If you were to take my creative essence and distill it down to its core components you’d eventually find a small group of individuals that have served as the foundation for everything I love and believe in. Within that highly-exclusive lineup, I can personally guarantee you that Kanye West would be one its primary figures.
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Last month, UK-based musician James Li released his expansive ambient album Life, Death and the Perpetual Wound. The second record released under the Ministry of Interior Spaces moniker, the album is a soul-searching 39-minute meditation on depression, beauty, and life in the face of obliteration.
While we caught up with him earlier this month for an interview, each track of the album is a multi-faceted work that’s deserving of its own analysis. Luckily James was willing to give us the details of what went into each song’s creation on both a technical and spiritual level. Here is his track by track guide to Life, Death and the Perpetual Wound.
The opening track was meant to be recorded live guerrilla-style at the Tate Modern. The London museum holds these repurposed oil tanks with an incredible fourteen-second reverb. But when I finally got there to record they’d just put in a new installation, so I recorded it at home instead. This was probably for the best.
After making a scratch track, I asked my incredible Seattle musician friend Katie Kuffel to send me vocal parts. I stayed at Katie’s apartment in Seattle when I went cold turkey on my SSRIs. It was a really dark time in my life but I think going out to visit her and other kind friends helped me stay alive. This is what I thought about while writing this track - a starting place of peace amid great turmoil overlooking Puget Sound.
Julianna Barwick was the biggest inspiration for this piece. There was a whole other version of Katie’s Apartment that was three minutes longer and more noise-based with samples of Seattle boats and foghorns. I was committed to it for a long time, but it didn’t work well as an introductory track.
I talked about its story extensively in this premiere - but on that same Seattle trip I took a bus to Portland alone, staying with a fan I’d never met before. It was raining, I was getting bad withdrawal symptoms, and listening to a leak of Carrie & Lowell.
At the crux of it I got lost and found myself in a nature preserve on a hill overlooking Portland. It stopped raining, the sun shone, and everything sort of came together at once. I felt the most incredible pain and joy at the same time, which is also a withdrawal symptom. That experience is what this track is about.
Hoyt Arboretum OR is made mostly from warbly guitar pushed through two delay pedals, and an improvised upright piano recorded from a significant distance (an SM57 six meters away). The OP-1 fills in the rest, while the reversed sample is a Totally Legal recording I took during a Sufjan concert in Cincinnati. It’s from the outro of Blue Bucket of Gold.
This particular piece was inspired by Bing & Ruth. I wanted to create a flowy piano-based piece with post-rock guitar as an ethereal undercurrent, representing the sensation of being carried underwater. The growling underneath is my electric guitar being fed into a granulator - I was scratching and scraping the strings while tapping the body. The broody trombone parts are by a Liverpool musician called John Denno - I love how mysterious and bodily they sound. The Montana river sample I used here is actually the last recording I made on my first TASCAM before losing it later that day (more on that next).
C64 Falls kind of looks like Lower Yellowstone Falls, except there are streams of code running down it if you look carefully enough on a sunny day.
This was one of the first tracks I made for this album. The bulk of it was recorded in Japan during a work trip. 80% of it was done on the OP-1 and mixed on its inbuilt DAW. Denno plays the trumpet here which I think really completes the track, giving it its lyrical voice.
Musically it’s very inspired by Disasterpiece as I’d been playing Hyper Light Drifter a lot, an indie game that he’d soundtracked. I love how Disasterpeace uses entirely virtual instruments but degrades them until they sound undeniably physical. Destruction is also a recurring theme on this album, and you can hear it clearly in this track - the way the synths crumble and tailspin at the end of every sequence.
The sample was taken in the California desert with an airplane flying overhead. The gross wet sounds at the end are the “Paint Pots” at Yellowstone. I also utilised the same guitar-granulator method I used on “C64 Falls.”
I refer back to this narratively in the very last track, but I lost my first TASCAM and hundreds of hours of audio in some Montanan foothills. I went back looking for it many times, sometimes somewhat recklessly, before finally giving up. It symbolised a lot of unexpected grief I was experiencing at the time.
This is the album’s William Basinksi piece. I took a John Adams composition (with the label’s permission) and slowed it down dramatically, ie. “screwed” it. After that, I ran it through a guitar amp with lots of distortion to create this crumbling tape effect.
Narrative-wise this was inspired by Craters of the Moon National Park in Idaho and the drive back from it. I describe it in better detail in the zine, but basically, I was riding shotgun with a very quiet, very conservative professor called Cheryl who only listened to Christian music. By the end of the night we were driving through Montana dancing and singing along to Queen and New Order in our seats. I wanted it to go on forever. It was perfect.
I don’t know how to play piano, so this piece was written in the key of C. Inspired by Max Richter - in particular “On the Nature of Daylight” which is a lucidly gorgeous and melodramatic work. It’s basically a poor man’s Max Richter piece, but I’m fond of it in the same way that I’m fond of my own dubious cooking.
The violinist on this track is a high school friend who’s now the CEO of his own Korean-American pharmaceutical company. Platonitudes National Park doesn’t exist, but in my mind it’s a perfect combination of Yellowstone and Glacier. I recorded this during my worst week of 2017 when both my mental and physical health was failing and I literally couldn’t speak. So I guess this spoke for me at the time.
