Stop. Listen.

Tirakat is a very funky album. From the album description:

Tirakat brings together Jakarta-based trio Ali and Lebanese composer and multi-instrumentalist Charif Megarbane in a collaboration shaped by long-standing cultural exchange between Indonesia and the Arab world. Ali’s blend of 1970s Indonesian psychedelic funk, Melayu traditions, disco grooves and Arab melodic forms meets Charif’s long-running exploration of cross-regional sound, rooted in a shared musical vocabulary rather than genre.

Bar the hardcore rock and hip-hop, this is how Beastie Boys could have sounded if they'd grown up in Jakarta and Lebanon instead of the USA.

This is inventive, extremely groovy, and romantic. Strings mingling with fuzzed guitars and beats that would make any hip-hop producer salivate? Just check out the track 'Pejokan Funk'. You want a hazy, arpeggio-riddled harpsichord dream track set to the oboe and sitar? Try 'SILK END'.

Don't sleep on this. Buy or stream it via this page.

#music #funk #groovy #soul #HabibiFunk

I've looked for a band to make me stop wishing Alvvays would release a new album like Blue Rev. That won't happen but having said that, Brink, the new album by Girl Scout, is very good.

There are many guitar-based melodies and the singer is nearly as good as the lead singer in Alvvays. Differ'nt strokes, y'all.

I'm such a sucker for good guitar-based music.

#music

Just as Miley Cyrus could potentially be seen as 'bad' for covering a Cocteau Twins song, that is, to me, not even interesting to consider.

First, it's obvious that Miley loves the track. Second, I love her talk before and during the song; reverence is overrated. Third, the result is a gateway into the universe that is Cocteau Twins, and that, friends, is never bad.

This morning I read a well-conceived and -written book excerpt about the villain as concept. The book is Dream Facades: The Cruel Architecture of Reality TV by Jack Balderrama Morley. The book excerpt is found in this LitHub post.

The excerpt starts by focusing on Heidi Montag, The Villain of fantastic TV series The Hills.

A villain is just Heidi Montag wanting to make money for being famous. She just wants to follow her own path. Her “flaws” are on the outside, and she’ll enumerate the ways in which she’s tried to fix them, not squirrel them away so they can do damage in the dark. Villains may not be perfect, but at least you know who they are.

Reality TV, despite all the moral hand-wringing and critical disdain surrounding it, has never really been so different from other kinds of American media. It fits neatly into the broader cultural landscape of torn social ties, disconnection and alienation, and the hunger for a life that feels more real and the belief that video somehow offers a cure.

The genre may actually be most similar to the televisual medium that sits on the opposite end of the respectability spectrum, vaunted as so critical to maintaining the American republic: the news.

Another excerpt:

Heidi is a storyteller. She conceives her lines and delivers them in the moment, reacting to the scripts of the people around her, such as the newscaster interviewing her.

Many have followed in Heidi’s steps—Christine Quinn, Donald Trump, the Kardashians—and they’ve been so successful because America had been heading in Heidi’s direction since its founding. She is the self- made soul, speaking the story of herself into existence, redefining the wilderness as she sees it, finding love and a home in the process.

This is the strange trajectory that hybrid homes get pushed along by the digital forces running through them. Video’s paranoia about the story of reality now runs through the places we live.

The Real World, Selling Sunset, the Kardashians shows, and The Bachelor show how homes are freighted with feelings, but they don’t explain why homes are just so foundational to the American psyche. Our homes, our selves. It might be a universal association, but Americans and their twisted economic system take it a step further. When it comes to your home, you have to own it, as any Real Housewife will tell you. It’s on their show that we start to see how deep the paranoia about reality runs.

The book seems to be extraordinarily well written. I will buy it.

#books #reality #TV #music

I do not like easy jazz. I don't know what is happening. Maybe I'm getting softer in my older fucking age or it's just that I'm appreciating a recording where you can hear playing not in the modern-classical jazz sense—i.e. fucking boring twiddling à la dreadfully-virtuosic-performer style—but instead how the piano hammers move inside a piano.

