GHOSTMiLK doles out the dopamine with a club flip of “Thuggish Ruggish Bone” on their first EP
Plus more new music from country rockers B. Hamilton, drone guitar trio Harjo, experimentalist Rent Romus with Heikki Koskinen, and Vallejo producer Asterisq
We’ve got nothing to say today except… enjoy the music. Happy 420 🌿
— White Crate
SPEED SLOW RINSE REPEAT
Rave music. No build up. Just pounding bass, spectral synths, and insane laughter straight out the gate. That’s how Oakland producer GHOSTMiLK opens up their self-titled EP, their very first EP period, featuring mixing and mastering work by Madre Guía and Obstac. The brutal four-on-the-floor of “DODECAHEDRON” gives way to stuttering beats, alien wah wah, and mini tractor beams on “Power የuffs ✿”. But there’s nothing quite like the healthy dose of dopamine all us 90s hip hop lovers will get from “Thugs luvin hugs,” which flips the classic “Thuggish Ruggish Bone” by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony into a warehouse-ready gangsta footwork jam. Speed it up, slow it down, rinse, repeat.
— Ronny Kerr
DUSTY CHUGGING COUNTRY
Written and Recorded in March 2023 in Jack London’s Childhood Shack. Next to all the chained down dog bowls and spoons.
It’s 2023. Who cares what you call your EP? Or your songs for that matter. All that matters is the practice. Maybe that’s all that has ever mattered, in music or anything. B. Hamilton understands this, and you can tell because the poetry pours out in fountains from their latest four-track work given the unwieldy title I would give songs numbers instead of names if I could. I can? Ok. Here I go, but not really. Dusty, chugging country rock, the songs here just roll along like a train ride through the West, repeating riffs and drumbeats that sink deeper and deeper into your heart with time. Highlights are “Six Brown Eyes in Bakersfield” (with the choice lyric “don’t call your father ‘daddy’ that’s just gross / and don’t blame him for the dumb that shit that you do”) plus closing track “That French Guy on the Jazz,” which turns up the fuzzy distortion and skips into the sunset.
— Ronny Kerr
CRUSHING SONIC BATH
If you are drawn in by the high-pitched laser tone that opens “The Great Memory,” then there is no straying from the path of The Magi. The third full-length album from SF electric guitar trio Harjo consists only of this seven-and-a-half minute prelude and an enthralling second piece (the title track), which journeys through cosmic baffling drone for a magisterial 42 minutes. The slow, crushing sonic bath will be familiar territory for drone lovers, but the album likewise contains delicious moments of surprise—especially when the players incorporate wide gaps of silence. It is a silence utterly deafening, serving to cleanse the ears’ palette before circling back to the monstrous triple stacked distortion. A worthy trip.
— Ronny Kerr
LAMENT IS HEALING
On an all-too-familiar journey to communal and familial belonging, Itkuja Suite by Rent Romus (accompanied by Heikki Koskinen, the Life’s Blood Ensemble, Heikki Laitinen) carefully considers deeply personal, interior existential ache within a geo-historical context. Finnish poetry fuses with saxophone/vibraphone/cello improvisation, swirling the past, present, and future into a beautiful and holistic outlook on what lament has to offer the human experience:
“The stories, sung by Laitinen in Finnish, are (with one exception) historical laments informed by The National Archives of Finland’s Ancient Poems of the Finnish People, with reference to the historic refugees of Finno-Ugric people across Northern Europe, and also to Romus and Koskinen’s longing for their heritage. With the benefit of translation, this offers listeners a dazzling discovery both musical and poetic, and a universal call to remembrance and healing.”
This piece is palpably a process of restoration and reparation, how the self is always in conversation with cultural belonging, and how where one comes from is deeply intertwined with identity, ancestral healing, existential survival, and resistance to cultural erasure. Lament is healing; music is medicine.
For more from Rent Romus, check out here for the outside, also released this month on Edgetone Records.
— Elise Mills
SYNTH PADS & FINGER SNAPS
“Stayism can be going round and round and not getting anywhere, paralyzed by either too many choices, doubt, or by perfectionism. Leaving things unfinished. It can feel surreal and disorienting
OR, it can be staying focused on what you need to do. Being consistent and disciplined.
Stay focused, but don’t get stuck!!”
Presenting what sounds like a new chapter in the book of growth mindset, Stayism is a 10-track, 20-minute beat tape by Vallejo producer Asterisq. Blending together psychedelic electronic sounds a la early Bassnectar and Pretty Lights plus the vibe of old school hip hop, the new work may be the perfect thing to get grooving out of the next rut you find yourself in. Midtempo boom bap, synth pads, finger snaps, and a bunch of thought-provoking vocal samples. Stay head bopping.
— Ronny Kerr
SHOW RECS
Our top show recommendations for the coming week:
[punk] COMMANDO, Middle-Aged Queers, Crush — April 21 at Bandcamp Oakland
[dub] Scientist, Fake Fruit, PAINT — April 21 at Old Princeton Landing
[club] Razor-N-Tape 10 Year Anniversary — April 21 at Chambers
[indie] April Magazine, Meat Market, Blue Zero, DJ Bill — April 22 at Edinburgh Castle
[club] Hazardous Nemesis ft. Tom Marsi, lil bebe cyborg — April 22 at El Rio
[rock] Flamin’ Groovies, Glitter Wizard — April 22 at Thee Stork Club
[rock] Iggy Pop & the Losers — April 22 at SF Masonic
[dub] Mungo’s HiFi, Eva Lazarus, Spliff Skankin, M3, Sep — April 22 at Monarch
[rock] Valley Queen, Madeline Kenney, Lauren Barth — April 23 at the Chapel
[country] Willie Nelson & Family — April 24 at Frost Amphitheater