Frank's 5 Under 50k (06/27)
#4--Organs, Sleep, Digi-Sex, Devastation, and "KUNTHOUSE"
Lawrence English is my church-organ daddy forever. During the winter months of this year, I often found myself dissociating at the thought of 4 pm sunsets; the type of situation where all you want to do is go to sleep, hoping that the melatonin you took prematurely will hold you down the extra couple of hours (spoiler: it won’t.) “Observation of Breath” was the very stimulus that kept me awake, alert, frankly alive during these shitty lulls. Performed entirely on a 132-year-old church organ, the keys rumble through headphones as loud, vibrant, yet strangely minimal progressions tickle the back of your brain and keep you awake just a little bit longer.
Sleep music collectives rise! This will likely be my first of many liminal droners on this segment, but I have been attached to this Polish collective since the launch of their “Seraphim” trilogy—a collection of dense, textural, monotone “sleep frequencies” procured by synthesized noise machine pulses and vocal tremors that are so distorted that they could be mistaken for one of the seemingly billion layers of reverb-drunk echoes. For a group so mysteriously inhuman, their 24-album discography should be plenty to help you get to know them considering there’s no face to pair with the group.
Speaking of singing faceless enigmas, JACKIE EXTREME is a self-proclaimed “nonexistent concept” that disrupts just as much as she creates. For an anonymous feminine individual who preaches digi-sex fantasies, making money the dirty way, and being hot while doing it, Jackie’s short-circuited e-femme beats are a force that I’m not really sure what to do with but I really dig. “THAT” was the first offering of Jackie’s I discovered as chronically online, undercooked lyrics, and an addictive club-bass loop keeps you glued in your tracks. Admittedly, the music is for a very, VERY specific time and place, though after my first full listen to her 2023 LP “ONYX,” “BUY ME NOW” and “CELLPHONE” are unironically and completely standout bangers.
The side project of Madeline Johnston and David Shaffer, professionally Midwife and Yarrow, serves doom and darkness with a peculiar sense of grace. This project feels like one long grueling respite—a cry out for something we can’t quite decipher, but we can certainly feel. A huge baritone guitar shreds and drowns many of the backing stems in the tracks from “Song for an Unborn Sun,” my absolute favorite release of the three 2016 projects, but are made continually interesting by the hardly audible, subtly devastating stacks of Johnston's harmonized chants. There are very clear parallels to early Liz Harris instrumentals too, which I can always appreciate.
There’s a wonderful intensity about BABYNYMPH that’s as endearing as it is it is scathing, extraterrestrial, and in your face. Synths bent into latex stretch sounds, SOPHIE-style wet frequencies, and Berlin bumps are the blocks that have come to build Baby’s sound into a micro-empire. With all of her music released under a self-made label “KUNTHOUSE” (a name hardly a dissimilar to the sound she brings) it seems she’s never considered the bounds of conformity because she is already so well beyond them. Her most recent release “Climax” is no exception to this as she welcomes a team of club-pop collaborators to smoosh the fast, slow, sexy, slutty, and ugly into just 6 songs, 18 minutes long, and a complete whiplash ripper of a collection.