The guitar part is a recording I took in 2014 of my old roommate, Andrew and I messing around on guitar and two delay pedals in my bedroom late at night. It’s honestly one of the coolest things I’ve heard from my guitar, and I’ve tried to recreate it since with no success. I’m grateful I recorded this at the time though, not knowing that I’d use it in an album four years later.
Narratively this is actually about Timber Canyon in Montana. I had a magical walk there with a friend I had a stupid unrequited crush on. It was great. Unfortunately the night turned disastrously bad soon afterwards, and we had to escape death via angry moose.
This song is actually the very first thing I ever made on the OP-1, a month before my first Ministry album Dying Towns of the Midwest. The .wav sat on an old hard drive, and I’m glad I rediscovered it.
After rescuing and mixing the levels on the .wav, I added a few more tracks. The radio chatter is from a Montreal police scanner. The woman counting numbers is my ex (mapped to my OP-1 and triggered by hand). The really heavy distortion is from an electric cello I borrowed. I fed it through an octaver, a reverb pedal, overdrive and a delay pedal which I fooled around with in real-time while playing. Which is a really difficult yoga balancing act to do with a cello.
The piece is inspired by a solitary Amtrak trip I took in the Summer of 2016 after graduating. It was 28-hours each way (actually a bit longer on the way back) from Chicago to Albuquerque. Raton Pass is a mountainous train tunnel by the Colorado-New Mexico border. Going through it feels like a rite of passage.
This track is fairly straightforward and was very linear to make: Swell guitar via volume pedal, very distorted feedback guitar, OP-1 for a recurring synth line passed through a distorted reverb filter, and then two appregiators. I wanted to keep it simple yet beautiful through growing repetition.
During Sophomore year of college six guys from my floor and I drove 24-hours straight to Canyonlands National Park from Grand Rapids. Those few days in the wild transformed my life for good. I didn’t know how nature could be that powerful or make one wish to live forever. I also didn’t know how gross it was to walk behind your friends’ massive shit swinging in front of you wrapped up in a plastic Meijer bag.
I thought of this track singing in the shower and quickly ran out to write it down. I’d been listening to a lot of Erased Tapes Records artists at the time, so I used Nils Frahm’s Una Corda VST as the key instrument. This was definitely one of the hardest tracks to mix because of the violins.
This track is about the healing, almost other-worldly power of nature - you know, the sublime. Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey is in this track’s blood. It also serves as the spiritual sequel, or second half, to The Needles UT.
Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath, 1972 inspired this piece, which is probably the most straightforward track on the album after Cassettelands. I used the OP-1’s FM engine to create the bulk of the song before placing a simple appregiator on top of it. I then reversed the track and added Valhalla Shimmer reverb and guitar pedal distortion which, for some reason, made it sound like a live church organ. About a third of the way in I fade the original unreversed track in but with a very heavy phaser. That’s it.
The field recording is from the Stockholm Public Library, sitting there quietly with my old roommate Anna. I tried to create a fictional cathedral setting in the desert by including hushed whispers. I think the illusion works.
Since the album starts at a home, I wanted it to end at another. A place of safety, creativity, and rest. The House of Eternal Return is an incredible interactive installation in Santa Fe. The concept is that it’s a house with multiple entrances to other times and dimensions, and I liked the idea of being free of this world’s physical constraints. Basically heaven.
However, when I listen to this track, I honestly think of the New Mexico desert more. I explain it more in the zine and also somewhere in this Imgur album. I was in a car with two strangers when we were so, so close to running out of gas in the middle of the New Mexico desert at night. We stopped the car in the desert and let the vastness of nothing sink into us for a while. And that’s what I think of when I listen to this track. Driving into an unknowable eternal darkness. Stopping the car. The ultimate ending.
Musically I lucked into this one. It’s two improvised synths (the Organelle) panned left and right, then screwed down quite a bit slower/deeper. Fittingly my buddy from Albuquerque, Audrin Niema, plays some percussion in the background which I mixed really low and cut a lot of the high ends on. He basically helps add a subtle human element.
Out of all these tracks, “The Perpetual Wound” probably went through the most changes. I want all Ministry albums to end with a song with words that summarise the thematic intent of the record, like the songs that play during the credits of a movie. It’s a nice way to gently wake someone up after their Ministry of Interior Spaces floatation tank experience and to restate the album’s mission.
Here are the ideas that I started then scrapped:
Recording the traditional folk song, “Hang Me Oh Hang Me,” live at an open mic. I liked the idea of ending with something live and human, like entering the album’s universe in a body for the first time. I made a few attempts, including drastically changing the lyrics to a New Mexico UFO encounter, but there were always too many uncontrollable factors, and none of the recordings turned out to be usable.
A repetitive mantra song, like “Driving” by Smog or “The Wounded King” from Dying Towns of the Midwest. As much as I tried, I just couldn’t crack this one.
A folk song I made up about a crust punk saving his boyfriend from an Idaho conversion therapy camp (I have no idea where I got this idea from - probably a crust punk).
I finally settled on a strange folk/Americana song to represent an ongoing personal struggle. It was largely influenced by Bill Callahan - I’d been playing Supper heavily around its writing. The idea of a recurring acoustic guitar hammer-on and the instruments interacting with the lyrics came from Our Anniversary. In Callahan’s song a panned electric guitar represents the chirp of crickets, while in The Perpetual Wound the snare drum represents the crack of distant fireworks.
