This Friday, Bandcamp will be celebrating Juneteenth by donating its share of all sales to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. It’s the perfect time to pick up some new music and support an important organization that fights for racial justice. Many artists and labels will be redirecting proceeds to worthy organizations as well, so be on the lookout for that when making your purchases.
This time we have a supersized list from a bunch of folks in and out of the blog’s normal sphere. They’ve hand picked some personal favorites, as well as told you why they love them. Many thanks to everybody who took the time to contribute to the piece; the best part about starting this blog has been engaging with fellow music lovers and learning about new artists I might not hear otherwise. Additionally, be sure to support our recommenders where relevant (we’ve provided links to their Bandcamp pages in bios)!
We’ll be doing this again in two weeks for the final scheduled no fee Bandcamp day (and possibly again in the future, depending on what happens). If you’re interested in turning people on to some personal favorites drop us a line; we’d love to chat.
Finally, for even more great recommendations check out this crowdsourced doc of Black artists.
Bill Roe Bill Roe runs and curates Trouble in Mind records along with his wife, Lisa. One of our favorite labels around, we’ve previously profiled them and recommended some personal highlights from their catalog. Their latest releases, Lithics’ Tower of Age, came out two weeks ago and is highly recommended.
S/T | JOSHUA MASSAD & DYLAN AYCOCK Scissor Tail is doing a series of duo cassettes & this one is my fave from the first batch. Four improvisations featuring twelve string guitar, air organ, pandeiro, synth, percussion, tabla, & sitar. Mesmerizing ragas to align your inner-self to.
PZ1 | POZI A great one from 2019 – A guitar-less post punk band from London (bass, drums, violin!). Nervous, rattling & engaging from the first needle drop, I find myself dancing around to this in our house often.
LEOS NATURALS | SiP Project of Chicagoan Jimmy Lacy – mellow, transcendent organ work reminiscent of Hailu Mergia or Timmy Thomas if they recorded in outer space.
EP | CB RADIO GORGEOUS Chicago punk quartet features members past & present from Negative Scanner, CCTV & Forced Into Femininity – highly caffeinated, ripping punk rock.
XV | XV Trio from Michigan featuring Shelley Salant (Shells, Tyvek), Emily Roll (Tyvek, Haunted, Cultural Fog) and Claire Cirocco (Comme À La Radio, Cultural Fog) who managed to record this masterclass in minimalist, sandblasted DIY free-rock. This feel so urgent & enviously off-the-cuff & I keep returning to it a year later (and probably will for a while). LP is sadly OOP, but grip the digital with a quickness!
LENA | ANNA HÖGBERG ATTACK Högberg’s ensemble was news to me until Omlott announced this album a month or so ago (her first album from 2016 is long sold out – anyone holding a copy they’d like to sell me?) and this album is alternatingly harsh & tender free jazz, with Högberg carrying the flame for Scandinavian horn players into the 21st century.
CRIES FROM PLANET EARTH | ARMAGEDDON EXPERIMENTAL BAND Primal Chicago multimedia collective churning out improvisational musical ooze. Brown-acid hippies a’la Amon Duul II.
2020 BLINDSIDE VOL 2 | THE RESONARS Matt Rendon (aka the one-man-band behind “The Resonars”) is a pop genius & these odds & ends he’s put together in his studio in Tucson during self-quarantine are as essential & vital as any of his proper releases. His savage cover of The Monkees/Mike Nesmith’s “Circle Sky” is exhilarating!
S/T | THE OFFSET: SPECTACLES A classic zoner from 2011 that I recommend to any & everyone I can. Minimal, ragged post-punk clatter from Beijing – like if Vertical Slit & VU collaborated. Totally essential (be sure to nab the recently released live recordings & odds & sods O:S releases from their Bandcamp too!). Guitarist Tom Ng from the band is now in the exceptional (and even more minimal) Gong Gong Gong, whose album on Wharf Cat is a 2019 “crucial grip”.
LIVE AT BROWNS | VERTICAL SLIT Recently unearthed live recording of Columbus poet, songwriter, musician, producer and legend Jim Shepard (Phantom Limb, V-3 and Ego Summit)’s group recorded live in 1979 at Browns. Tom Lax of Siltbreeze was apparently given the tapes in 1998 from Shepard himself before he passed & Siltbreeze just released it digitally & on (a very very limited pressing on) vinyl. Don’t sleep!
