THREE GOOD MUSICS

Because I am currently listening to one of these (the first one), here is a short list of three fantastic albums from 2025 that I have been listening to recently. The first two of them might not have had the luck/infrastructure to reach a bigger audience. Not all of them are brand new, but are still new to me.

CALUM GUNN - Eroder

I've crossed paths and shared some drinks with Calum a bunch of times over the years. Once upon a time he was a member of Dananananaykroyd, but these days he's a live-coder extraordinaire (Tidal Cycles being his code of choice). He opened up for 65daysofstatic at the Funkhaus in Berlin back when we did our Decomposition Theory show there, where he smashed out an astonishing set.

His most recent release came out on Evel Records in March and it is mind-blowingly good. A big reason of why I am generally so enamoured with live-coded music is because it can be used to build and collapse structures of sound in a kind of haphazard, nonlinear or at least episodic way. But that doesn't mean it can't also be used to write 'proper' songs. And this is an album full of proper bangers.

No doubt this has been criminally overlooked because, well, that's the plight of most musicians these days isn't it. I'm not sure if it's even on music streaming services or not, because I have happily escaped their clutches (that was a fantastic decision, zero regrets), so have not checked. But even if it is, why not instead just drop the €7 over on Bandcamp so you get to keep it forever?

GRAILS - Miracle Music

Another band 65daysofstatic have crossed paths with many times over the years, finding ourselves sharing cramped dressing rooms at tiny, hot and sweaty venues around Europe, or backstage at those lovely and strange mid-sized festivals that are long-gone in the UK but were still flourishing in the early 21st century on the continent. Are those festivals still there? It's been a while since 65days were in a position to be invited to them.

We never really got to know Grails as people, but I was a big fan of The Burden of Hope all the way back in 2003 and have been checking in on them ever since. I'm not a completionist, so will have certainly missed more than a couple of albums. In fact I probably haven't really listened to them regularly since The Black Tar Prophecies albums. Somehow though, their new one that came out a couple of weeks ago managed to grab my attention and after a first listen this morning I can confidently say that it's a winner. It's got that doomed-but-also-unable-to-entirely-give-up-on-utopia kind of despairing energy of early Godspeed You! Black Emperor records. Or perhaps something approaching a more energetic Bohren & Der Club of Gore.

JISOO- AMORTAGE

To be completely honest though, this is the one that is really clocking up the plays. Jisoo is one of Blackpink and this is her latest (first?) mini-album. I haven't been so taken with the solo efforts of the other Blackpinks, but this one: YES. The first time I gave it a proper listen it inexplicably got me thinking of Deleuze & Guattari's 'desiring machines' and the 'body without organs' from their infamous punkrock-Marxist-hyper-philosphy tome Anti-Oedipus about capitalism and schizophrenia. Which is quite a lofty thing for me to say considering I have never been able to get beyond the first chapter of it. (But what a chapter!)

Why did this music bring this philosophy I can barely understand to mind? Best I can figure out, it must have been something about pop songs being productions of desire, and how good pop songs sit in contrast to the end goal of the pop music industrial complex, or 'culture industry', and the aims of all these ghouls who run companies like Sp***fy or Suno AI who want to flatten culture into this kind of endless, faceless, frictionless, infinite wash of atemporal nothingness, which is the best grasp I have of whatever D&G's 'body without organs' might be supposed to mean. Some kind of empty, eternal space that can only be made sense of by breaks or disjunctions wrought against (or into?) it.

We are all desiring machines, producing more desire, and surely somebody who properly understands these ideas has written about them in relation to pop music already. For me, the best I can explain it is that the second I heard these songs, like all the best pop music it was like they had always-already existed. Familiar like old friends. But even as I felt like I already understood them intimately, there was something slippery about them. Something a little different, something that set them apart from countless other b-tier pop music that is churned out in the wake of the hyper popstars. That intangible assemblage of creative choices that allow a piece of art to stand out, to create some kind of disjunction, some break in the flow of churning, disposable pop content. A special kind of seductive friction that sets different expectations, or else presents slightly different answers to unexpected questions.

Also in Hugs & Kisses, the way Jisoo rhymes 'kisses' with 'malicious' is, (sorry), delicious. And when she tells me I'll be young forever in Your Love, I think I believe her.

Pop bangers! What would the world be without them?