The drums are by this very talented high schooler, Josh Frenier, who I met in line during Pitchfork 2016. He also helped give me the idea of reincorporating the vocal melody from the opening track, thus making Life, Death and the Perpetual Wound perpetually cyclical.
Stream Life, Death and the Perpetual Wound here, or pick up a copy on Bandcamp.
Album art is sacred. It is the physical embodiment of a record’s soul, a manifestation of the thoughts, strife, and emotion that went into its creation. Album art is often the one chance an artist has to distill their work into something visual; into one composition that translates the art they’ve made into an entirely different medium. An album’s cover is both the face and synopsis of the music that lies directly behind it.
Even outside of vinyl, the artwork of an album is a vital piece of the overall music experience. As we cram albums onto our phones by the hundreds and platforms like Spotify continue to shrink artwork down to hundred-pixel squares, it’s more important than ever to appreciate the work and artistry that goes into a cover.
In 2018 it’s less important to have a cover that “sells” a potential listener simply because there’s rarely ever a sale in the traditional sense anymore. When everything is one click away, the listener has nothing to lose aside from the three-minute commitment it takes to listen to a song. Sure artists can still use sex or controversy to court discussion and clicks, but now more than ever the cover’s primary job is to translate the senses of the record into something outside of itself. Something recognizable, something beautiful, something with heart.
I’ve long been fascinated with album art, and more recently I’ve found myself looking at my music library abstractly, organizing albums and playlists not by artist, alphabet, or genre, but by color. If records are the physical embodiment of the artist's music, then the color can tell us a lot about the mood and texture of their songs at a glance.
Earlier this year I found myself face to face with a playlist of all pink albums and enjoyed the experience of interacting it so much that I figured why not do that for every color? I sat down, scrolled through my library, and after collecting all of these lovely records into one mood-board-like word document, it only made sense to talk about them here. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed apropos to have this multi-color collage coincide with Pride Week, the most colorful time of the year. So here are 60 (mostly single-color) albums that are largely well-regarded, but also definitively “Taylor-core.”
But wait, that's not all! In addition to these images, I’ve plucked one album from each color and given it a short mini-review. Most of the covers above fall under "classic" territory, but there are also some deeper cuts that I've always wanted to write about on here, even if it's just for a short paragraph.
Husband, father, and noted sad man Mike Kinsella has been making music for a majority of his life. From his work as a teenager in the late-90’s under Cap'n Jazz and American Football to his current solo work as Owen, Kinsella is a prolific artist who seems to be continually overflowing with both good music and raw emotion. While American Football’s self-titled debut is now viewed as an all-time classic in the emo/indie/underground circuit, I posit that I Do Perceive should be brought up with the same level of reverence. Offering a slightly more “adult” counterpoint to his younger self, Perceive is an early-morning exploration of Kinsella’s headspace and the inner-workings of his most intimate relationships. Packed with smart observations, clever topics, and lush instrumentation, this album aches with beauty and honesty.
Perhaps best-known for his work with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers during some of their most successful releases, anyone who dives into John Frusciante’s solo records will quickly come to realize what an essential (and artistic) role he played in the group. From his early drugged-out acoustic albums to later-career dissonant electronic phases, Frusciante is a complicated musician with a vast body of intricate work. PBX Funicular Intaglio Zone is a 2012 experimental album that blends electronic, indie, and hip-hop into one schizophrenic explosion of songs that shift rapidly and without warning. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever heard in my life and concrete evidence that Frusciante is a genius with a mind and vision all his own.
While they achieved greater success and recognition with later records, The White Stripes’ self-titled debut remains a fantastic release that marks the beginning of an incredibly strong discography. Featuring punchy, thrashy, and messy garage rock, The White Stripes shows us a band in its charming infancy. There are well-crafted choruses and catchy melodies, but at the same time everything is so ragged and distorted that the entire record sounds as if it was recorded in one take. There’s something pure about pre-fame Jack White, and the band’s rough-around-the-edges debut is eternal proof that everyone must start somewhere.
While it’s only three songs long, Pause and Clause stretches out over a luxurious and lavish 21 minutes. Technically only an EP, this shorter format allowed the band to embrace some semblance of punctuality while simultaneously giving the songs proper time to breathe. Fronted by Minus The Bear’s Jake Snider, Sharks Keep Moving is a reverse-super group whose members went on to form Pretty Girls Make Graves, The Blood Brothers, and These Arms Are Snakes. Pause and Clause, the group's final release, features long-winding and arid songs of love, heartbreak, and disappointment, the centerpiece of which is the 11-minute “Like A River.” One of my favorite songs of all time, “Like A River” tells a tale as old as time of a man, a woman, and a bar. It’s a song that’s not afraid to writhe in its emotions and say exactly what it’s thinking. The lyrics are few and far between, but each line hangs in the air as a poetic observation of the simple beauties in life. The song’s instrumental outro is thrilling and gorgeous, allowing the listener’s mind to reel in their own experiences and project themselves onto the multi-colored soundscape of love and affection.
After gaining a cult following with 2014’s Forgettable, Sorority Noise returned one year later with their landmark Joy, Departed. Decidedly more serious, mature, and musical, the group’s sophomore effort sees a shift from half-goofy pop-punk into full-blown heart-on-sleeve emo. In retrospect, this release does a fantastic job of acclimating the listener into the band’s more-grounded later work, but still manages to strike a balance between sing-along pop-punk and moody emo that I find enchanting. With poetic lyrics tackling depression, self-harm, and drug addiction, Joy, Departed is far from a “fun” listen, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable or important.