Joey Agresta Joey Agresta has been a fixture in the American musical underground, releasing albums under various monikers (Joey Pizza Slice and Son of Salami being two personal favorites) and most recently under his own name. His latest album, Let Me To Rock, is out digitally now with a physical edition forthcoming from Feeding Tube Records. Check out our review here (spoiler alert: we highly recommend you pick it up), and his recommendations below
Ian Martin Ian Martin runs Call and Response Records, a great Tokyo based label that focuses on contemporary Japanese music, and is a music writer. His book Quit Your Band! Musical Notes from the Japanese Underground is an essential history of modern Japanese music (I own a copy and highly recommend it). Here, Ian recommends some favorite recent releases from the Japanese scene.
BARBICAN ESTATE | BARBICAN ESTATE A chiming guitar line wanders, unhurried, through the first half of opening song Angel, with vocals intoning distantly like a 4AD band from back in those early-’90s days before “ethereal” was such a clichéd adjective. That’s when the guitar starts to veer into its long-threatened detour into celestial, shoegaze-tinged distortion. Barbican Estate are new on the scene in Tokyo and this EP sets them up as a key band to watch out for.
CORE | UHNELLYS Where COVID-19 has caused a lot of bands in Japan to hole up to wait out the pandemic, feeling unable to make music without access to the drum kits, amp and PA setups studios and venues provide them, experimental hip-hop duo Uhnellys embraced their new restrictions and made Core very swiftly, jettisoning the live drums that had been a key part of their dynamic for the past 20 years, and leaning hard into electronic beats and sequencers. The first part of the album gets up in your face quickly, spitting rhymes and beats fast, but Uhnellys’ waters always ran deeper than that and, around its midpoint, Core takes a turn into more intriguing and experimental territory, touching on elements of jazz, trip-hop and psychedelia in addition to the new electronic core. It makes for a listening experience that combines musical richness with a sense of homemade DIY intimacy.
I MIGHT BE IN LOVE | PUFFYSHOES Puffyshoes are a guitar/drum duo who specialise in ramshackle, lo-fi takes on the sweet harmonies and lovelorn teenage melancholy of 1960s girl group pop. There’s an economy to their songwriting, with the duo instinctively homing in on a hook (whether musical or lyrical) and riding it to its natural conclusion with very little excess waste. By focusing on the fundamentals, they can often deliver a devastating two-chord blow to the heartstrings and make a perfectly satisfying exit in just a minute or less.
STOMACH | MY SOCIETY’S PISSED A wonderfully named band formed partly from the ruins of the equally wonderfully named Pinprick Punishment, My Society Pissed are a dirty, sweaty punk band who rant their way, Wipers-via-Mission-of-Burma, through a cocktail of of screwball rock’n’roll mania touched by an instinct for the oblique, dark and distorted.
WE NEED SOME DISCIPLINE HERE | VARIOUS ARTISTS This compilation, emerging out of a regular Tokyo club night, makes for a baffling listen at times, ricocheting bleary-eyed between hardcore, techno, noise, gothic post-punk and abstract electronic occurrences. Like the event it’s inspired by, it starts to make sense after a while though, with the ferocious assault of a band like Klonns merging in a strangely logical way with the throttled distortion and minimal beats of the Dead Bitch track that follows. As a compilation taking its name from British industrial pioneers, Throbbing Gristle, there’s enough in here to make sense of the reference, with the relentless, doom-laden mechanical beat propelling Solvent Cobalt and the Germanic EBM pulse of Golpe Mortal, but the album explores beyond its most obvious influences in surprising ways that are nevertheless always coherent on some level. There’s a lot going on in this compilation and it rewards repeat listens.
NAVARO COMPILATION | VARIOUS ARTISTS Kumamoto isn’t a particularly big city, and tucked away on the western coast of Japan’s western island of Kyushu it’s in many ways an optional tail end of the line for any touring act. Partly as a result of this, its own local music scene rarely gets much attention, so this compilation created by Kumamoto live venue Navaro offers an intriguing window into parts of the area’s music scene that often don’t get much attention. Linked less by genre than locality, it’s naturally a diverse collection of songs, but the journey it takes the listener on through Kumamoto’s musical landscape is nonetheless a fascinating one, from the feelgood pop-rock of The Heightz through the lo-fi hip-hop of Griner feat. Blueprint and the demented carnival ride of Que?st, to the absolutely deranged experimental rock of Doit Science and Ishiatamazizo/石頭地蔵.
