Genius #17 - May '25

Larry Michaels

02 Jun 2025 • 11 min read

I am NOT going to bury the lede here: I am playing in a new band (again) we have our first show on 6/19 @ The Undercroft in Baltimore. Our band name is Chanp. If you're in the area, please come thru! I don't know how much tickets are, but we play first around 7:30ish. Weird & noisy punk stuff, lots of time signatures.

Chanp @ The Undercroft 6/19

Hello Geniuses,

I'm really excited about the albums in this month's edition: six brand new records that span a pretty wide net of genres. If ever there was a month with something for everyone, this would be it. Plus! I wrote a little about one of my favorite obscure post-rock albums (oh brother). AND guitar pedal chat with soundclips (oh GOD). A true genius dot com of geniuses dots coms.

A lot of my time lately has been spent writing (or thinking about writing) music for my projects, especially the newest one with the soonest upcoming gig (Chanp), so I have not been listening to as much music lately. I kind of doubt there will be a scrap heap in June, but maybe in July I will distill some of those thoughts down for a good Garbage Corner.

Ok enough chit chat, let's get into it.

Capitalism/Garbage Corner
Album Recs
Replay
Upcoming Shows

Capitalism/Garbage Corner

For the first time in years, I finally bought a new guitar pedal – an EAE Prismatic Wall. I'd pushed back on the idea of purchasing a new pedal for a long time, but lately I've been dreaming up some new ideas and they have all been rooted in the idea of blended & tuned feedback. Enter the PW!

Here's the Chanp board, the Prismatic Wall is circled

Prismatic Wall at an over-basic description is a tuned reverb, with a feedback knob that allows for droning self-oscillation. But the core technology of the pedal is a Karplus-Strong synthesizer: a tuned delay line where the repeats are so close together that it buzzes into an audible frequency. The closer the incoming note is to the tuned note, the more powerful the consonance is – but there is an internal gain knob to make dissonant notes push through the mix. Every element of the pedal can be addressed by MIDI CC messages, so I've paired it with my Empress ZOIA to squeeze extra functions out, like creating note sequences, or making the pedal detune harder when I strum harder.

If I'm being honest, I've been drawn to this pedal since it was announced – but I haven't liked any of the influencer content surrounding it. Every video convinced me that this pedal wouldn't do what I needed it to do, so I held off for years. This thing is more than just a sound engoodenizer or whatever – it does more than just harmony.

So, I recorded a few of my experimental ideas, which you can listen to below: parallel clean blend with feedback-distortion, ZOIA sequencing melodies while I hit the guitar like a drum, a little weird tremolo, and some drum machine chimes. Feel free to listen below. I'm planning to really abuse this thing moving forward, I can see it being a big part of my sound.

Tracks have little descriptions of the signal chain, but this is just stuff I tried out

Album Recommendations

Barker - Stochastic Drift (Smalltown Supersound, Apr '25)

Supremely satisfying dance music

A legit modern masterpiece of experimental dance music from the Berghain DJ. Been listening to this basically nonstop. Syncopated synths resonate out for the exact correct length of time, his homemade analog plate reverb rings out & and suddenly gets cut with satisfying precision. Clicky drums have just the right amount of bite, but don't cut through the gauzy synth fabrics. If it's not clear, the thing that I personally find the most enriching about listening is the way that he sculpts his ADSR envelopes – there's so much that goes into dragging the attack of a synth the correct distance & making sure that it fades away at the right speed. This album is his first major release in 6 years and you can tell that immense care was put into each part of each track.

Infinity Knives x Brian Ennalls - A City Drowned In God's Black Tears (Phantom Limb, Apr '25)

Genre agnostic hip-hop that HATES the IDF

Local Baltimore duo's newest is a kaleidoscopic hip-hop release that spans nearly the entire palette of the Roland SP-404 and explores the possibilities of new frontiers in party music. The bread-and-buttter sound is a classic backpack rap sound (big synth bass, punchy lo-fi drums, glissy arps, with vocals a little too forward in the mix). But interspersed, throughout the album there are these dreamlike shifts into completely different genres. Black choir music that turns into out-and-out noise rock; sweetly sung Modest Mouse interpolations; a piano rock song in Russian (??); some reggaeton (ok this also fits into the backpack rap thing); 2010s disco revival dance punk (ok this DEF fits into the backpack rap thing); and lofi folk. Plus, I'll stan any album with an opening track hook "Netanyahu, you a cracker and you know it / Donald Trump, you a rapist and you know it / Joe Biden, you a Nazi and you know it / Obama, you's a devil and you know it."