Assisted by Seattle’s own Sub-Pop, Everything All The Time was Band of Horses grand unveiling to the world. While “The Funeral” will probably always be their best-known and most widely-recognized song, Everything All The Time is an incredibly-well put-together album featuring personable and charming songs of lackadaisical indie rock with just a tinge of country. Tracks like “The First Song” and “I Go To The Barn Because I Like The” offer laid-back earthy slice of life vignettes that all add up to one of the better debuts of the 2000’s.
For an album that was recorded in only four days, How Strange, Innocence is absolutely immaculate. Even when taken in nearly two decades later, Innocence fits squarely into the Explosions In The Sky’s discography and feels like a group that already knew exactly what they wanted. While the band’s later work gradually became quieter and more subtle, their debut is the loudest, most distorted, and most singular thing they’ve ever recorded. Each song explodes with a wall of guitar, drums, and bass that all chug forward relentlessly until crescendoing into sparks of violent beauty. It’s an absolute wonder.
After achieving commercial success and near-universal acclaim on his first two records, Tame Impala’s third album found Kevin Parker moving away from Beatles-esque psychedelia and further into electronic progginess. Much like Joy Departed, Currents does a fantastic job of segueing long-time fans into the band’s new sound. Opening track “Let It Happen” begins as a classic Tame Impala psychedelic rock song before glitching out into a prolonged electronic section marked by a dancey explosion of sound and light. Mid-album cuts like “Eventually” all bear the same clean production and showcase the specific type of beauty to be found at the intersection between these two seemingly-disparate genres.
Comprised of only two Canadian men, a guitar, and a drum set, Japandroids pack a gigantic, anthemic, and cathartic punch into a small package. While 2012’s Celebration Rock is arguably the rock album of the decade, Post-Nothing will always hold a special place in my heart as that record’s fuzzier, more nostalgic older brother. Beginning with the Thin Lizzy-referencing “The Boys Are Leaving Town” Post-Nothing immediately casts a late-summer spell upon its listener, hurling them into a suspended animation of their own memories. Mid-album cuts like “Heart Sweats” and “Crazy/Forever” find the duo settling into well-crafted melodies and lulling the listener into a sense of trust and inner-peace. Finally, album closer “I Quit Girls” is a soul-rending adult lullaby that builds to a climactic groove which eventually ferries the listener off to the end of the record.
One of the most common words that people use when discussing instrumental music is that it’s “cinematic.” While this is often meant as an endorsement, I’ve always read this descriptor as a bit of a back-handed compliment.
On one hand, this (hypothetical) person is saying ‘this so good it could be in a movie,’ but they’re also saying ‘I view it as background music’ in the same breath. They recognize it as music on a technical level, but the only reference point they have for this type of sound is when it’s pushed to the back of a movie with sound effects and dialogue placed over it. Almost as if it’s not musical enough to stand on its own due to the lack of vocals.
I’ve written previously about my complicated relationship with post-rock and instrumental music, even (lovingly) using the phrase “background music” to describe it. While I stand by that term, the more vital piece of this equation is the listener’s role in the genre’s consumption. Instrumental music rewards its listener regardless of how carefully they’re paying attention. Sure, you can leave instrumental music on in the background, but something wonderful happens when you listen to it actively.
When you put an instrumental record on with the music as your sole focus, the songs gain abilities that they wouldn’t otherwise have. In many people’s minds, this is the “ideal” way to interact with music of any genre, but I recognize it’s not always practical given how much commitment it requires. But when you sit. And kill your senses. And listen. The music can envelop you. It can access forgotten parts of your brain. It can retrieve long-lost memories. It can re-establish broken connections. It can help you feel.
Music serves a purpose for everyone, and each genre possesses different abilities. Instrumental music allows the listener expression, projection, and reconciliation on a level unparalleled by any other genre. It’s the soundtrack to our own thoughts and senses, the backdrop to a mind running wild.
On his newest release as Ministry of Interior Spaces, James Li takes the listener on a “mystical road trip through a magic-realist American West.” It’s a long-winding, heartfelt, and compelling release that means as much to its creator as it can for the listener. With each track named after real-world locations, Li takes inspiration from events in his life and weaves a narrative of recovery in the face of obliteration. While his story remains unspoken, the music acts as both his voice and emotion, carrying the listener from one happening to the next with ethereal grace. It’s a canvas that listeners can engage with, project their own experiences onto, and enclose themselves in.
James Li: We all experience nature in a way that is subjective and relative to our own selves. There is no truly neutral way of experiencing nature - a family road trip to the Grand Canyon eating from Wendy’s drive-throughs isn’t neutral, but neither is solo backpacking in the Cascades.
As humans we can’t help but experience nature through our own individual-shaped lens. We’re always bringing our personalities, our anxieties, our philosophies, our memories, and emotions to the table. In my case, my worldview was seriously muddied with depression and anxiety. I was dragging a lot of ugliness to these places of often incomprehensible beauty.
There was a definite, discernible conflict whenever this happened. I’d find myself humbled and confused by the natural beauty in front of me - how could so much goodness and pain exist at the same time? So each track isn’t as much of a description of a place as it is a description of that event, that meeting. They’re not describing how the place objectively is but rather how they made me feel at that moment.