DECALCOMANIA | TATSUHISA YAMAMOTO & RIKI HIDAKA Most often found as a drummer collaborating with or supporting other artists in Tokyo’s experimental music scene (perhaps most famously Jim O’Rourke, who provides the cover photo of this album), Tatsuhisa Yamamoto has been releasing a stream of quite wonderful Bandcamp albums over the past few months. Perhaps most fascinating among that rush of eerie ambience is this extraordinary album with guitarist Riki Hidaka, comprising four cinematic explorations of landscapes both sinister and glittering with crystalline beauty. A beautiful album.
VERTICAL JAMMING | PHEW Originally recorded during the years 2013-2015, these tracks were conceived as sketches of the mental landscape during the years of uncertainty and government upheaval following the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear accident. The insistent yet alarmingly awry electrical hum of closing track Drone stands out in particular, making uncomfortable yet timely listening as the foundations of our lives are shaken once more by the 2020 pandemic crisis.
UP AND DOWN | YOSHIDA SHOKO Through a series of bands and guises, Yoshida Shoko (or just Shoko, or Shoko Y.) has been quietly charting a meandering and idiosyncratic course through the psychedelic underbelly of Japanese music for years, and her appearances, wherever and however they occur, are always subtly striking. Released as a digital preview of an upcoming four-song 10-inch, the two songs on this release flow forth, carried by an understated yet emotionally devastating current of synth-embroidered mystery.
EP + 7 SONGS AND HELL | GETAGETA This collection of recently unearthed old recordings is an energetic showcase of delightfully unhinged, synth-tinged punk. The vocals tremble with a mixture of fury and madness in a way that sometimes recalls oddball pop/new wave legend Jun Togawa in her punk pomp, while at others simply cascades into nonsensical babbling. Getageta’s music, meanwhile, straddles a line between hardcore and anarchic lo-fi garage-punk, with the synth element casting a neon halo around the music’s cacophony of strange explosions.
Noa Samson In honor of queer pride month, I chose to highlight albums from queer and trans artists. I want to acknowledge here that we wouldn’t have Pride if not for Black queer and trans people past and present, who are constantly leading us to a better world and face the most danger in the horrible one we have created. Pride should always be a protest, and we need to keep hitting the streets and doing the work to help our Black queer and trans siblings make a world that keeps them safe and uplifts them.
STRANGER | TUNDE OLANIRAN Singer/rapper Tunde Olaniran’s witty rhymes, earnest choruses, and dance beat breakdowns should give him prime status in your queer music library. In the world I want to live in, this album would be blasting from Pride floats at a parade with no cops or banks.
EGO EP | PARADOX ISRAFIL In their own words, ParaDox IsRafil is “a genderfluid first generation African American songwriter that combines influences from a formal classical background, iconic world music, and the underground/indies genre. My sound varies from alternative rock and hip-hop to movie soundscapes and video game compositions.”
DEATH; MIDWEST | THE HAPPY PLANETS Effie Vision is a trans genderqueer artist who makes “trans-genred” music inspired by a lifetime of engagement with cyberfeminism: “folktronic agit-pop” as the happy planets (upcoming album: AD2020) and “dissonant dance subversion music” as Effie Vision (upcoming album: ANTiBODY), among other projects. She describes her early album death; midwest as having “themes of dysphoria and confronting the oppressive cultural decay of midwestern values, wrapped in tender indie folk with moments of darkness”.
IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME | PARTNER Their perfect website bio reads “Partner is funny, but not a joke. Gay, but not for each other.” They are the Canadian stoner lesbian rock duo of my dreams – and maybe yours?
THERE IS NOT A METAPHOR THAT CAN CONTAIN | BEBÉ MACHETE Bebé Machete is a genderqueer Boricua experimental artist who makes music about decolonization and liberation. ‘Ta Vivo, the closing track on this record, was easily one of my favorite songs to come out of 2019. Required listening for the revolution.
PITY BOY | MAL BLUM Mal Blum’s openness about being trans and non-binary makes them an easy pick for Bandcamp Pride-ay! Their latest release sees them fully leaning into pop punk, a welcome shift for any artist in my opinion.
