A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn.
Hot Snakes, “Suicide Invoice” The Greatest Living Posthardcore Band played this cold knife of an earworm at Music Frozen Dancing. The next day, I learned that Jeff VanderMeer (of Annihilation fame) had used its lyrics as an epigram for his new novel, Dead Astronauts: “And when I dream / I keep my promises to you / I really do.” Both the book and the song are improved by the association.
Co-dependent A few times per month, Co-dependent releases an album with a color-gradient circle for a cover, titled with CODE plus a three-digit number. Each contains contemporary electronic and computer music, covering a wide spectrum: rhythmic dance-floor pulses, deep drones, knots of generative noise. It’s the musical equivalent of a gumball-machine egg: you never know what you’re going to get, and if you don’t like it, there’s another surprise coming. Current favorites include RM Francis’s squiggling pulsar synthesis on CODE889 and 333’s enigmatic sine-wave transmissions on CODE333.
Jen Kutler, Disembodied The most intriguing release of 2019 was Jen Kutler’s Disembodied, an album generated by vibrations and movements captured with an electronic ring worn on the finger by a series of feminine-spectrum people bringing themselves to orgasm. In what Kutler calls a “de-sexualization experiment,” data transmitted from the ring is transformed into MIDI files that activate pure tones, field recordings, and granular synthesis; these voices are then edited into lush drones, complex harmonies, and engrossing textures.
