Excessive Heat Warning

8/12/2021

1. Stratego - Amtrac
   Bit of a different look here from the Kentucky-born DJ, who typically traffics in spacey dancefloor thumpers.
   
   I’ve never played Stratego, and I don’t have a particularly strong affinity for board games. Although I do know several board games people, and they’re pretty much all cool and good-natured. If you accept the premise that hobbies reveal some essential truth about the psychology of their hobbyists, then I wonder what people’s abiding love of board games says about them. Is it a longing for order in a disordered universe? For clearly defined markers of success and failure set within a self-contained, predictable world of immutable logic? Is it a fetish for explaining complicated rulesets? A fascination with little plastic tokens? Maybe it’s just that board games serve as vehicles for time spent with friends and loved ones, but I think it’s mostly the ruleset thing.

2. Crushed Velvet - Yves Tumor
   Fresh Yves. Always a cause for celebration. This one here is three minutes and seventeen seconds of Tumor peacocking around in what I imagine to be a positively refulgent crushed velvet ensemble. There’s a conviction in the artist’s assertion that “I feel my best when I'm dressed in all crushed velvet” that, as a listener, I simply cannot relate to. I have absolutely no notion of what clothes best suit me. I can dress myself well enough to avoid embarrassment, and I’m plenty vain, so you would think I’d be able to figure this shit out. But I find that vanity and self loathing are often two sides of the same coin. And right now, that coin is jamming the door that stands between me and a beautiful new world of sartorial self-realization.

3. On the Day’s - Hamlet Minassian
   Armenian disco-pop don Hamlet Minassian builds and builds and builds this track with the farsighted precision of an architect, until it rises from the clay like the arched apses of the Etchmiadzin Cathedral or the ancient colonnades of the Temple of Garni, two world-historic Armenian landmarks that we all very much appreciate and are familiar with.

4. Space Jam - Hey Choppi
   Space Jam contains two of the most perfectly deployed “Watch me now!” ad libs that I’ve heard in recent memory. I don’t understand why we don’t hear “Watch me now!” more often, nor can I imagine a situation in which I would be disappointed to hear “Watch me now!”

5. Tambaleo - Meth Math
   New single from the Mexican avant-garde reggaetón trio, who I think are on the precipice of a major blow up. Tambaleo’s woozy synth squelches sound like neon reflections off a rain-slicked street.

6. Capricorn Woman - Janet Kay
   This 1982 cut from London soul stalwart Janet Kay goes out to all my star chart cartographers out there. I used to be the kind of asshole who would reflexively turn his nose up at astrology. Now, I realize that it’s just another of the countless, harmless system’s we’ve created to think deeply—and ideally, compassionately—about ourselves and the people around us. Unfortunately for me, I was born without the ability to meaningfully introspect—to tease out and make sense of the tangled knot that is my personality. I have the self-consciousness of a jellyfish afloat on the current.

7. Zavkhan - Enji
   Munich-based Mongolian singer Enji dropped a perfect, five bags of popcorn album earlier this summer. If you like what you hear in Zavkhan, I would advise you to listen to the record in full, preferably while sat beneath a tree or walking slowly through a garden.

8. Under the Sun (Instrumental Theme) - Under the Sun Orchestra
   The kind of frolicking, brassy salsa joint you might hear when passing a ritzy waterfront yacht club restaurant on your way to a less expensive but still clearly overpriced multistory seafood place just across the street. You’ve had these table reservations since your family planned this vacation six months ago. You’re looking forward to the calamari but are ultimately disappointed when the breading is soggy. Sorry about that.

9. In August - Half Waif
   This song has been haunting me since the first time I heard it. Like literally creeping around the shadows of my apartment and leaping out when I least expect it. The first 15 seconds specifically have completely gripped me by their tenterhooks—I’ve been compulsively repeating “In August if I’m honest we were on each other’s team” so often that I think it might have crossed the boundary into pathology. I’m hoping that by including the song on this playlist I am released from whatever demonically possessive hold it has over me.

10. where are we going? - Baghi
    We cap this weekend’s list with a quick and friendly reminder from Amsterdam neo-soul singer Baghi of the harrowing and unspeakable uncertainty at the core of every single human relationship. Bon voyage and sleep tight!
    
    

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