EVERYONE ELSE | SLOTHRUST This album is full of grungy, heavy, and darkly funny songs that absolutely crush live. Leah Wellbaum, who fronts the band, is queer, landing this on my list of pride purchases.
SURVIVAL POP | WORRIERS Another strong entry in the queer pop punk canon, Lauren Denitzio’s defiant lyrics lift the songs of Survival Pop into anthems for folks with a precious sliver of hope left for the world.
David Wilikofsky Finally, here’s some recs from yours truly. Suffice to say anything we’re written about on the website in the past month is well worth your time and support, but here’s some Bandcamp discoveries I’ve been digging as of late. And, like last time, feel free to explore my personal Bandcamp collection for even more records.
PANOPTICON | DREAMCRUSHER Dreamcrusher has an expansive catalog; they are up to almost forty releases at this point. As someone more familiar with their earlier work, their most recent releases strike me as music that will satisfy old fans but can also bring in new ones. Whereas noise and rhythm seemed to be the focus of earlier work, Panopticon! allows the songcraft underneath to shine though through the trademark Dreamcrusher sound. It’s an exciting evolution of their art from old favorites like Suicide Deluxe.
TEMPLO DEL SONIDO | OBNOX What does punk mixed with free jazz sound like? Templo del Sonido is the answer. Released by Astral Spirits, which has become one of the essential jazz labels around over the past few years, this record is one wild ride. Sidenote: there’s also a new Obnox record released a few weeks ago by Ever/Never Records that’s equally great.
TAKEN AWAY | KDJ-49 | MOODYMANN Moodymann is a Detroit techno legend; his debut album SILENTINTRODUCTION is a bonafide classic. In 2019 he was arrested at gunpoint by police on his own property after someone called them to report “suspicious behavior”. This album, his most recent release, is smooth and soulful but bares the scars of that experience; most overtly police sirens puncture multiple songs, but there’s sadness and ache throughout. As strong as any work he’s produced, this album is an essential buy.
COIN COIN CHAPTER 4: MEMPHIS | MATANA ROBERTS Matana Robert’s Coin Coin series is one of the great musical projects of our times; planned to be a cycle of twelve albums, four have been released so far. The most recent, Memphis, mixes free jazz, spoken word and folk spirituals to create music that defies easy categorization (Roberts refers to her compositional technique as “panoramic sound quilting”). It’s an intensely powerful work exploring race and American history by one of the best artists working today.
THIN BLACK DUKE | OXBOW Oxbow have been consistently releasing some of the weirdest, most exciting rock music of the past thirty years. Their most recent album, 2017’s Thin Black Duke, is a tour de force. It sounds absolutely massive; guitars crash, strings swell, and vocalist Eugene Robinson presides over all of it. Nick Cave’s early 2000’s output comes to mind as a comparison, although Oxbow have a darker and more dissonant edge while maintaining the same sense of grandeur. An epic album thats not to be missed.
GET IN UNION | BESSIE JONES AND THE GEORGIA SEA ISLAND SINGERS Bessie Jones was a popular musician on the folk music circuit in the 60s and 70s who helped preserve Southern Black music traditions. This compilation, originally released on Tompkins Square back in 2014 and now available in expanded form on Bandcamp, collects mostly a cappella solo and small group performances recorded between 1959 and 1966 by Alan Lomax. It’s essential document of American gospel and folk music that’s as vital today as the day it was recorded.
NEW LUCK THUNG | JUU & JEE G The concept for this album absolutely shouldn’t work on paper (a fusion of traditional Thai luk thung music with hip hop) but the results end up being insanely addictive. Juu (a rapper based in the Isan region of Thailand who has been active since the 1990’s) absolutely blows this one out of the park.
THEM AIRS | UNION SUIT XL I discovered this gem via Turntable Report, a newsletter recommended to me by another newsletter (Lars Gotrich’s Vikings Choice). The album reminds me of Palm circa Trading Basics (possibly still my favorite Palm album), which is to say it’s mathy, complex music that still manages to be compulsively listenable.
TOP OF THE POPS | CARLA DAL FORNO Carla dal Forno is an expert on everything post-punk; a listen to her always amazing NTS radio show proves as much. Any record in her discography is worth picking up, but I’m partial to this EP of covers. Showing her eclectic taste, covers of Lana del Rey and The Fates are clear highlights.