James Li: The two years I spent making this album were full of bruising seismic life changes. This included graduating college, leaving Michigan for good, taking an office job in Hong Kong, going through a bad long distance break up, spending some time in the hospital, a confusing visit to the States, then moving to England where I live now. I don’t want to talk about everything because it’d involve people who wouldn’t want to be involved, but it was definitely the most painful and truly nihilistic time of my life. Completing this project was the last thread pulling me through. I wanted to create an album that could justify getting through all of this loss, a reminder to myself that real objective beauty exists.
I had a clear idea of what I wanted Life, Death and the Perpetual Wound (LDATPW) to be early on, taking the atypical move of writing a thesis and track listing before starting recording. Because of that specific vision, I was merciless with what didn’t fit. I cut at least thirty tracks in the making of this album - some turning up on Sister in the Snow, an EP about Michigan I released in the interim.
Writing LDATPW was a huge learning process as well. Through trial and error I learned new methods such as screwing and granular synthesis, which made me constantly retread my steps and revise earlier tracks. For two years my life basically revolved around finishing this album, and at times I wasn’t sure if it’d ever be completed. I only allowed myself to put it out when I was certain it’d been fully realised.
James Li: Liance is an intensely personal project with little space between what I write and myself. It’s very literal. After releasing Bronze Age of the Nineties I wanted a musical outlet that didn’t have my personhood at the forefront, something completely untied to my ego.
Ministry of Interior Spaces started in January 2016 after playing the indie game Kentucky Route Zero. There’s this one scene where you visit a government agency called the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces. Inspired by the game’s ambient synth score and magic-realist American setting, I wanted to create my own Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces, a “Ministry of Interior Spaces” so to speak. Dying Towns of the Midwest was to be an ambient album from that Ministry’s perspective, a government survey of post-financial crash towns I was familiar with in Michigan.
This was during J-term in the middle of a particularly cold Michigan winter. I’d just bought an OP-1 and slept in a sleeping bag as there wasn’t any heating in my room. I was experiencing serious anxiety about my post-college future and the upcoming presidential election. I was also reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and watching the movie Her to sleep every night, all-in-all a strange headspace to be in.
These different factors somehow came together as the perfect catalyst and I found myself churning out tracks on bus rides and 15-minute class breaks. I made friends at an antique store so I could use their Wurlitzer and recorded a borrowed cello in the kitchen. Dying Towns of the Midwest took just four weeks from conception to publishing, which is quick for any album. Unlike writing under Liance, none of it felt vulnerable even though it was still a deeply emotional process. It felt liberating to create something so completely for myself without the expectation of explaining my lyrics or performing live.
I still consider Liance and Ministry just as important as each other though. They simply occupy different parts of my mind, with the added benefit of being able to jump project-to-project whenever I have a creative block on the other. There’s a lot of narrative overlap as well, although Liance focuses more on memory while Ministry focuses on the spaces they occur in. In fact, the next Liance album covers events described in LDATPW.
James Li: I’ve been very lucky to have the musicians I’ve had on this album. All of these connections have been completely serendipitous. Katie Kuffel, who sings on the opening track, used to date my old high school friend during college which is how we know each other. I stayed at her apartment for a week when I started writing this album. It just so happens that she’s also an incredible musician and someone whose work ethic I look up to.
John Denno, who recorded all the brass on the album, reached out to me online after listening to the Liance albums. He teaches at an Indian boarding school which one of my best friends coincidentally went to. I met Josh Frenier, the high schooler who plays drums on the last track, while waiting in line for Pitchfork 2016 with his dad. Those are only just some examples of the many crazy connections on this record. The universe is abundant and I continue to meet exceptional human beings without ever planning to.
I think it goes to show that most people are inherently giving and just want to be part of something beautiful. It’s also a testament to the new possibilities technology has opened. Borders and regional scenes simply don’t matter as much as they used to. There’re stems on this album recorded all around the world, including India, Seattle, Liverpool, New Mexico, Brighton, and Hong Kong. All you need today are good strangers, a decent microphone, and a Google Drive account.
James Li: Depression, and also just that life itself is inherently painful. The Perpetual Wound is also a theme carried over from the first album, which ends with “The Wounded King.”
James Li: On Dying Towns of the Midwest I named some tracks after places in Michigan like Holland or Marquette. This was inspired by Bon Iver’s self-titled album, with titles like “Lisbon, OH” and “Hinnom, TX.” On LDATPW I wanted to take this concept one step further and turn a series of imagined spaces into a full narrative.
Worldbuilding and storytelling is inherently fun. It’s in our very blood to mythologise. I’ve always enjoyed science fiction and concept albums, or really just concepts in general, and wanted to try creating a self-contained universe in an ambient album.
The American West is perhaps the most sublime and unknowable place in the world. Its landscapes genuinely changed my life during a period of serious desperation. There’s something truly transformative in the West’s sheer scale of wonder - something spiritual, for lack of a better word. It felt like my duty to pay tribute to its beauty and document what I’d seen.
The idea of a journey came naturally as that was how I’d experienced the American West. Traveling is probably my favourite thing in the world - the notion of free movement and perpetual discovery. It’s something that I’ve been fixated on since a very early age, perhaps because Hong Kong is a small place surrounded by water and borders.
