mayday mayday! it's bandcamp day!
I’ll be honest, I’m a little frustrated because I had a very well-written intro here that I wrote once I got out of bed this AM, but my computer crashed and none of it was saved. Classic. But none of this article is really about me, so maybe I saved you some unnecessary rambling.
Anyways, the gist was that today is May Day. A very significant one at that. Today, essential workers at grocery outlets across the country are striking for humane, safe working conditions as they risk their lives to keep the rest of our world from completely collapsing under the weight of top-heavy inequality. This is a statement of solidarity saying that we stand with you. We will fight alongside you. Your struggle is everyone’s struggle, and it’s about damn time that we supersede corporate greed and political negligence with the rights of the working class.
In another vein, the music industry as we know it will exist in a completely different form once we are on the other side of this pandemic. Many artists who were well on their way to supporting themselves with their work now face unprecedented uncertainty as to how they will earn enough money to eat and pay rent (#RENTSTRIKE). We won’t be able to attend their shows for quite a while, so the best way that you can support independent artists’ work is by buying their work. Today, Bandcamp is going the extra mile by waiving the revenue fees they usually cut from artists, so 100% of what you pay will go into the hands of that musician.
Here’s a list of some artists whose music I’ll be buying today. Pay it forward if you can!
Where do I even begin? Everything about how her creativity manifests itself in ways that are strange, beautiful, and seductive. An artist who seems to effortlessly float between the candy-colored pixels of the digital universe, the rich, organic tones beholding Earth’s secrets, and the shadows of the underworld. But that’s the thing -- none of this is effortless. The nuance and range of her beat making skills suggest anything but. As a multidisciplinary artist who processes the world around her in a way that’s based in sound, visuals, as well as movement, Baby Uniq brings forth a work ethic which gives one the sense that she is a young antipop icon in the making.
Her most recent release with Yung DB, B.O.A. is a reimagination of Alice DJ’s ecstasy-laden eurotrance club banger, back in a time where we were bracing ourselves for the 2010s. The nostalgic air of the melody makes you wonder if you could have ever predicted how that next decade would end, or especially how the third one we’re currently living in would start. It feels like we’re floating in an alternate universe. It’s like when I was a teenager; everything was done via traveling online. Myspace, Tumblr. All that shit.
That was ten years ago. Where has the wormhole spit us out now?
That’s what this track is. It’s where we’ve been ejected by a black hole. Ten years later, to a blip in time where we’re all trying to figure out how to navigate the chaos and heartbreak in the modern age at the dawn of the 2020s. If we’re all just here doing our best to hold it together, B.O.A. provides a compelling example as to how we might just be able to cope with it all. Just because we retreat inward doesn’t mean we have to stop dancing and finding ways to enjoy ourselves.
***Pssst - you can also buy her merch here. :)
It’s been a busy year for Bapari. Homegrown in LA, they relocated to NYC in the fall after a stacked summer of appearances, which included their first Boiler Room set, and their first NYFW for another groundbreaking show from the absolute visionaries designing for the No Sesso label.
Revved upon arrival, they put in the work to leave their stamp on the city in little time. They secured coveted sets on lineups curated by the iconic Papi Juice party label, at the notorious Nowadays for late nights of decolonized techno curated by Tygapaw, and ending the year onstage at the now-legendary Melting Point NYE rave. Right before the quarantine hit, they even traveled to Australia and Japan to open for Steve Lacy on his tour.
All of this while maintaining their Puffy Radio residency at NTS. Not to sound like a cliché, but Bapari is truly just getting started.
Their bandcamp offerings suggest just as much movement and exploratory growth in their creative practice as their booking history does. They were churning out singles and edits so fast that I actually had trouble keeping up for a little while. But today is the perfect chance to catch up on all of those releases. They even put out a new remix just for today’s Bandcamp fundraiser.
I’m not going to pretend that I have already listened to Dawning in its entirety yet. Released at the end of March, this was a release that I wanted to allocate time and space to give my undivided attention to. Davia Spain makes music and art which demands, intentionally but gently, that you listen closely to what she is creating. The tracks I’ve heard already demonstrate an absolutely stellar vocal range and her ability to see clearly through the many layers which often blur our daily existence.
Tolliver from L.A. Record had some beautiful words to accompany the album’s premiere on its site. I think they do more justice to the project with their writeup than I could at this point, so I will pass the spotlight to them in order to entice you to buy this album.
“She sings here about relinquishing control to find a new self—surrendering, if you will, to the fates to be born anew. If that ain’t relatable content...There are no lyrics more human than those. Spain—with assists from fantastic musicians Mx. Matias, Bapari, Amanda Yamate and more—uses space and breath and bombast in such a way that each word of these songs is featured, emphasized, heightened. Humans deserve to hear this music, no matter how much space is between us at the moment.”
If you are reading this, I am guessing that you are a human. You deserve to hear this music. And if you are able to pay for it, she deserves your appreciation in the form of compensation. It may never be enough to pay her back for the gifts she’s given us with Dawning, but it’s a step in the right direction.
