Genius #31 - Jul '26
New music recs: Hannah Peel & Beibei Wang, Slippers, Visible Cloaks, Winged Wheel, Debit. YHWH Nailgun review. The MIDI Guitar project. Show calendar.
Thursday 8/20: CHANP live at The Ottobar with Star Card (NYC) and locals Choking Boys & Ella Can't Save You. This is not one to miss!!!
Hello hello geniuses.
It's been a minute! I did not forget about you. I have been traveling back and forth across the country all summer & have had a little trouble finding time to sit down to write.. but we are back! I've got a bunch of music recommendations, a full on commodity fetishism pipedream, some thoughts on the new YHWH Nailgun LP, and shows to recommend. Come see Chanp live at the Ottobar on 8/20.
Let's get into it.
- Commodity Fetishism - MIDI Guitar Project
- Album Recs
- Garbage Corner - YHWH Nailgun - Magazine
- Upcoming Shows
Commodity Fetishism - MIDI Guitar Project
I obviously don't have enough projects right now, so I have begun spec'ing out a project guitar. This is my 2nd attempt at a project guitar... the first one is still in pieces with no plan in place to repair. This one, obviously, will be different.
A couple weeks ago, I went to the best instrument dumping ground in America, Atomic Music in Beltsville MD, seeking a playable-but-ugly guitar for less than $200. I wanted something with simple electronics and room on the body to install outboard gadgets. I tried out every weird-looking guitar in the store and ended up trading away some gear so that I could walk away with a Squier Paranormal Telecaster for about $160. Not bad!
The goal: after all of the other projects are complete (yeah right), turn this guitar into a hybrid digital-analog instrument. I want a regular instrument-out for guitar sounds + a MIDI output to send to external gear. I'd also like to install some piezo pickups for percussive hits that can be routed to both analog or MIDI.
Let's start with the guitar itself: I wanted something that I could rip apart and put back together, but I'm shocked at how nicely this thing plays and sounds. The bridge pickup has bite and the neck pickup sings. It's bigger than my strat, but a touch smaller than my J Mascis Jazzmaster. The neck is super thin, which is great for shredding, but the high E-string sits a little too close to the edge for me. I also don't love the 3-saddles for 6 strings. I'm planning to replace the entire bridge plate and will probably replace the pickups and the nut at that time. I haven't figured out how to route wires for piezos, that'll be its own question mark once I open it up and see what's inside.
I've been doing research into the MIDI guitar pickup world, but I have not made a leap yet. I've been looking into the tripleplay, the jamstik, the roland gk-3... I'll do a proper write-up on these as I do more research. To be honest, my top pick right now is to put a hexaphonic pickup in (like the submarine or the six pack) and run its 6 output signal into a Teensy microcontroller mounted directly to the guitar, writing custom code to convert it to downsample it to fundamental frequencies & convert the notes MIDI. I think it'll be the most flexible, but I haven't figured out how to get power to a Teensy that sits on a guitar body yet. That's a future problem.
Anyway, sometime next year, I'll start digging deeper into this. I have enough projects as it is!
Album Recommendations
Hannah Peel & Beibei Wang - The Endless Dance
somewhere between ambient, classical, electronic
drvon2
Thanks to my chanpmate Sean for sending this to me – an absolutely fantastic mixed genre ambient record. I've been spinning this a lot in the past few weeks, since it moves through so many moods and never wears out its welcome. I could not predict anything that would happen next and it still catches me off guard when I listen. Peel & Wang are both based in London, though Peel is from North Ireland and Wang is from China, they are both classically trained musicians and composers, who met while working together on an ensemble piece and decided to meet up after to just simply jam and have some fun. That sense of Capital-P "Play" permeates the whole record. There are sampled hiccups, the sound of them laughing while playing, secret recordings during warm-ups turned into full songs. A highlight on the record is Wang doing a Mandarin tongue-twister she learned as a kid while playing bamboo clapping sticks. The instrumentation is super rich: Wang plays vibes, water percussion, temple bells, rice bowls from her kitchen, a jawbone, etc. – while Peel resamples these and adds color with cutting edge production effects, and expressive synth stabs. IMO the album is best summarized by Wang: “Two women talking in totally different languages that had a wonderful chat.”