The EP Galileo by Luke Howard is a lovely EP where old-schooly piano playing meets a neo-classical sensibility.

I feel weirded out by myself: I actually like the 1940s-ish type of playing, how it twines with steady and quieter background chord thrums, while the Howard's right hand louder plays melodies and curlicues.

Fuck me, this is nice. I can't remember a single song name nor a single melody but I just like this shit. To me, this is a pleasant take on romantic piano playing in jazz. This is everything that the Downton Abbey scriptwriter should have wanted to do and failed to do. This is made with feeling and does not at all feel like it's written by AI, thank Bog. Get in.

#piano #music #jazz

The Dwaele brothers, a.k.a. Soukwax, a.k.a. 2 Many DJs, have now released a 50-minute video from their February 2026 gig in Studio One in Abbey Road—yes, the room where Shirley Bassey recorded 'Goldfinger' in the world-famous recording studio—that shows why they're great DJs.

I really like the mix between feeling you're caught in a liminal space between being in the same room as the DJs and being in the surrounding areas, watching buspeople, empty room, and corridors, for example, here:

#music #soulwax #dj #dance

Stream the album via this page.

My Bloody Valentine's song 'only tomorrow' is great example of what the band could and can create.

Kevin Shields has a billion guitar pedals and ways to make effects; still, this song is basically something that a young person with a few computer-based effects could make. Shield's great knack at creating music is what separates him from the chaff.

It takes a fucking aeon of trial-and-error to come up with this fucking sound, let me tell you, in case it's not already obvious to you. To mix a simple guitar that's not particularly fuzzed with another guitar that sounds like a Big Muff pedal has been blasted through overdrive... And pairing those two elements with what seems to me to be pink and white noise, and then adding Bilinda Butcher's processed vocals...

The arrangement and full-on playing could easily have become ham-fisted but here we are: this is fucking grace.

From the first verses to the bridge at 01:20, to then twelve bars of overlays: softly toned-down guitar feedback and then back to the verse?

mbv live in 2025.

Fuck me. This is some really thought-through music that still sounds like it's made by renegades and young punks. This is some proof that the next MBV album will fucking rock the world, if it ever comes. Only Kevin Shields would know, I guess.

03:29: the start of a solo-guitar tremolo melody starts. I can't believe how more guitars are added just a bit after the four-minute mark, and the song grows even more. Is that a Leslie speaker? I don't know. I've heard this song and it's taken me to other galaxies so many times that I can now afford to chill out and just go somewhere else in my mind with this. Repetition, minimalism, and a simple wall of guitar-based music – the drums can't be ignored, because unlike most of the guitars, they and the simple one guitar that follows the verse are the only instruments that seem to contain a bit of treble.

It's all mixed very extraordinarily. If you know anything about Kevin Shields's ways around music, you know he cares about everything in how music is presented.

At the end of the day, the song is a fucking tune. Regardless of how well-produced, engineered, mixed, and presented a track is, if it ain't a tune, people won't like it. This is a track that one could play on one acoustic guitar and people would get off on it.

#MyBloodyValentine #music #MusicTips #shoegaze #feedback #composition #sound #tone #guitar

A short while back, MTV—a.k.a. MTV Music—stopped broadcasting. Their website went fairly dead as well. The music video phenomenon didn't start with MTV but without MTV, it would have gone nowhere.

Now, a developer has taken it upon themselves to try and save the feeling that MTV was. Enter MTV Rewind.

What's saved:

• 120 Minutes (6,063 videos): The holy grail of alternative rock and shoegaze.
• Headbangers Ball (1,604 videos): A shrine to thrash and heavy metal.
• Yo! MTV Raps (348 videos): The golden age of hip-hop, preserved.
• MTV Unplugged (343 videos): Stripped-back intimacy from before auto-tune ruled the charts.
• Club MTV (232 videos): For the techno and house heads.

There are also decade-specific buckets—ranging from the experimental MTV 70s (268 videos) to the massive MTV 2020s (8,050 videos)—proving that the music video format isn’t dead, it just lost its home.

Here's an embedded example of MTV Rewind:

For more information about the project, see this Midnight Rebels post.