The Subconscious Motel. I was listening to this in my backyard the other afternoon and…I don’t know how else to say this, but I was really…just vibing with the fuck-you-America rhetoric bleeding through each one of these tracks. If that’s something you can even attribute vibing to. Vibe check? We are fucked.
Saying “we” here feels like I am doing a mild injustice to The Uhuruverse’s music because it deserves to be stated that their work centers and prioritizes the experiences of Black, queer, trans, and nonbinary people throughout the subjugating reign of Western colonial democracy. My opinion doesn’t mean shit, and that’s perfectly fine. It’s how it should be. I was thinking this as I mulled over some of the words they shared in a recent Instagram post.
“Don't nobody know shit….people's opinions of you, good or bad, is irrelevant. It's only a distraction from what you doing. I don't care what people think ‘cause that useless opinion never came to me and fed me in my hunger or housed me when I was unsheltered.”
Too often white people try to contort the work of Black artists to fit their definition of what is palatable and acceptable in order to monetize it, failing to adequately compensate the ones who are unwilling or unable to sacrifice who they are in order to please the hand that feeds from art’s capitalist manifestations. The Uhuruverse powerfully rejects those notions of acceptability and creates from a deeply personal and unfiltered place. To even have a glimpse into the sentiments and experiences which went into creating their work is something I do not take for granted.
The first step in repenting for any of our sins towards others is to listen, humbly, in earnest, to those who have been forced to endure their brunt for too long, and to pay reparations to those who have been historically oppressed by an utterly dehumanizing system. Here is an opportunity for you to do that. Buy their work if you are able, and please, please compensate them even more if you are white.
This is another project that makes me want to break shit and burn down my neighborhood. Therefore I will be playing this as loud as I can today in hopes of offending my neighbors back inside their house when they’re supposed to be staying the fuck home. My voice isn’t one which can speak to this EP with any particular level of nuance, as I’m not super well-versed in the hardcore space, but on a basis of pure emotional response, it strikes a chord deep within. Going back to that theme of feeling like a teenager, it’s like all of the disdain I felt towards the callousness of an unjust system while growing up in California’s epicenter of ignorance and materialism, which I couldn’t fully comprehend at the time, is resurfacing with the words I had been looking for all those years ago.
FYI: I will be taking the time to write a separate, more insightful review of Eye for an Eye, but right now I am feeling the self-imposed pressure to get this piece up in time for enough people to see it before today’s fundraiser comes to an end (YOU HAVE UNTIL MIDNIGHT TO MAKE YOUR PURCHASES).
I really, really love this new project from nstyx3 (pronounced “nasty three times”) and Jerry 3m. It transports you back to a simpler time when we could, you know, hang out with friends, staying out late as a way to temporarily leave behind the stressors of our daily lives. This is a fun collection of tracks, yet still encased by layers of emotion which extend beyond the fleeting whims of a party. It carries that self-awareness that you can’t ever really forget the challenges and obstacles which led you to that particular dance floor, to taking that shot of tequila, or to rolling that blunt, but you do have the power to create the space to enjoy it in that moment. It’s a lesson in being present and cherishing the love around you without taking itself too seriously.
I was pretty blown away with what nsty has put together at just 20 years old. It’s clear he exists as a beacon of positivity for his friends and the community around him in the Bay. That’s something that deserves to be shared widely through his music. Be sure to preorder the EP on bandcamp, but you can listen to it in its entirety here.
Repurposing my original review for his EP Golpe de Estado here because of self-imposed time constraint stated above. Few things make me miss the Bay Area more than hearing a new release from Juanny Depp. Thankfully, he’s released hella tracks since that first EP, so there’s a lot of good stuff to be added to your collection here.
Bay Area readers are probably familiar with the group Amor Digital, which he helped form with DJs 99% Lean and the ever-illustrious Namasté Shawty. In a year + some change they’ve made significant waves across the Bay and the country at large through their Central American DJ collective. By staking their claim at long-standing local institutions which, like the Black, Brown, and queer folks who occupy them, must fight the nefarious forces of gentrification and oppressive capitalism each day, Amor Digital parties bring into a physical and aural context the most crucial reminders for our cities. These communities not only have every right to safely remain in the places they’ve called home over generations, but deserve the rights and autonomy to dictate their own futures and to move freely through different spaces without fear of violence or disenfranchisement for simply existing as they are.
GOLPE DE ESTADO brings this spirit of resistance and curiosity back to the digital realm. The EP offers a really enjoyable listening experience where the beats are just as suitable pounding from club speakers on the dance floor, as they are exuding from headphones to aid creative focus. The tracks progress from a dreamy and almost inquisitive state to one filled with decisive force and a fiery energy. What I love the most about it, though, is you can really hear how much he enjoyed making each song. It’s an impressive and wavy little compilation to boast as a debut release, making it wild to think he didn’t even start learning production until sometime last year. Thankfully we have a chance to glimpse into that learning process as he continues to grow and thrive as an artist [insert blue butterfly emoji].