The events covered in LDATPW come from four separate trips to the American West during and just after college. In 2014 I followed some guys on my floor and drove 22 hours straight to Canyonlands for some backpacking, which was my first real encounter with the West. Then in 2016 I headed out to the West three more times - to Seattle over Spring Break after going cold turkey on my SSRIs, to Montana and Wyoming just two days after graduating for a geology course, and New Mexico via Amtrak a few weeks before my visa expired. Each journey was unique, challenging, and utterly transformative.
While designing the album I stitched these separate journeys together as one epic continuous pilgrimage, an album you could draw on a map. It’s a simple way of framing that helps give it a larger sense of progression and meaning, while staying true to the actual personal journeys I’d experienced.
A really fantastic book on the American West and all of its paradoxes is Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. If you’re able to look past his macho abrasiveness, it’s a perfect summary of this album’s core themes. It also informed some of the poetry on the album’s zine and the lyrics of the last track.
James Li: The listener’s experience should always take precedent. It’s my hope that people continue to project their experiences onto my music. My favourite aspect of working on this project are the completely different takeaways people get from the same tracks. “This reminds me of an aquarium I went to when I was five,” or “This track totally brings back college summers in Lake Michigan.” Hearing memories like these gets me super excited. It means more than any good review could.
And that’s the beauty of ambient music I think. You get to choose your level of engagement, and however you interpret it is yours to own.
While some musicians may disagree, I see making music as essentially creating a tool. It’s a noble and necessary thing to do, but you’re still ultimately creating something that exists outside of yourself for others to use. When someone likes your music, they like the tool that you’ve created, not you. Your relationship to what you’ve created shouldn’t matter as it exists independently on its own. And that’s kind of freeing, you know? You get to contribute back to the world without forcing your ego onto it, and the people who need to find your music will find it eventually.
Stream Life, Death and the Perpetual Wound here, or pick up a copy on Bandcamp.
Read James Li's track by track analysis here.
June is almost upon us, and that can only mean one thing… it’s time for another roundup of the month’s best new music! May was a stellar month with some big names dropping long-awaited records, and as usual, there were some surprises along the way. Let’s waste no time and jump straight into it.
The lead-up to Parquet Courts’ sixth album appeared to be a series of increasingly-questionable decisions, each of which seemed more worrisome than the last. The first strike came when the band announced that production on their new record was to be helmed entirely by Danger Mouse, a known-homogenizer of rock music. By the time the band made a daytime appearance on Ellen, most fans cautiously waded into Wide Awake! with tempered expectations. While I’ll admit I’m a relatively new fan of Parquet Courts, Wide Awake! seems to be the most thoughtful, polished, and complete offering the band has put out to date. Perhaps thanks to that unified sound brought to the table by Danger Mouse, it feels like the band was finally unencumbered enough to get as freaky, groovy, and political as they have always wanted to, all while sounding as clear and raw as they ever have. Still oscillating between thrashy punk and long-winded indie, after hearing the record it now feels silly that we ever doubted them in the first place.
By now everyone knows the story of Rae Sremmurd. Two brothers from Mississippi who broke their way onto the scene with “No Flex Zone” in 2014 and continued to solidify their place in hip-hop with a stream of undeniable singles, killer features, and inescapable cultural moments. For their third record, the duo decided to embrace the theme of threes and release a triple album; one traditional Rae Sremmurd release, plus one solo record from each of the two brothers. I ended up enjoying SR3MM far more than I ever expected (in fact, I wrote a full review for it here) but aside from exceeding my expectations, I think the Brothers Sremm handled every facet impeccably. Triple albums are rare, but when we do get them they’re notoriously bloated, overly-long, and just plain bad, but here the two approached it with a unique perspective and were able to deliver the exact level of fun that fans have come to expect from them. Plus watching Swae Lee and Slimm Jximmi flourish in their respective styles is wonderful to see. From bangers to ballads, SR3MM has it all and excels on every front.
I’ve always been a pretty passive fan of Beach House. I like what they do, but rarely ever seek it out on my own. When the group released Depression Cherry in 2015 something finally clicked for me, and I fell in love. Wonderfully-dark, beautifully-pensive, and just the right amount of distorted, Depression Cherry was the record I’d always wanted the band to make. Despite turning me into a fan with that record, the duo squandered that goodwill almost immediately when they released Thank Your Lucky Stars the very same year and gave us a second album that sounded exactly like everything else they’ve ever done. Now in 2018, the group seems to have stared down these two divergent paths and leaned even harder into that darker side that I enjoyed so much on Depression Cherry. Forecasted by a plethora of increasingly-dark singles and a detailed public announcement/explanation of their sonic change-up, 7 represents the fulfillment and embrace of the band’s darker side. The full evolution of this distorted, borderline-shoegazey sound, which (from the outside) sounds like quite the pivot for a dream pop act, yet Beach House manage to make it look effortless. 7 finds the band plunging headfirst into midnight and emerging with some of their best work to date.
