of great music in it that you’re not gonna be able to hear elsewhere, so I’ll allow it. Because it’s my blog and I get to allow things like that.

Feel Like Going Home is the first of seven films collectively known as Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues, where different directors – from Wim Wenders to Clint Eastwood – were drafted in to look at different aspects of the blues, and they all have their different methods, with historical documentary, contemporary interviews, reconstructions and even a fiction screenplay. For the first of the series, though, Scorsese took the reins himself, for a dive into delta blues and its roots.

The film follows bluesman Corey Harris as he travels around the Mississippi delta getting to grips with the story of the blues, from his own contemporary take, to the delta guitar styles and even further back to fife and drum music and field hollers. And then even even further back, with a trip to Mali, where he meets Salif Keita, Habib Koité and Ali Farka Touré. It’s interesting and entertaining as it should be, but the reason I’m including this film on an album blog is really because of the music. There’s a bunch of cool archive footage of blues legends such as Son House, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, but the real draw is the performances recorded especially for the film, and Harris is often involved too. We see and hear him jamming with old bluesmen Sam Carr and Willie King in Mississippi, with Otha Turner and his fife and drum band, and, most thrillingly, with Ali Farka Touré in Niafunké in Mali. You can watch a little bit of that section here, where they play a beautiful mash-up of the classic ‘Catfish Blues’ and Touré’s song ‘Mahini Me’:

The idea of West African music – especially Malian music – being the starting point for the evolution of the blues is a really attractive one, although a literal ‘Malian music → blues’ timeline, such as is presented in Feel Like Going Home is a little too over-simplistic. Nevertheless, collaborations between the two never cease to be intoxicating for me, as long as they’re done well, and this jam between Harris and Touré most definitely is. I wish I could have been there under those trees with them! Makes you wonder what other stuff they played together that never made it into the film.

There are absolutely tons of music documentaries out there, covering every sort of music you can imagine, but Feel Like Going Home is one of the best I’ve ever seen. The story it tells is fascinating and touching, and the arguments are compellingly made (even if I don’t wholly agree with them), but the music is something else. If there ever was a film that you can listen to as you would an album, it would be this one.

095: Magic & Mayhem, by Afro Celt Sound System

Afro Celt Sound System (United Kingdom)
Magic & Mayhem (1999)
12 tracks, 41 minutes
YouTube playlist

You’ve heard hidden tracks before, pieces of music that are ‘hidden’ in an album in some way, usually just by being left unlisted on the packaging, sometimes after a long silence at the end, and sometimes with some tech wizardry, like being placed before the music starts. Well, this one is the next level: a whole hidden album.

Magic & Mayhem is a real-time strategy video game from 1999, with a sort of high-fantasy theme. Video games were only just being able to include full soundtracks of pre-recorded music (as opposed to programmed music that is ‘played’ by the game itself with MIDI or similar sound chips), and the makers of Magic & Mayhem leapt at the chance to utilise this ability to its fullest, and they hired pioneering world dubtronica outfit the Afro Celt Sound System to create their score. As you played through the game, it was to the grooves of the Afro Celts. So far, so relatively normal. But it turned out that if you stuck the CD-ROM of the game into your CD player instead of your computer, it played the soundtrack there as well, all twelve tracks just as it would a normal album. I’ve never heard of that technique before, but it’s a great idea.

And, because it’s the Afro Celt Sound System, the music is great too. Fitting the game, the tracks are divided up into three realms with four tracks each: there’s music for Celtic, Greek and medieval worlds. Each has its own feeling, of course. The Celtic tracks are classic ACSS with uilleann pipes and whistles; the Greek ones feature harps and guitars; and the medieval tracks, perhaps a bit oddly, are a bit more new-agey, focussing on electronic instruments but using ancient-sounding scales. From those bases, everything is given rich layers of luscious synthscapes, appropriately Afro-Celtic drum loops and an overall dubtronic production treatment. This soundtrack is maybe not as adventurous in terms of the amount of international influences and guest musicians as on their standard albums, but the quality is great nevertheless and it shows a different and little-known side to the group that went on to be so successful.