#music #video

Robyn's 'Sexistential' vs Factory Floor's 'Fall Back'

'Sexistential' feels a bit dated as Robyn's done this stuff before; it's not bad, it's just that I feel spoiled with how more of an pop innovator Robyn used to be. This isn't bad stuff! It's just that other artists, for example Fever Ray, make sexual music that's more exciting and uproariously fun than this. 'Sexistential' feels like Chicago house, the stuff that Robyn tapped with Honey.

I can't help but think of music like Factory Floor's song 'Fall Back' as I hear this new single. Even though their sound owes a lot to that of New Order, they managed to release something with a distorted and contorted vocal, a very simple bass-line, and drums that sounded as though they've been programmed by myself (not an accolade in any way), and yet everything coalesced and sounded good; better than that, it was really fucking good.

I hope Robyn's coming album contains a lot more interesting and mainly experimental stuff. She's a pop master, I get that, but we need more. MORE!

#music

Baxter Dury – 'Allbarone'

There's a chain of bars named All bar one. Dury took that, his drawly speak-song, and made an electronic album with Paul Epworth, the guy who's produced Adele, Florence & The Machine, and Rihanna.

It's catchy. Imagine Orbital on downers. Footy hooligans come their fifties. Songs about schadenfreude, no love, being wrecked, laughing at c*nts.

The Velvet Panther.

#music

Today three live music albums are released.

Depeche Mode – 'Memento Mori: Mexico City'

Stream the album via this page.

I love the song on 'Walking in My Shoes'. However, I must say this: I'm a little worried about Dave's song on 'No Good'.

I saw DM live during the Memento Mori tour and they've been better and more inventive live in the past; just consider the official live version of 'In Your Room' that was recorded during the Songs of Faith and Devotion tour. Wow.

This album is released on the same day as Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' Wild God (Live God). Listen to that album to hear what is possible, by the hands and voices of people who are around as old as DM, who apply older tools, but reach more high-soaring goals.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – 'Wild God (Live God)'

Stream the album via this page.

This is, at best, a soaring, gospel-sounding experience. Just listen to 'Frogs', the first track on the album. The artist as preacher comes out; Cave quips lines like a reverend. This is closer to gospel than nearly what James Brown, Sam Cooke, and Little Richard did live at times*.

Hear the guitar and the chorus of 'Tupelo'. Yeah, yeah, yeah!

Where Depeche Mode went electronic, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds go back to gospel music. To choral music. To human breadth in mass voices. To simple chords on the piano, to Cave chanting 'you're beautiful' again and again and again to a tambourine and the chorus singing 'touched by the Spirit/touched by the Flame'.

Where Cave has gone from noise and punk and art in The Birthday Party to gaming pop music during the 1990s to two of his sons dying and his making intimate and extremely soulful electronic music, to creating gospel, this is a fucking live album.

Listen to the song 'Conversion' as hands-up proof that this album should be heard.

*This is said in total awe and adoration of Little Richard live in Hollywood, James Brown live at the Apollo, and Sam Cooke live in Harlem. These are three of my favourite live albums.

Die Nerven – 'LIVE IM ELFENBEINTURM'

Stream the album via this page.

I've no idea how this came to be, but Die Nerven have become one of my favourite modern ice-cold punk-ish artists. I don't know German, but I love Einstürzende Neubauten enough to have learned a bit, and it's not like one can't translate lyrics online.

Die Nerven live is a one-trick pony. Their sound is based largely on the guitar sound: it's either very reverby and non-distorted or reverby and distorted; the singer's voice complements the guitar in exactly the same sound. Drums and bass sound circumstancial.

That's how they sound live, but on record it's a different story. They're tight as hell on record!

Having said that, there's something about Die Nerven's live sound that really captures me in small doses. Two or three songs at a time, brilliant! I can't listen to this album in one single go without pauses, and that's saying something having just listened to two entire live albums before this one: I should be able to make it, but I can't.

This band is fairly close to being a German version of Swedish band Kent some points, but that's doing Kent a disservice as they're a lot more varied in styles.

#music