BC115 - Five Mixes: Not Dance Music, 2025 Q1
Fifty shades of localized “indie,” broadly defined
Janie Nicoll of The Vultures; via NTS Radio
Lots of dance music coming soon, promise! But I have been gathering up some stray listens of stuff that isn’t, mostly from NTS Radio, and wondered how they might play off each other. Pretty nicely, I say. I don’t guarantee they’ll become permanent favorites. But you’ll learn some things for sure. More is more.
You can hear four of the sets below (with a link to the fifth) on this SoundCloud playlist.
uncredited DJ, An Incomplete Snapshot of Skramz in Australia, 2001-2009 (NTS Radio, January 1)
Do I enjoy this hour of screamo—I was completely unfamiliar with the term “skramz,” a synonym, until I looked it up—more than I do most (almost any) screamo because this hour is so relatively lo-fi? Could be, could be. The era I identify as my most prolonged contact with this music was 1998-99, when I was a regular at the Foxfire Coffee Lounge (cf. WA005), so right before bands like these were playing outside of, well, all-ages coffeehouses. And that one was notoriously noisy. But it was also the sense of a scene taking shape, of kids inspired to find themselves, that made it resonate to the limited degree I saw those kinds of shows in particular. In any event, there’s a lot of variation here—throat-shredding, insane drumming, mathy interludes, the occasional jazz chord. Some of it is stuff I hated at the time; I may not love it, but I’ve learned to hear and accept it. My interest is historical and retrospective and voyeuristic—which is to say, musical.
Jiselle Layson, Roots of Pinoy Jazz (NTS Radio, January 2)
You’re not always thinking of geography when you listen to a piece of music, or a series of them selected by a DJ, but it’s a helpful organizing principle. Here, an hour of jazz by Filipino artists dating mid-sixties to mid-eighties but concentrated hard on the seventies (all but three from that decade, with 1977 represented thrice) sketches out an alternate history of the music in that period. It’s not too far off the one we have a general idea of—when selector Layson refers in her show notes to “rare grooves,” she means sample-able and on the funky side. When it comes to that style and that decade, variation is all, and unless your concentration is as acute as hers, you haven’t heard this one yet—and if that kind of thing gets you going, you should.
Nstop, Cycles Per Second (Hollow Earth Radio, January 22)
My old friend Jen does this show every single week from Seattle’s Hollow Earth, has done for many years now, and while global indie-pop and other non-macho indie rock is not always my bailiwick, sometimes it really is. That means whenever I tune in, I wind up liking it, but this go-round (sorry, my listening is peripatetic and I spend more time on SoundCloud than Mixcloud) especially cut through, and I thought so long before Dean Wareham, long a favorite, appeared in the final quarter. Incidentally, Canyon Cats, who end things, are also from Indonesia.
Samuel Knee, A Scene in Between: Scottish Indie Underground (1979-88) (NTS Radio, February 28)
My thanks again to Jen/Nstop, who found the ID for the photo at this page’s top (and this mix’s home) for me. This one, among other settings, made the last 45 minutes of working in the dish room go by speedily; it jumps, as Knee puts it up top, from “melodious anarcho-punk [and] DIY paisley bedroom power pop to quintessential feedback-drenched eighties indie jangle racket.” All that guitar skronk fit right in alongside the pans slotting into one another. A scrappy bunch of selections, as you’d readily expect; when it ends, as it must, on “Molly’s Lips,” it is only right and natural. Knowing in advance that it will doesn’t make it any less perfect.
COSMOS & Lamunai Records, Indonesian Underground (Refuge Worldwide, March 10)
Our survey ends where it does for reasons of chronology, but it also fits as a climax for this particular grouping. Another intro-as-explanation from selector COSMOS and his echo chamber, whose brief intro discusses his label—Lamunai Records, obv.—which reissues vintage Indonesian recordings as well as newer titles. This selection’s luxe, lush air triangulates the global-popster colored-vinyl feel of the other shows here. It has jazz, it has pop, it has rock, and many of the guitars have a surfy tinge to them that offers a welcome layer of froth, like a cappuccino.