Horticultural Marxism

7/21/2021

1. Homage to a Friendship - The Zenmenn, John Moods
   Both The Zenmenn and Berlin’s John Moods are repeat Tent House Radio offenders. They just can’t help themselves. Three more hole punches on their THR Loyalty Cards and they’ll get free playlists for life. Them’s the rules.

2. Wild and Lethal Trash! - Goldlink, Fire!, Santigold
   It’s a harsh fact—an “inconvenient truth,” as it were—that in a global capitalist consumer supersociety whose sole animating force is the profit motive, the system’s trash will eventually become so wild as to be lethal. For a while, the rich and powerful will delude themselves into thinking that this isn’t the case, that they can extract and expand and acquire with impunity and in an unpuncturable bubble of material comfort while their externalities float harmlessly up into the atmosphere, or drift out into the middle of the ocean, or are forced at gunpoint onto faraway peoples who lack the means or political currency to viably resist. But that won’t last. It can’t. Eventually, the temperatures rise, the continent-sized trash islands start washing ashore, the subordinated Other finds new ways of destabilizing their oppressors. The system’s waste, its trash, becomes intractably wild. The feedback loop overheats. The system collapses.
   
   Wait, you smell that? Is something burning? Oh, right, it’s probably just the acrid yellow cloud of West-Coast wildfire smoke that traversed the full breadth of North America and settled over my apartment in NYC for a few days earlier this week. Lethal.

3. About You - Moontype
   Moontype’s Margaret McCarthy writes the kind of melodies you only need to hear once before they’re ineradicably inscribed on your squishy little temporal lobe. I’ve had About You’s bright, chattering theme rolling around my head for weeks.

4. A RING - Towa Tei, Pascal Borel
   Towa Tei was doing this in ‘99. Saucing up a bossa nova beat with a little francophonic assaisonnement. Spanning cultures, forging friendships, inventing music.

5. John/Joseph - The Narcotix
   One of the groovier cuts from the Brooklyn duo’s grandiose debut EP. The Narcotix’s tunes sound like they’d be most at home soundtracking a baroque, moodily lit contemporary dance program.

6. Heart Magnets - Voltagectrlr
   LA-based DJ artificer Shiro Fujioka is one of the chief progenitors of Modbap, a kind of technophilic beat making that marries hip-hop’s inborn ethic for sampling and irreverent collage with the virtually infinite creative potentiality of modular synthesizers. The wave coalesced in the mid-2010s after Fujioka released “Switched on Beats” under his Voltagectrlr moniker. Since then, Modbappers have continued to chart new frontiers in hip-hop production one patch cable permutation at a time.

7. Corsican Shores - Deradoorian
   I can’t say with any kind of certainty that Deradoorian’s Corsican Shores was inspired at all by Corsica’s ridiculous geographic splendor, but I’d have to guess it played a part.
   
   The island—a French territory in the northern Mediterranean, just over 100 miles from the country’s southern coast—is predominantly mountainous, with over 472 named prominences including a clutch of 20 ancient granite peaks that each soar more than 6,500 feet heavenward. Corsica is also home to a distinct montane broadleaf and mixed forest ecoregion, which sees towering, evergreen holly and cork oaks in the lower elevations; deciduous broadleaf communities and cone-shedding maritime pines in the middle elevations; and silver firs, Corsican pines, European beeches, green alder, and other subalpine flora crowning the higher elevations.
   
   Then, after descending its mountains and enjoying a restorative hike through its forests, you get the 620+ miles of Corsican coastline, with its stunningly sheer cliffs and it’s more than 200 pristine white sand beaches. And not to do the Corsican Chamber of Commerce’s job for them, but the island is also rich with history; the little big man Napoleon Bonaparte was born in the capital city Ajaccio, and his birthplace now serves as a museum devoted to memorializing the Bonaparte clan’s Corsican roots.

8. Kadeed Badanaa Naftaydani (My Life is Full of Tribulations) - Sharaf Band feat. Xaawo Hiiraan
   Barakallah to the folks at Ostinato Records for compiling this tape of lost/forgotten/overlooked tracks from Somali artists of the ‘70s and ‘80s, especially those who made Mogadishu a veritable musical Mecca before the advent of a decades-long civil war in the early ‘90s.

9. Jazz Club After Hours - Barry Can’t Swim
   As the title suggests, this one is strictly for After Hours. If you’re not dead tired, delirious, hallucinating the haunted visages of your dead childhood pets, this ain’t for you. If your body isn’t in full self-sabotaging revolt, what are you even doing thinking about playing this? If it’s not technically tomorrow morning, if your eyes ain’t redder than an ovulating baboon’s backside, if your brain is still forming memories, it’s probably best that you forget you ever heard about this song.

10. I’m On Fire - Gus Dapperton
    Don’t think it’s unfair to say that this is one of the greatest horny songs ever written. The Boss’ libido was insane… I have no idea how he wore those jeans when he must have spent a significant majority of the ‘80s running around with a heat-seeking throbber tentpoling his trousers. New York songwriter stripling Gus Dapperton offers an excellent reinterpretation here, but it’s hard to match the absolutely broiling arousal of Bruce’s original. Sperm count’s going down around the world, government’s making us chug that yellow no. 5. They don’t want us to be horny anymore. But we’re gonna stay bricked up. We’re gonna stay poking holes in our denim. The future of the species depends on it.

⛺