#22: Moin, Nikki Nair, Bishopskin
This week’s shows, new music and more
This Week’s Playlist
Typically the playlist is just a collection of things on the newsletter, which are eclectic to begin with, but this time there’s more of a coherent thread to it. Enjoy!
Buy Now for Later
Moin — Barbican, 31.05.2025
Moin, whose Barbican show will surely sell out imminently, are a trio of experimental musicians: Joe Andrews + Tom Halstead (Raime / Blackest Ever Black) joined by prolific percussionist Valentina Magaletti. They’ve put out three albums of largely undefinable music over the past five years on Nik Tasker’s AD93 label. The latest, last year’s You Never End, brings in many genres and influences, but in my view it’s a logical and explicit expression of emo-rap.
Emo-rap the genre never really lived up to its name. Lil Peep, Juice WRLD, XXXTentacion etc. paid scant attention to the tenets and history of both “emo” and “rap”. Granted, it wasn’t a label that they applied to themselves. In fact, they variously shrugged it off. But when a term sticks, particularly in the consciousness of fans, it says more about what people want to be happening than what is actually occurring: think nu-rave, indie-sleeze and so on. Little of the thread that began in late-80s post-hardcore, or ran into the emo mainstream of the 2000s could actually be heard in the music. If anything, the “emo” in “emo-rap” wasn’t referring to a genre at all, just a general mood. Similarly, the extent to which the “rap” was happening, particularly on Lil Peep, is open for debate. What made it “rap”, if anything, were the beats, which rarely deviated from the late 2010s trap formula: booming kick drums working as bass, consistent hi-hats with an occasional triplet. These beats were more or less identical across all extant tracks, which helped situate the movement in a particular time. Emo-rap was uninterested in what came before, only the here and now. It burned brightly, then all three of its most prominent artists tragically died within three years of each other, all before the age of 22.
Back to Moin then: the guitar tones, melodies and drum grooves pay clear attention to Don Martin Three, Sunny Day Real Estate, and other early-emo artists and their successors like Duster. (Listen to the Numero Group playlist Early Emo here to get a flavour.) But where these guitar bands had drawn out breakdowns, loose phrasing and a scratchy exterior: Moin play with ultimate precision, as if the grooves were in fact samples being triggered by an MPC3000. Even if the commenters and the band themselves may not make the hip-hop connection, the music knows it; listen to those late 2010s hi-hats I mentioned earlier come in on the back end of “It’s Messy Coping”; the way vocal samples are chopped up on “We Know What Gives”; an almost gospel vocal sample on “C’mon Drive”. There’s also the spoken word here, which while not “rapped” as such, is rhythmically delivered. Qatari-American poet Sophia Al-Maria brings an evocative and tender performance to “Lift You”: “To fear being used, to fear being poor forever / To fear ending up on the other side of the border / To fear imprisonment, to fear detention / To fear witch hunters and their generals”; sentiments precisely within the political spirit of hip-hop.
These sounds don’t summarise Moin: there’s more to it, more influences, more experimentation. But if nothing else, it shows their uncanny ability to get under the bones of the genres they meld together. In doing so, they manage to put across a form of something I wanted to hear, something that I doubt they were ever explicitly gunning for. Tickets.
Nikki Nair - Village Underground, 01.03.2025
In the great lineage of album cover art referencing other album cover art you have: The Clash and Elvis, Kanye and Madonna, Mac Demarco and Bruce Springsteen, Childish Gambino and Funkadelic and, in 2023, Nikki Nair + Hudson Mohawke and Alvin + the Chipmunks.