Slippers - Slippers 08 (K, May '26)
pitch-perfect retro jangle pop
poligona
It's a power-pop summer for yours truly and this Slippers record slots in just perfectly to what I've been looking for: earworm vocal melodies with leading tones, jangly guitars, and deceptively-complex songwriting with simple verse-chorus-bridge structures. Madeline BB's one-woman-band continues to eschew any lessons that might have been learned in the 1970s and beyond – she plays laid back drums without much flash, hyper-melodic basslines, and uses 60s-appropriate instrumentation (and similarly appropriate mixing). We've got those "ba ba ba" backing vocals, chiming arpeggios, tambourines, lovelorn lyrics, simple synthesizer patches. I don't know if every song on here works, but "Wasted Tonight" and "Til You Know" are absolutely perfect bangers and "Sunday Morning" is a great slacker anthem. I too "get down by the weight of things."
Visible Cloaks - Paradessence (RVNG, May '26)
ableton live-core ambient
kaycs
Portland MIDI wizard duo has returns for a victory lap over the music production protocol. Vocals seamlessly morph into synths and then back into vocals; little robotic blips and holographic zippers scan across the soundstage to bring percussive pop and texture to synthetic flutes, disembodied pianos, false-vibraphones. Each song has a moment where it seems like the whole thing could collapse on itself, before the structure shifts and a new pathway forward appears, whether it's a sudden oboe, a new harmony, or an entirely new track that seems to be birthed out from within. The album feels alive. All heartbeat rhythms and airy breaths lurking in the holographic shadows. The collaborations are wild, especially the vocal processing on "Thinking" and the way the viola is rent then rendered apart in "Intarsia." If you're into that ambient whooshing sound from St Giga, they've got Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano to collab with them again and bring their signature sound. Great for vibing & for contemplating the most complicated Ableton session file on this earth.
Winged Wheel - Desert So Green (12XU, Jan '26)
psychy post-rock super group
Kenneth Pyron
A utopian vision in full – propulsive motorik beats, lush viola, layered multi-guitar drones, and multiple lead vocalists. A mix of structured songs and free-improv guitar-distortion-as-texture-and-harmony experiments from a strange supergroup featuring Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth, Cory Plump (owner of Tubby's in Kingston NY), Whitney Johnson (as featured in GDC #26), and others. The band started off long-distance, but for this release they holed up and put together In the 3 "Canvas" pieces, that are more open-interpretation rock pieces, while named tracks like "Speed Table" and "More Frog Poems" call to mind post-hardcore riffs and downer jams, like Unwound doing krautrock. This is the type of record I can lose myself in over and over, it's hard hitting, it's kaleidoscopic, and it is rooted in alt-rock traditions without sounding like a retread of any of them.
Debit - Potpourri (Boomkat, Jun '26)
absolutely banging techno
maggie
Cheers to Aled for the rec on this one. 13 intense techno tracks with bilingual song titles referencing the artist's placelessness – the album cover is her on the bridge between the US and Mexico and her song titles including tracks like "Assimilate" and "2placesatonce." I've been putting this on while going on runs and working and it's like putting my brain on a railroad track – hypnotic and hard-hitting, music for losing your mind on a dancefloor. Debit's topbeats use ratcheting exponential hi-hat rhythms & rhythmic noise loops for a scungey baseline sound, but the pieces are kept clean by simple bass parts & kick-snare. The vibe is that she's coloring inside the lines, but in a way that seems like it could go off the rails at any moment. The drum hits have a ton of power behind them, (whether in 4-on-the-floor straight-time or in a reggaeton shuffle) and Debit's use of either tuned delay-lines or wave guides (are those the same thing??) adds a kind of slappy-string sound to some of the drum hits that I find immensely satisfying. The tracks are progressive, with satisfying beat change-ups and including some ambient pieces where the crushing stops just enough to catch your breath before the kick comes back commanding you to get in the field and fucking dance.
August albums:
- Australian outback nearly so-quiet-it's-nearly-lowercase-music songwriter & ambient artist Hana Stretton released her second LP for PW Elverum & Sun, tiarn was released on 8/7.
- I'm very stoked for a new Sweeping Promises album next week – You Say I Romanticize is out on 8/14 via Sub Pop. Just one of the best to do it.
- Tyondai Braxton (ex-Battles) is releasing another solo album of heady and abstract electronic songs. Splayed Werks is out on 8/21 thru Erased Tapes.
- I've been kind of mixed on most of her work, but the highs are so high that I always make time to check out whatever Julia Holter is releasing next. Materia is out on 8/21 thru Dominom, it's a companion LP to 2024's Something In The Room She Moves.
- Drone ambient artist Sarah Davachi is releasing a triple LP of compositions for organ, chorus, string trio/organ/tape machine quintet, plus a bunch of interlude microtonal pieces for brass & woodwinds. 2 hours of sounds to get lost in. The Will Of Tongues is out 8/28 through the artist's Late Music imprint.
