The Official Chart for November 1
f(x)’s aesthetics are always top notch, but I’ve generally found their music to be pretty hit and miss. The same is true of their new album, which is largely forgettable but has two fantastic tracks. One is the title track, “4 Walls,” a great slice of garage, and the other is a piano-led house track called “Rude Love.”
Some similarly old-school house pianos in this remix by KiNK, who I think is mostly a more minimal producer, as with the title track of his most recent EP, “Cloud Generator.”
It’s apparently minimal week here at Voyou Désoeuvré, courtesy of my Spotify Discover playlist. “Motherless Child” by Romare does exactly what I want this kind of music to do, with a small number of components each carefully engineered to get stuck in your head. Looking into the artist, though, turns out to be a little troubling: a white guy taking his stage name from an African-American artist and releasing records built from samples of Black music, with titles like Meditations on Afrocentrism. Now, minimal is full of white guys and the whole scene obviously owes a great debt to the African-American inventors of dance music, and acknowledging this debt is surely better than simply ignoring it; but there’s a risk of fetishisation in the way that acknowledgement takes place.
I don’t know what the proper name is for the kind of post-dubstep Lxury makes; luckily, that question can be avoided by listening to this remix, which is exemplary sino-grime.
Last but by no means least, Montgomery, part of the burgeoning goth-inflected 80s MOR revival scene. I’m not sure if that’s actually a scene, but it is the best way I can describe the sound that Montgomery has in common with Kitten.