This is, however, less likely to be a direct reference to Simon, Theodore & Alvin in their original state, and more likely a reference to Sludgefest:
Sludgefest is a minor YouTube phenomenon from the last couple of years. The video itself is the Chipmunk Punk album — which features covers of Blondie, Billy Joel and Queen — slowed down so that the voice is in a baritone register and the instruments occupy a low frequency doom-metal space. The real point of the meme, however, is to comment wildly verbose invented memories of seeing the Sludgefest-era Chipmunks — in this universe rendered into a band vaguely reminiscent of The Doors — under the video. Like this:
Written out here for clarity:
“I was there at their infamous show in Detroit in late 1987. I was flown there with a head journalist from the paper I was aspiring to work at, as I had won a sweepstakes of sorts amongst the other interns to go with him to watch their performance. Originally we were supposed to get special reserved seating, but a group of some rather intimidating teen delinquents must have bribed their way into our spot. We ended up having to watch quite a ways towards the back in the cheap seats. They kept the crowd waiting some 45 minutes after the show was scheduled to start, and there was this air of angst and tension that I will never forget. The whole concert hall was hot, dim, with a heavy scent of beer and weed lingering in the air. Despite the place being packed to the brim, there was this terrifying silence, as if everyone was holding their breath. I will never forget the collective gasp and change in energy when the curtains finally opened. Simon stood awkwardly with his guitar strapped to his chest standing completely motionless, resembling a cardboard cutout. Theo was obviously tripping on something strong, standing behind a meagre setup of a small synthesizer and a drum machine. Alvin stood between them for a moment, took in the crowd, and then clumsily stepped forward towards the mic. He looked rough. His fur was matted, his signature red hoodie stained and torn. Then, in perfect unison, Simon and Theo started playing, and the set began….”
This is just the first two paragraphs…
Like a lot of internet humour, it’s about blurring the lines between sincerity and absurdity. The longer and more complex the comment — the more time wasted by the individual, the logic seems to go — the better.
Ultimately, this meme is a testament to the evocative nature of the voice and what emotions pitching it up or down excites in the listener. This fact is really the original Chipmunks’ genius; there’s just something about a high pitched voice that makes children lose their shit.
And there’s something about “Set the Roof” that makes me lose my shit. A ridiculously drawn out drop that seemingly uses everything to hand in the Ableton toolbox, utilising and processing Tayla Parx’s voice to maximum lunacy. It’s hard to make a fourteen syllable phrase — “hit the thing right and it’s enough to set the roof on fire” — scan into what is essentially 2-step, but my god they’ve done it (kinda).
Mohawke and Nair are tricksters in electronic music, imparting buckets of humour and joy while making something technically brilliant. Like Sludgefest, off kilter musical experiments such as these can be fertile ground for meme-ing if in the wrong hands: Hudson Mohawke’s seminal wonky trap cut “cbat” went viral a couple of years ago.
Unlike HudMo, Nikki Nair is relatively new to releasing and hasn’t yet brought out an album. However, his Mixmag Impact mix, unconventionally, contained 100% his own music, almost all of which is unreleased. 2-step, drum n’ bass, leftfield techno, an absolutely bludgeoning bit of dubstep around the 52 minute mark. Likely the best way to get an impression of what’s to come at Village Underground on the first of March. Tickets.
Shows this week
femtanyl — No90 Hackney Wick, 23.01.2025
A friend of this newsletter recently sent me a game called Stimulation Clicker. You click, it stimulates. In it are all the titans of the 2-second-attention-span-brainrot-internet-lore. Lofi-girl, subway surfers, endless news. For me, it would need hours and hours of instagram-cooking-reel-garbage to really be the full stimulation experience.
Particularly from the generation who have grown up completely assailed by high levels of stimulation, everywhere, all the time, it’s unsurprising that a particular kind of musical output would follow suit. Enter Femtanyl, bio: “We r Online we r online”. Here’s a quick formula — take 2 Unlimited’s Get Ready, add 100 gecs, add Crystal Castles’ Alice Practice, stir in DJ Rashad’s Double Cup, put all of that through the Evian Christ / Trance Party meat grinder. So far Femtanyl are yet to put anything out that deviates from exactly this. At the end, they’re not doing anything particularly new, but what feels different about it in comparison to all its references is the absolute lack of sonic space left. The distortion is constant, the vocals are always at a yell, the beats are completely saturated with compression: if it was a WAV file it would be a big black block. A slug. Attention is dead: long live stimulation. NO90 Hackney Wick. Tickets.
Bishopskin — MOTH Club 24.01.2025.
