𝔟𝔫𝔤𝔯𝔷 𝔩𝔱𝔡.003

"ℑ 𝔥𝔞𝔳𝔢 𝔢𝔵𝔠𝔢𝔩𝔩𝔢𝔫𝔱 𝔫𝔢𝔴𝔰 𝔣𝔬𝔯 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔴𝔬𝔯𝔩𝔡: 𝔗𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔢 𝔦𝔰 𝔫𝔬 𝔰𝔲𝔠𝔥 𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔞𝔰 𝔫𝔢𝔴 𝔴𝔞𝔳𝔢."

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DJ Minx - A Walk in the Park [2004, M_nus]

I listened to very few club bangers this week as I was collecting tunes for an indie rock radio show: glider on Refuge Worldwide, the latest iteration of my DJ collab with beloved DJ, producer, Panorama Bar alum (and, incidentally, essential member of the bngrz fam) Nick Höppner. 

This one from DJ Minx, though, has an unwavering position in my listening habits. On some semi-secret level I pretend it's my own personal theme song, listening to it privately as I go about my day-to-day business. The subtle mischievousness of it makes daily life feel like some kind of comically uneventful spy movie ("What's he done now? Said a basic German phrase like 'sehr gerne' with convincing nonchalance? Badboy.") Maybe, on some level, that's how DJ Minx felt when she made it, though in her case she was pulling off a genuinely slick double-life: working an office job at GM while making tunes and DJing on the DL. "A Walk in the Park"—which she wrote in the time it took her husband to do a grocery run—is the crème de la crème of a sound that will always be close to my heart, I guess because it was peaking when I first got into DJ culture: minimal house, elegantly skeletal but warm and catchy enough to get stuck in your head. And, in the right setting, it's an absolute party-rocker. 

As rave lore has it, Minx once turned up to a party Hawtin was playing in Detroit. He told her he’d just played "A Walk in the Park" but was going to play it again just so she could see "what it does to people." She couldn't believe it. "I sat and watched him play it and loop it, loop it and loop it, and the crowd was absolutely bonkers." A '90s minimal party in Detroit where this one makes the room pop off? As mythical dance floors go, that's about as good as it gets for me.

The Knife - Silent Shout / Pass This On [Rabid Records, 2006]

Beyond making some of the best pop songs and club bangers of my lifetime, Karin and Olof Dreijer animated my view of how music and politics intersect more than perhaps anyone else. In Karin's case, it was through their music as Fever Ray and metamorphosis into a gleefully unhinged queer feminist firebrand; with Olof, it was—somewhat counterintuitively—through the relative silence of what he called an intentional "withdrawal."

When The Knife stopped making music and Karin blazed ahead as Fever Ray, there was immense pressure for Olof’s second act. Instead, beyond the occasional remix and a short run of now-classic techno 12-inches as Oni Ayhun, he busied himself leading music workshops for undocumented migrants and working as a camp counselor in Sweden. The Guardian couldn't conceal its head-scratching when it wrote about his reemergence as a flutist in the Tunisian group Hiya wal Âalam.

When I interviewed Olof at Unsound in 2019, he told me there would be no big solo act. He disliked the spotlight and, as a devout feminist and believer in international solidarity, the only worthwhile use he could imagine for his profile was elevating marginalized artists (hence his 2010 remix of Sudanese activist Emmanuel Jal—IMO the best track Innervisions ever released). After the interview, someone close to Olof told me that, while she admired him enormously, there was something ironic about him—of all white men from wealthy nations—being the one to "withdraw." Olof's remarks rewired my brain; I still wrestle with them today.

But I know I'm not alone in being hyped to see him release wild, technicolor bangers on Hessle Audio and Dekmantel these past few years. I rarely get as excited about a new record as I am about his first solo album, Loud Bloom. My musical OCD rituals stop me from listening to the first single until I have the whole thing, so in the meantime, I've returned to this video of their opening number on the 2006 Silent Shout tour. This was the first sign that The Knife were not just a cool new band, but something profoundly next-level—genuinely strange and truly different. It gave me chills then and it still does now, 20 years later.