Macie Stewart - When The Distance is Blue (International Anthem, Apr '25)

Ambient/modern classical

Stewart has collab'd with everyone from Makaya McCraven and Alabaster Deplume to Japanese Breakfast & Mannequin Pussy, so it's cool to hear what she is dreaming up as a solo work. This work is a mostly droning song cycle of muted colors and shifting landscapes. Stewart offers prepared piano, violin, voice, and fuzzy nostalgic field recordings – with 3 more string players in the mix for a mix of composed pieces and ambient free improv. The shape of each composition brings the listener on journey – "Murmuration/Memorization" starts with droning strings before wordless voices come in, then the strings start swooping downward around them before thinning out into percussive texture; on lead single "Spring Is You, Spring Is New" clangy microtones in the prepared piano give way to a more muted sound (maybe felt on the strings?) of quiet whole notes before getting more and more densely packed with notes before being overtaken by legit stunningly mixed pizzicato strings. There's so much depth here, it's quite satisfying to listen to – the close mic'd instruments and voices are each sparsely arranged, so each one can occupy a big chunk of the soundstage. The highlight for me is the closing piece, "Disintegration," where the quartet plays the same line repeatedly, but each pass through the melody slows the tempo and further detunes their instruments away from each other. The effect is nauseating and enchanting.

Emma Goldman - all you are is we (Zegema Beach Records, Apr '25)

Political chaotic screamo

For this Vancouver quartet, the personal and the political have been mashed together repeatedly and the result of that mashing has become a horrifying amalgam that can bought and sold on the market. This album presses on the pleasure receptor of my brain – scuzzy guitars, busy basslines, wordy back-and-forth shrieking – and abstract interstitials where field recordings and overanxious techno offer breaks through the album (and one well-timed Office Space quote). The band's sense of humor & fury are perfectly balanced as they recount the horros of our modern world: internet-poisoned slop, Zillow listings, squirting dopamine sluts, service workers offering you sandwiches, classifications of punk subgenres confused for class warfare. Music to throw a brick through a cop car window to.

SUMAC & Moor Mother - The Film (Thrill Jockey, Apr '25)

Noisy free improv & poetry

When you hear "rap metal," this probably isn't what comes to mind. On second thought, I'm not even really sure that this album either "rap"nor "metal." What is it then? SUMAC bring freewheeling drum fills, scraggly guitars, and gnarled fuzz bass as a shifting but solid foundation for Moor Mother's frantic delivery. Her lines are economical, but important ideas get reiterated and she rolls the words around in the bar, shifting the emphases around until each word has been highlighted. Radical stuff, truly an exercise in freedom, which is the central driving force in the work of both bands, whether it's SUMAC's descent deeper into improvised compositions or Moor Mother's Black Power political bent. Def not a collab I would have ever dreamed of. Anyways, the last song is 15min long and is full of these bizarre off-hand Operation Ivy and Rancid references – I don't fully understand why, but appreciate it all the same. Truly worth it to listen if only to hear Moor Mother intone: "America piss and shit itself, no diaper."

Σtella - Adagio (Sub Pop, Apr '25)

Greek bossa nova

Perfect soundtrack for taking a dip in the Greek Isles & getting up to some White Lotus shit. Stella's expressive range is impressive, her voice has a ton of character, and these torch songs ache with longing. What a band tho! She's accompanied by such a great array of sounds: Acoustic guitars, mallets, flutes, analog synths, accordions, funky basslines, syncopated drums. The whole thing sounds like the band is suspended in a single sun beam – melancholy hangout music in filtered, dappled sunlight. Cool & sophisticated, offering more than just vibes, but also: it's still got the vibes. Not sure how to express this: the album hits a good sweet spot between open enough for a general pop audience while still feeling like the artist was making music just for herself and her personal tastes. "Baby Brazil?" The song?? of the summer???

Upcoming June albums:

Brooklyn minimalist ambient trio Purelink is back with Faith on 6/6 via Peak Oil. Love that they squeeze so much melody out their textures.
Baltimore legendary hardcore quartet Turnstile are back with more posi poppy punk songs. Stoked for NEVER ENOUGH which is coming out via Roadrunner on 6/6.
6/13: Russian experimental kitsch-pop composer Kate NV is releasing a live recording of her and an octet band taking on her Room for the Moon compositions. Out 6/13 on RVNG.
Having trouble tracking down info on the new album from Memphis rapper Lukah produced by Statik Selektah, but allegedly A Lost Language Found on 6/20 via Raw Materials.
Baltimore legendary electronic duo Matmos are back with more crazy live sample-flipping magic. Metallic Life Review out on 6/20 thru Thrill Jockey.

Replay - Macha

I've been mildly obsessed with 90s/00s post-rock band Macha for about 10 years now. None of their work is available on streaming services, you have to dig for it, which is actually cool and good. The core of the band is 2 brothers, Josh and Misho McKay (Josh currently plays in Deerhunter), plus collaborators Kai Reidl and Wes Martin. The band plays what I would describe as college rock like Polvo or Dinosaur Jr, but with instrumentation rooted in East Asian/Pacific Islander traditions like gamelan and Hawaiian traditional strings. Their song structures hew closer to post-rock – kinda like Tortoise or Talk Talk/.O.rang. I don't know what else to call this except for post-rock.