A recent review of Bishopskin — the “London-Oxford-Brighton” folk-rock ten-piece (must be hard to organise rehearsals) — likened them to William Blake. This seems highly accurate. To say of any poet that “they’re just making it up” is an obvious platitude. But when it comes to Blake, this really is a true summation of his aesthetic. There are no rules in the Blake universe; people have desperately tried to find some kind of neat categorisations of the repeated characters in his work and some sense of his spirituality, but no such order will come. He meant whatever he wanted to mean at the time. It’s bombastic, spiritual, wild and, above all, foolish. As is Bishopskin. Their album Babble (2024) has a self-serious playfulness unlike much else on the scene right now, tied in with a kind of Christian-Folk-Weird-Walk-Stone-Circle-Pagan aura. “Good morning my lord”, utters a soft voice at the beginning of track one, before the word “bracken” is spat thrice and the Virgin Mary is called upon. Later on there’s a Polka interpretation of “Stella Splendens”, a piece of latin polyphony form 1399. A bit of 2010s nu-folk twee comes in on the penultimate track and, to close, a piano ballad replete with bird calls, title: “Jerusalem”. Like Blake, anything goes, so long as it contains some spirit and is, at the very least, a bit of a laugh. It’s a listening experience somewhat reminiscent of Wild Beasts 2008 album “Limbo, Panto”: if you give yourself over to the pomp and bombast, you start to feel the sublime. Bishopskin claim that their MO is to strike “The Fear of God” into their audiences and whip them into some kind of cultish frenzy. This I (and you!) have to see to believe. Tickets.
Ikävä Pii (live), AYA Mossambi, SPINEE — Venue MOT, 25.01.2025
Ikävä Pii is an east London-based musician, composer, producer, DJ, and community organiser. Pii’s two albums from 2020 titled “Post-Capitalism Hyperwars pts 1 & 2 are like a melding of Rian Treanor’s File Under UK Metaplasm (2020) and Matmos’ Plastic Anniversary (2019); madcap glitching with a footwork feel and a tongue-in-cheek self-awareness. I’ve always liked the expression “dance tools”. The Turin-based label Early-Reflex uses it here to describe Pii’s EP “Process Fatigue” which was “Written “literally” while keeping “Discord and Ableton open at all times” and funnelling “ideas from one channel to the other””. More hyper-stimulation then. Artistry is still there in the dance tool, but it’s not the central point. It gives itself over to the dancer, a functional bit of kit for them to use. Indeed, the promo around this Friday’s MOT night opts for the same flavour: “Learn from experts sharing actionable insights from the bleeding edge of dance music. Fast-paced, vibrant programme to foster dynamic mixing of scaleable beat deliverables.” Interested to know exactly how this will be performed live, not least because Pii has recently pivoted into vocal-based music under the name AGENDA: which goes for a kind of neo-soul feel over metallic synth stabs. Tickets.
Ephemera
Drake calls no fair and sues UMG for promoting Kendrick Lamar’s diss track against him, surely the nail in the coffin for who won that particular beef.
David Lynch - true visionary - has died. Lynch’s films have a constant, striking use of music, much of which he collaborated on himself. (Re)sharing Angelo Badalamenti’s recounting of the composition for Laura Palmer’s theme for Twin Peaks below.
Outside of his film work, there were also many music-only Lynch compositions / collaborations. Without being too morbid — though Lynch himself may have enjoyed this — “Fire is Coming” feat. David Lynch from Flying Lotus’ Flamagra (2019) has a particularly Lynchian uncanny resonance given the circumstances of his death.
Many have left heartfelt comments and responses to this sad news, but you can always trust
to provide the best perverted / verbose / accurate take on any given subject:“The very beginning of David Lynch's The Straight Story, with the words that introduce the credits—"Walt Disney Presents - A David Lynch Film"—provides what is perhaps the best résumé of the ethical paradox that marked the end of the 20th century: the overlapping of transgression with norm. Walt Disney, the brand of conservative family values, takes under its umbrella David Lynch, an author who epitomizes transgression by bringing to light the obscene underworld of perverted sex and violence that lurks beneath the respectable surface of our lives.”
It now occurs to me that “The Pink Room” from the Fire Walk With Me soundtrack (Lynch, Badalamenti) is charting some quite similar territory to the opening track on “Sludgefest” (Chipmunks et al.)
Finally
We’ve added a highly recommended section and some more events to the existing website. Check it out below.
