My First and Only Amnestic Episode

9/2/2021

1. Walking at a Downtown Pace - Parquet Courts
   **Reclining in a wrought iron garden chair, squinting into a shaft of golden sunlight**
   
   Ah yes, the leaves have begun their autumnal change, the flowers are browning, there is a savory crispness in the air, a bracing breeze carries upon it the sound of a nasal sprechgesang over a locomotive rhythm section. We have reached the advent of Parquet Courts season once again.

2. Progressive Class - Chikiss
   One of my favorite types of songs is “songs that play like the slightly discomfiting soundtracks to depersonalized liminal spaces”—elevators, waiting rooms, mall concourses and the like. This joint, from Russian-German composer Chikiss, fits that mold. It’s giving “you’ve just been put on hold during an interdimensional telephone call.”

3. Aww (Zaza) - MIKE
   MIKE mints a brand new typa flow on this song. Almost a waltzy kind of tempo to it. He understands the fundamental tenet of Prosodic Theory which states that pauses, rhythmic valleys, are just as richly meaningful and metrically important as spoken utterances. I love a wordy triplet flow—only haters and bores would say otherwise—but I’m glad there’ll always be room on the margins for brand new flows to bubble up out of the collective unconscious.

4. Riot - Hugh Masekela
   Two ebullient trumpets in ecstatic conversation. Of what brassy mischief do they speak?

5. Easter Sunday - ZelooperZ, Earl Sweatshirt
   ZelooperZ is definitely having a moment. He’s received plenty of love in the Tent, he’s surged to the fore of Danny Brown’s Bruiser Brigade, and his new album is doing good numbers (depending on your interpretation of the 10-point scale, which I’ve recently come to find out is a contentious topic).
   
   But we’re kicking it back here to a 2019 track in which the Detroiter secured the rare anointment that is a cosign from Earl “The Pearl” Sweatshirt, who is so motherfucking good at rapping that—in this, his post-“Some Rap Songs” era—it always kind of sounds like he writes and records his verses without ever listening to the instrumental because he knows that he’s God-touched and whatever he comes up with will fit perfectly over whichever beat you care to pair it with.

6. Path of a Blue Cat - Parannoul
   I’m happy to see that the mysterious South Korean lo-fi artist’s music has become more accessible as of late. He creates sweeping emo vistas that blister like barely contained detonations—controlled burns raging threateningly close to their prescribed perimeters.

7. Underwater Boy - Virna Lindt
   Sometimes the algorithmically self-perpetuating music streaming infrastructure creates moments of serendipity. That was the case recently when DJs Wzrd Czar and Glizzie both, individually and unbeknownst to the other, discovered and became fascinated with the discography of the relatively obscure 1980s Swedish pop star Virna Lindt.
   
   With each of these moments of spontaneous convergence, we inch ever closer to Tent House Singularity: the end-state of operation Tent House Radio in which it’s three constituent DJs coalesce into an all-powerful superorganism with full four-dimensional access to the complete continuum of Perfect Playlist Permutations.

8. Narcissus - Xyla
   Virgin Narcissus: Looks at his reflection in the pool and falls in love.
   
   Chad Xyla: Looks at a blank Ableton project and thinks to herself “let’s make a club banger they’ll play when they clear out the bookshelves and convert the off-hours Barnes & Noble into an acid house performance space.”

9. Ponta de Areia - Wayne Shorter
   Every week, without fail, I am blessed to come across a new song that is without a doubt the most beautiful song I’ve heard in my life. This week, that song was Ponte de Areia.

10. About You Now - OTTO
    About You Now has an interesting lineage. It was originally a Dr. Luke (boo!) concoction recorded and released in 2007 as a successful single by the very early-2000s girl group Sugababes. It was then covered by Miranda Cosgrove in ‘09 when she was aging out of iCarly and into the child-star-to-pop-singer pipeline that either rockets kids to Ariana Grande/Olivia Rodrigo-level superstardom or chews them up and discards them Jamie Lynn Spears/Victoria Justice style. Sugababes’ and Cosgrove’s versions of the song both kick ass and evince a kind of proto hyper-poppiness that is fully realized in OTTO’s 2020 reimagining, in which the tune reaches its logical methamphetamized endpoint.

⛺