To me, their best work was right in the middle of their career: 1999s See It Another Way and 2000s collab with Bedhead. SIAW was big enough to get a bizarre and positive Pitchfork review, but has otherwise seemingly fallen off the earth. The album features the quartet playing gamelan percussion, flutes, zithers, rock drums & bass, vibraphones, Hawaiian slide guitar, organ. Half the songs feature dual shoegazey downer vocals from the brothers, the other half are instrumentals. The first half of the EP is higher tempo, bright songs full of bells and flutes, while the second half is mostly slower and darker, with slowcore drums and melodic basslines.

Macha - The Nipplegong is the middle track on the EP and splits the release into 2 parts

The middle track "The Nipplegong" is a perfect post-rock composition that balances both sides of the record. Six minutes gives enough space for the band to build the motifs up one at a time: droning organ & zither quarter notes, then the fuzz bass with mallets, then vibraphone – only to pull it all away before bringing it all back at full force. The chorus repeats the album title as a plea to the listener, asking how many lenses you can reflect through.

Their collab album with slowcore band Bedhead brings just the right amount of pop sensibility to Macha's sound. The story is that Bedhead admired Macha and sent unfinished demos to them and asked them to record additional instruments. The resulting EP resolves some of my issues with slowcore (boring, repetitive song structures) and also some of the issues with the other Macha releases (unfocused tracks, songs that behave more like sketches). Ok yeah sure maybe we didn't need the 6 minute long ambient track "How Are Your Windows?" that exists just to separate the 4 songs from the fantastic & sincere Cher cover. Whatever! It adds mystery! I think. For some reason version of this release had the 6min track broken up into like 80 tiny mp3 files lol. Oh yeah, this one also got a stupid Pitchfork review.

I've been hoping that the band would reunite or reissue these albums, but it seems like Macha is a band that will be left a soft secret. A mystery band for nerds to uncover & try to learn more from and about. And for the true nerds out there, yes, they did a TapeOp interview.

Upcoming Shows

Baltimore

6/7 (Sat) Young Widows, Rid of Me, Kal Marks @ Metro
6/8 (Sun) JPEGMAFIA @ Baltimore Soundstage
6/10 (Tue) John Wiese, Lana Del Rabies, Jeff Carey @ Metro
6/13 (Fri) Astrid Sonne @ Current Space
6/16 (Mon) Crumb, Kassie Krut @ Baltimore Soundstage
6/19 (Thu) CHANP @ The Undercroft
6/21 (Sat) Ed Shrader, Tomato Flower, Mowder Oyal @ Metro
6/25 (Wed) Juli Doiron @ Ottobar
6/28 (Sat) Baltimore Pedal Show @ Metro

DC

6/1 (Sun) Pinback @ Union Stage
6/7 (Sat) Perfume Genius @ 9:30 Club
6/13 (Fri) Karate @ Black Cat
6/16 (Mon) Deerhoof @ Union Stage
6/18 (Wed) Agriculture @ DC9
6/23 (Mon) GY!BE @ 9:30 Club
6/25 (Wed) Femi Kuti @ 9:30 Club
6/27 (Fri) Joyce Manor @ 9:30 Club

NYC

6/7 (Sat) Lucy Liyou @ Public Records
6/11 (Wed) Mark Ribot @ Roulette
6/21 (Sat) Matmos, More Eaze @ Knockdown Center
6/22 (Sun) Xiu Xiu, Chino Amobi @ Knockdown Center
6/25 (Wed) GY!BE @ Pioneer Works
6/26 (Thu) GY!BE @ Pioneer Works
6/28 (Sat) Deerhoof @ Pioneer Works

Future Shows

7/25 (Fri) Faraquet @ Black Cat (DC)
8/16 (Sat) Pretty Bitter (album release), Cuni, Rosslyn Station @ Black Cat (DC)
8/30 (Sat) Matmos @ Black Cat (DC)
9/11 (Thu) Nourished By Time @ Ottobar (Baltimore)
9/19 (Fri) billy woods @ Union Stage (DC)
9/24 (Wed) Tropical Fuck Storm, Infinity Knives @ Metro (Baltimore)
9/29 (Mon) Lightning Bolt @ Union Craft (Baltimore)
9/30 (Tue) Lightning Bolt @ Black Cat (DC)
10/9 (Thu) J Robbins Band plays Burning Airlines @ Metro (Baltimore)
10/24 (Fri) Conner O'Malley @ Baltimore Soundstage (Baltimore)