Late Night Listening for Midsummer Malaise.

I wish there was a generally acknowledged catch-all name for this kinda stuff. Y’know - sorta psychedelic, but not heavy or way-out enough to flip anyone’s wig; sorta ambient, but too eventful and attention-grabbing; sorta dance music indebted, but not very dancey or purely electronic; sorta experimental, in the generic sense, but not jarring or challenging enough to really justify the label as a descriptor. Sort of in the right ballpark for “hypnogogic pop”, but not really pop, and not ‘80s obsessed, fashion conscious, ultra self-aware or predominantly shit.

So a bit of everything and a whole lot of nothing really. What is this stuff that’s split itself off from the early ‘00s psyche/drone/whatever underground and taken up root somewhere around the central hub of Not Not Fun / 100% Silk etc, gradually migrating across to slightly bigger labels as time goes on? I dunno. Maybe somebody who still reads The Wire can tell me. I just tend to file it as “late night listening”, for reasons as dull as they are self-explanatory. I’ve been listening to a lot of it over the past few years anyhow, and finding it very rewarding.

Cringeworthy intro aside, it occurred to me the other week that all of my current favourite practitioners of this vague form have put out new releases recently, and that it might be nice to throw down some thoughts about them all now, rather than waiting for my end-of-year round up, as is traditional. So without further ado, let’s throw some cushions together somewhere near the turntable and spend the week seeing how this shit stacks up…

Labels: late night listening, series intros