Sonic Youth - Shadow of a Doubt [1986, Blast First]

I'm currently going through the fourth or fifth Sonic Youth phase of my life, and this time around, it's all about Kim Gordon. That's partly because she won't stop cranking out fresh and twisted music (at 72, no less), from last year's The Collective to last week's PLAY ME. 

Even when revisiting Sonic Youth's old records, the ones with her singing tend to eclipse the others. The band was foisted on me as unquestionable royalty when I joined my college radio station at 18. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found their sprawling discography and dissonant sound a little hard to crack. "Shadow of a Doubt" was the first one that got under my skin. Gordon says it was inspired in part by the Hitchcock film Strangers on a Train. Although it didn't come out till 13 years after this record, the movie it makes me think about is Eyes Wide Shut, the way it dwells on the haunting potency of infidelity in a dream. The last time I saw the late JD Twitch, he played an edit of this one (just the original, he claimed, with a kick drum whacked on and the grungy middle bit scooped out). With an added clubby pulse, even just the opening bars—its plucked arpeggios dripping like melting icicles—would get the job done.

The Vaselines - Molly's Lips [1988, 53rd & 3rd]

One of my many personal highlights from Crying In H Mart, the 2021 memoir by Japanese Breakfast's Michelle Zauner, is her account of a teenage crush on a wannabe alt boy named Nick. Even in his mediocrity, Nick neatly embodies the vibe I, too, was going for at that age: "shaggy blond hair, painted his nails with White-Out… quiet and terribly slow, like he was stoned all the time." He had a band and she got their demo. "There were five tracks," she says, "the last, a song called ‘Molly’s Lips.’ I wondered if Molly was another one of his many exes… I was too stupid to know that ‘Molly’s Lips’ was actually just a Nirvana cover, and I’d like to think that Nick was at least too stupid to know that Nirvana was covering the Vaselines."

Before I read her book I was too stupid to know either version of "Molly's Lips," a song now firmly established on my musical speed dial. I always loved Nirvana’s more famous Vaselines cover, “Jesus Don’t Want Me For A Sunbeam,” but since it appears on one of the few albums I’ve listened to regularly since the age of 12—MTV Unplugged In New York—I've kind of played it to death. (Actually, that one’s a double cover, too. “It's a rendition of an old, um... Christian song,” Kurt mumbles from within his low-key fire combo of granny cardigan and multiple t-shirts.) Anyway, "Molly’s Lips." Listening to this one as a middle-aged man confirms a fundamental truth: I will never stop loving catchy punk songs about crushes. 

Young Marble Giants - Colossal Youth [1980, Rough Trade]

Combing through my indie favorites this week, it occurred to me that, at some point, Young Marble Giants entered the inner sanctum of my personal canon. This is post-punk minimalism at its finest, from a Welsh trio that doesn't include a drummer. Some of the tracks, like "Brand - New - Life," would be straight-up punk songs, were it not for a clicking metronome instead of clattering drums, Alison Statton singing quietly (and a little shyly), and the distortion turned resolutely off. The utterly un-punk organ-and-drum-machine tracks on this record are great, too. At first blush, it might sound like a lighthearted sketch, but "Wind In The Rigging" has been a steady companion to me for decades.

𝔟𝔬𝔫𝔲𝔰 𝔪𝔦𝔵: 𝔤𝔩𝔦𝔡𝔢𝔯 𝔣𝔢𝔞𝔱. 𝔟𝔦𝔩𝔩 𝔰𝔞𝔫𝔱𝔬𝔯 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔫𝔦𝔠𝔨 𝔥ö𝔭𝔭𝔫𝔢𝔯 𝔞𝔱 𝔦𝔨𝔦𝔦

After blabbing about this indie rock thing so much I figured I may as well drop this here: Nick Höppner and I sharing the decks on a preposterously freezing night in January for the first glider event at Ikii in Berlin.

You can check out all the songs I ramble about here in this playlist.