For their sixth album as a band, the Arctic Monkeys decided to curve every sonic, historical, and fan expectation in favor of something completely left field. A far pivot from the dark deserty sounds of their last album, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino sees Alex Turner taking center stage (quite literally) as a sort of smoky lounge-singer in search of the soul. On some level, this record is just as “dark” as AM, but ends up being much more laid-back, conversational, and perhaps most importantly: funny. Tranquility Base a Hotel & Casino takes a similar approach to all of its songs, embracing a dynamic of hyper-verbose lyricism sung over subdued instrumentals. It’s a far cry from any of their previous work, but it’s a combination that works for me. There are still enough musical moments for the other band members to show their chops, but as a whole Tranquility Base reads like a late-night exploration of Turner’s brain over the course of one dark night of the soul. A lounge album recorded in the void of space. A stream-of-consciousness outpouring in the aftermath of a post-Bowie world. A near-future disaster recorded directly to music. A wonder.
Ever since releasing one of the best records of his career in 2015, the hip-hop public has long-anticipated Pusha T’s next move, waiting with bated breath to see how he could possibly follow it up. On his first full-length in three years, he reveals the answer was to make things shorter, tighter, and even more cohesive. The first of four Kanye-produced albums we’re receiving over the next 30 days, Daytona is the best non-poop-related indicator of what to expect from these upcoming projects. Bearing Ye’s classic chopped-up soul-sampled beats, an intentionally-short tracklist, and songs that bleed into one other flawlessly, Pusha’s latest output is a sharp, soulful, and compact update on the rapper’s mindstate. “Santeria” is a slowly-mounting guitar-based track that climaxes in an explosion of organ and a moody Spanish refrain. Oppositely, “Infrared” is a barebones track that finds Pusha T spitting realness on everything from politics to race relation and ends on a few subliminal shots at Drake… Speaking of which, the benefit of writing these at the end of the month is that we now seem to find ourselves in the midst of a beef between the two. On the 25th Drake dropped “Duppy Freestyle” to which Push responded with “The Story of Adidon.” While Drake’s freestyle centers around Pusha’s credibility in the drug game, Pusha T went straight for the jugular attacking Drake, his family, and his best friend, all within three minutes. The story is still developing, but as a fan of each artist, it’s exciting to hear new, sharp, and mean music from each as they go back and forth in what may be the defining hip-hop beef of the decade.
For someone whose music typically gets placed under the “Slacker” sub-genre of indie, Courtney Barnett seems to work really fucking hard. I know that name is just a silly label meant to describe her music, but I can’t help but feel like that title is a disservice to her art. There are certainly still moments of slack-fueled hopelessness throughout Barnett’s sophomore effort (most notably “Crippling Self Doubt and a General Lack of Self-Confidence”), but there are moments of strength too. Perhaps spiritually-bolstered by last year’s collaboration with Kurt Vile, Barnett seems more pointed, bombastic, and personable than ever before. Opting for less-narrative songs than her breakthrough record, Tell Me How You Really Feel finds Barnett shredding, grooving, and narrating her way through ten stories of personal growth. Sometimes psychological, sometimes agonizingly-real, this album feels like Courtney Barnett engraved a piece of herself onto each record and passed them out to people on the street. A wondrous (and sometimes rambling) journey of the self.
I’m not a sad person. I don’t have many regrets in life, nor a wealth of personal tragedies to draw from. Earlier this year I attended a This Will Destroy You concert, and it was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in recent memory. I knew their songs like the back of my hand and midway through the instrumental set, my mind began to wander into long-forgotten thoughts. It was meditative. I began thinking about people, places, and events I hadn’t considered in years, as if the music was helping my brain re-establish these broken connections in order to feel these things I hadn’t in decades. At its best, I feel music offers listeners a canvas on which to project their own feelings and anxieties. An avenue to interact with deep-seated traumas and unheard thoughts, and that’s exactly what Ministry of Interior Spaces offers on Life, Death and the Perpetual Wound. Half concept album, half whatever you want it to be, Perpetual Wound is an ambient release that recounts the tale of a “mystical road trip through a magic-realist American West.” It’s a document of its creator’s struggle with drugs, depression and, friendship in the face of natural beauty. The record tells a timeless tale that simultaneously acts as a canvas for the listener to venture through and draw upon. A beautiful self-exploration.
We interviewed Ministry of Interior Spaces here.
When I first discovered The Wonder Years the band felt like a revelation to me. The group’s hyper-realist approach to lyricism was something I’d never heard before in my life, and something I desperately needed at that time. When I first discovered Illuminati Hotties, their single “(You’re Better) Than Ever” immediately evoked the same feeling I first got when I discovered The Wonder Years so long ago. Punchy, powerful, and disarmingly self-aware, Illuminati Hotties is a “tenderpunk” group fronted by Sarah Tudzin that finds the band grasping at the straws of adulthood. It’s both heartbreaking and reassuring to hear music from someone in such a similar situation as myself. It’s an album about fucking up, growing up, and moving on. Tudzin takes a similar approach to The Wonder Years using specific vignettes and imagery from her own life to let the listener into her existence on a level that’s almost too close for comfort. From working three jobs to pay off college debt to doughnut dates and ceilings covered in glow in the dark stars, everything connects in a way that’s just eerily real. Filled with cute lines, catchy choruses, and poetic barbs, Kiss Your Frenemies fumbles its way through adulthood in an intimate, anthemic, and beautiful way.
BlocBoy JB - Simi: After making waves with the Drake-assisted “Look Alive” in February, Memphis rapper BlocBoy JB funneled his newfound-attention into a well-polished and banger-filled mixtape. Additional fun fact: I crunched the numbers and Mr. JB ad libs “that’s on my mama” a total of 32 times throughout.