Magic & Mayhem wasn’t the only time ACSS combined their music and video games with hidden content. Their second album proper, Volume 2: Release, also from 1999, did the opposite of Magic & Mayhem: it was a standard audio album, but when you opened it on a computer, you could install a small game called Noodle, in which you could remix the track ‘Whirl-y-Reel’ from the group’s first album. The way it worked was really interesting, each instrument was represented by a little moving graphic, and each played a set of loops that you could mix and match, bring to the fore and let fade away, and even save your favourite configurations. The amount of hours I sunk into Noodle as a kid is probably too embarrassing (and too long ago) to tally. And again, this was hidden: you wouldn’t know about it until you tried it in your computer and opened that unknown and suspicious .exe.

So hurrah for hidden content and hurrah for the pioneering mix of world music and video games – it still doesn’t happen enough. More please, but until then, let’s enjoy this little-known gem of an album, hidden perhaps too well.

078: Dewrane Dewrane, by Burhan Toprak

Burhan Toprak (Kurdistan/Turkey)
Dewrane Dewrane (2014)
5 tracks, 62 minutes

This is a difficult one to talk about, because I’m not sure really where my version of this came from. Well, I do, it was a CD-r in a big box of other CD-rs, but I mean, I don’t think this is a real album, probably more likely to be a sampler. I can’t even find all of the tracks online anywhere. So what I’ll do is send you to a couple of his other albums on Spotify: Dewrane Dewrane (2013) and Daweta Gel, Vol. 1 (2016), and if you want to take a listen to my version, I can send it to you, just let me know.

As you can tell by the vagueness of that introduction, I really don’t know much about Burhan Toprak, or this music in general. As far as I can tell, Burhan and his group Roj Müzik play Kurdish wedding music in Turkey. The repertoire is all based on traditional songs and melodies, but they’ve made it super poppy. That means lots of cheesy synth chords and drum machines. But what I find really enticing about this music is Toprak's electric bağlama. The instrument already has such a lovely sound in its acoustic form, with its double courses of strings, open tuning and microtonal frets; the electric version, played with loads of distortion, adds an extra dimension again.

The recorded work is one thing, but I would love to attend a wedding with this guy. Check out this footage from an event in 2016:

Without all the way-too-cheesy add-ons of the recorded stuff, the ensemble of vocals, electric bağlama and drums is much more exciting, and allows Toprak to show off his skills more too. I’m quite amazed at how civilised the dancing stays to be honest – I reckon I’d be whipped into a frenzy in the right surroundings.

I know that in the past few years, Roj Müzik have been trying to break out onto the international scene, performing in concert settings for world music audiences as well as at Kurdish and Turkish weddings, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be going too well for them. In fact, the only update I can find in English on the web was from 2017, when the group were apparently invited to perform at SXSW but then denied the necessary visas. I really hope that Roj Müzik and Burhan Toprak do end up making some in-roads within the international scene soon. I’d love to see them live – and learn more about them and their music!

052: Ecstatic Music from Sri Lanka, by Baliphonics

Baliphonics (Sri Lanka/New Zealand)
Ecstatic Music from Sri Lanka (2018)
8 tracks, 26 minutes
Listen on the Baliphonics website

This is actually a group that have been on my radar for quite a few years. They caught my eye simply because it’s not every day you hear Sri Lankan music (if you’re me, anyway), and they kept that attention through their mix of traditional drumming and jazz, as well as what appears to be (although I’m definitely no expert!) a modern take on traditional dances…including dancing with fire, which is always exciting. The concept of Baliphonics has been around for about ten years, inspired by Sumudi Suraweera’s study into the music of the bali ritual while working towards his doctorate in ethnomusicology in New Zealand. That ritual aims to heal through warding off the evil intentions of planetary gods, so it’s not a music to take lightly. Baliphonics hold onto that seriousness despite their innovation.

With Sumudi on drum kit, the traditional styles are brought to the table by Prasanna Rupathilaka on yak bera drum and Susantha Rupathilaka dancing, and both sing. When I first heard the band, the jazz used to come from a solo double bass, but now it’s the task of Reuben Derrick on clarinets big and small to provide a never-too-intrusive avant-garde sound bed for the drums and voice. I think the musical input of Sumudi himself is what makes this such a successful fusion of styles. He’s a trained jazz drummer, but his academic explorations into the traditional Sri Lankan styles have allowed him to adapt his kit playing to nicely complement both sides of his band’s sound.

Although Baliphonics have played quite a bit throughout New Zealand, Sri Lanka and everywhere in between (namely, South-East Asia) over the past ten years, they only just made it over to Europe with a couple of gigs in Poland in December. They don’t even have an official album out yet, but they have put up a bunch of tracks recorded live in 2018 on their website, which is enough to class as a Good Album in my eyes. I really hope they come a little closer to the UK soon, so that I can see them live and keep writing about them! Keep a look out for these lot, they deserve to go places.

033: Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Original Sound Version, by Alexander Brandon

Alexander Brandon (USA)
Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Original Sound Version (1998)
17 tracks, 67 minutes
Listen and download at KHInsider

What is the complete opposite of yesterday’s all-acoustic album of solemn, religious chants and prayers? A late-90s video game starring a green, gun-toting, anthropomorphic hare who's too legit to quit, I suppose. Yup, that’s Jazz Jackrabbit 2. It was a fairly typical run-and-gun platformer that could never quite complete with its rival series of Sonic the Hedgehog and was eventually forgotten by most. It was quite good and I had fun with it when I was little, but that soundtrack still slaps well after Jazz hung up his bandana.

There’s a superb groove through everything on the soundtrack, but despite its name, this ain’t jazz. It’s all electronic; trance, techno and other electronica play a big role in the sound, and there’s a few little pastiches in there, but for the most part this is funk. This isn’t some crude replica, either – this funk is hard. Yes, the instrument sounds aren’t the best – it’s only a couple of steps above General MIDI – which lends it a particularly ‘gamey’ feel, but the synth sounds are quite good and the music itself is of a quality that can utterly transcend those timbres. You’ll forget that the instruments are shitty reproductions or whatever, because they work so well in context.

Soundtracks can be weird sometimes, because their quality isn’t necessarily tied to the quality or popularity of the thing they’re soundtracking in the first place. That’s how you can get some proper righteous instrumental funk locked up within a mildly unsuccessful PC game. It’s a shame, really – the music fits the game well, but it really does stand well on its own, and hasn’t dated nearly as badly as the game. This stuff deserves to be heard on its own merits.

018: Dead Bodies in the Lake, by Ho99o9

Ho99o9 (USA)
Dead Bodies in the Lake (2015)
10 tracks, 26 minutes
Soundcloud · Spotify · iTunes

This is terrifying. I admit my taste in music isn’t exactly hardcore, and so I’m sure this stuff is tame for some of you lot out there, and you’ll probably be rolling your eyes throughout reading this (leave me alone, I’m a delicate flower). But I remember the first time I listened to Ho99o9 (pronounced Horror) was on my way to a house party – I was on edge all evening.

And that’s great! I always find it interesting when music – or any art – invokes such a visceral reaction. It’s why I get so frustrated at music that is ‘nice.’ I often use the word ‘nice’ in a negative way when talking about music – not to mean that it is gently enjoyable (there’s lots of music that is nice in a nice way, of course), but to mean that there is a complete lack of anything to inspire emotion. It’s musical ‘meh.’ Sometimes a visceral reaction can tip over into revulsion and any chance for enjoyment disappears, but at least you feel something. But to be ‘nice’ – that’s a sin.

Dead Bodies in the Lake is not nice. It’s sludgy metal with electronics, it’s dark hip-hop with hardcore punk. It’s like a psychological horror film in audio form. It’s disturbing and disorientating, and it’ll get your hackles right up. The version I know is the mixtape – no gaps between tracks means there’s no let up and no way out. It forces you through the experience and it’s thoroughly uncomfortable. How amazing is it that music and art can make us feel like that? To feel such strongly negative emotions and come out the other side having had a whale of a time. Ho99o9 do that as well as any band I’ve discovered. I think this 26-minute long mixtape is enough for me for now though.