Royce 5'9" - Book of Ryan: Hyper-lyrical, incredibly-dense, and heartbreakingly-personal hip-hop that demystifies the history of Ryan Daniel Montgomery. Told from a first-person perspective, Royce remains as technical as ever while also taking an incredibly-compelling storytelling approach.
Desiigner - L.O.D.: A perfectly-punctual and wonderfully-ad libbed EP from the goofy dude that brought us “Panda.”
Iceage - Beyondless: Moody and anxiety-riddled post-rock from Copenhagen.
Parkway Drive - Reverence: Well-crafted metalcore that bubbles up from the diaphragm and explodes into a perfectly-honed point. Chuggy, angry, and filled with growls, Parkway Drive continues to kill it.
DJ Koze - Knock Knock: Natural electronic music that’s been warped, shifted, and delivered it to us from another universe. Simply Transportive.
Shakey Graves - Can’t Wake Up: Slow-moving psychedelic Americana that twists and writhes in the evening light.
Cut Worms - Hollow Ground: Jangly throwback rock with just enough personality and weirdness to be a pleasant oddity.
The Word Alive - Violent Noise: Sinewy and mostly-generic metalcore with an electronic tinge.
Jon Hopkins - Singularity: (Mostly-)electronic music that crests with emotion and pulsates with mood until eventually frittering out into slowly-unwinding heartbreak.
Mark Kozelek - Mark Kozelek: Long-winded as ever, Mark Kozelek gets personable and folksy for 90 minutes as he expels every verbose thought in his head.
Ty Dolla $ign - Beach House 3 Deluxe Edition: Noted crooner/rapper hybrid Ty Dolla $ign tops off last year’s installment of the acclaimed Beach House Series with an additional six summery songs.
Lady Legs - Holy Heatwave: Celebratory indie rock with a ceaseless groove and unkillable joy.
Playboi Carti - Die Lit: 19 smoky bangers filled with incredulous ad-libs and not a lot else.
La Luz - Floating Features: Dreamy, sun-kissed surf rock that reverberates with passion and strength.
Wajatta - Casual High Technology: Reggie Watts and John Tejada combine forces to form a delightful portmanteau and equally-delightful electro-pop.
NAV - Reckless: I don’t understand Nav.
James Bay - Electric Light: Pop music that’s simultaneously soulful and sterile.
KYLE - Light of Mine: 2017 XXL Freshman, joyous rapper, and possible industry plant KYLE returns with a 15-track tape of feel-good hip-hop.
Now, Now - Saved: Polished and simplistic indie pop that mixes heartfelt emo with electronic sensibilities.
Remember Sports - Slow Buzz: After changing their name, the vivacious pop-punk band is back proving (once again) that Philly is the eternal hotbed of upcoming emo rock.
Lil Baby - Harder Than Ever: Street rap assisted by a high-profile Drake feature.
Clairo - diary 001: Since half the tracklist consists of revisiting the viral hits that have brought her thus far, diary 001 ends up being a scattershot history of Clairo’s rapidly-ascending career and musical phases up to this point.
A$AP Rocky - Testing: Immaculate flows, booming bass, and dark production. A million drugged-out lines spit in zero gravity while coming down from acid.
Hatchie - Sugar & Spice: Lovelorn dream pop that captures relationship dynamics with as much color as a middle school trapper keeper.
Chvrches - Love is Dead: Glossy and bright indie pop that practices what its title preaches.
Shawn Mendes - Shawn Mendes: Pretty-boy pop music that I wouldn’t know about if it weren’t for Kevin Abstract.
American Pleasure Club - Tour Tape: Following-up their fantastic a whole fucking lifetime of this, Sam Ray offers up a free download of twelve tracks that were previously exclusive to the band’s merch booth.
Lil Aaron - ROCK$TAR FAMOU$: After discovering his jaw-dropping emo remixes last summer, Aaron is back with a sophomore album that continues to blend his unique combination of hip-hop, rock, and humor.
We also saw singles from Travis Scott, Snail Mail, Childish Gambino, Sufjan Stevens, Dance Gavin Dance, Andre 3000, Future Islands, Jimmy Eat World, Dirty Projectors, Protomartyr, The Flaming Lips, Sia, Attila, White Denim, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Lil Uzi Vert, Shortly, Denzel Curry, Weezer, Tyler, The Creator, The Devil Wears Prada, Melody’s Echo Chamber, Get Up Kids, Jorja Smith, Drake, Anderson .Paak, Weezer (again), Jay Rock, James Blake, Lil Peep, Fleet Foxes, Idles, Mac Miller, Charli XCX, and Mitski.
In other news, we’re now far enough into the year that I’m beginning to make discoveries that I wish I had included in previous month’s write-ups. To amend this, I’m adding a new section to these monthly roundups: A “Rewind” section that goes back in time to highlight albums I missed but wish I hadn’t.
Bambara - Shadow on Everything: Dark, hard-drinking post-punk with a southern narration-like drawl. Music for a midnight drive through the desert.
Nanaki - Decline & Dislocation: Brooding spiritual post-rock that drips with distortion and head-bobbing riffs.
The World Extinct - Theodicy: A powerful bite-sized metalcore offering from a (mostly) new lineup of band members.
Bewilder - Everything Up To Now: Heart-rending and soul-binding emo-flavored math rock. An incredibly-apt band name.
Words on Music and Life.
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