Garbage Corner
YHWH Nailgun - Magazine (4AD, May '26)
tinkertailorsoldierspy
I wanted to write a little at length about this tiny LP – this isn't necessarily an album rec, though I do think it's worth checking out if you have a spare 11 minutes.
NYC's YHWH Nailgun put out their debut last year and it was my favorite record of 2025. Ten blistering songs in 21min, the songs all covered a similar sonic palette of choked-scream whisper vocal delivery, rototom drum fills, and synth (both real synth & hyper-effected guitar). Each track had a "I wish I had thought of that first" moment, for me. Their follow up record is their debut for international indie mega-label 4AD. In my opinion, the quartet finds some really interesting spots, but makes songwriting decisions to undermine their own success.
This time the record is also 10 tracks long – but clocks in at just 11 minutes total. The band has not released any kind of statement on the intent here, so it's up to the listener to decide what the meaning is. The band didn't have enough ideas to finish any of these songs? A statement on the album as a form? A statement on songs as a form? A statement on our limited attention spans? An attempt to grab cash on the per-stream payment system?
The album title Magazine obviously has multiple meanings, it's again up to you if you think this is an album about periodicals or ammunition or both.
Each track barely has enough time to establish a theme before it is replaced by the next one. They often shuffle in fully-formed – maybe there's an intro to establish the vibe, sometimes we start right in on the A section of the song. If you get a B section, it's usually a pretty good. Usually the A section continues until the song peters out.
To the band's credit: each song feels sonically distinct from its counterparts, which is a nice departure from their previous LP where the songs could blend together. And there are some honestly electrifying sounds – the broken bent notes in the intro of "Stilness Blues," the ghostly reverb of "Innocent Sigh," the huge B-section of "Sewer Tree." I don't really think that any song sounds as good as the ideas behind it, though – that is to say, without more investment from the group into writing the songs, the album comes across as a throwaway from the band and so I treat it as such.
That said!! While writing this, I discovered that the band released an album-length music video that's actually pretty sick and I think adds quite a bit to the record BECAUSE it demonstrates that time and effort which I think is missing from the purely-audio experience of listening.
And maybe I'll be looking back on this in the future & think that it's a compelling piece of art and that I was too hard on it. In my experience, compelling art doesn't always make for compelling listens. I love thinking about this record, talking to people about this record – but when I listen to it, the songs just flitter through and then the record has ended and I didn't really notice specific moments.
I went back to re-listen to 45 Pounds and, in comparison, the songs are all very similar to each other (several times, I had to check because I thought a song had played twice) – but the songs also have hooks and have shape. Is it the "better" album? Not necessarily – but the songs are gonna be better live, there's just simply more for the listener to grab a hold of.
Scene Report
Upcoming Shows
For real, come to The Ottobar on 8/20, it'll be a good time,.
Baltimore
- 8/6 (Thu) The Body, Big ‡ Brave, Carl Gene @ Metro
- 8/13 (Thu) Insignia, VirtuaDX, Life, Julia Set, Hypoxolyn @ Ottobar
- 8/14 (Fri) Hiroe, Talking To Shadows, Sutras, Switchboard Deathray @ Wax Atlas
- 8/14 (Fri) New Works Film Screening @ Current Space
- 8/15 (Sat) Ragdollz, Tentative Decisions, Shagg Carpet, Cult Counselor @ BSC Cocktail Gallery
- 8/16 (Sun) Glad I Didn’t Get My Stupid Wish, Jade Weapon, Simonne Wrath, Emanda Womer @ The Undercroft
- 8/19 (Wed) Madeleine Usher, Sextool, Fight Fight Harm, Blame 2, 11Apparition5 @ The Kitchen (2121 N Charles)
- 8/20 (Thu) Ella Can’t Save You, Star Card, Choking Boys, Chanp @ Ottobar
- 8/22 (Sat) No Model, Pearl, Cataclysmic, Brainwashed, Psyop @ Zone Of Totality
- 8/23 (Sun) Flowerbomb, Micah E. Wood, Little Lungs @ Metro
- 8/28 (Fri) SUBSCAPE @ Le Mondo, Currnet Space
- 8/29 (Sat) SUBSCAPE @ Le Mondo, Currnet Space
- 8/30 (Sun) SUBSCAPE @ Le Mondo, Currnet Space
- 8/30 (Sun) Ploy Machine, The Mostly Dead, Animals Awake @ Wax Atlas
DC
- 8/1 (Sat) Zoh Amba @ Pearl St Warehouse
- 8/1 (Sat) All The Feelings Tour with Metric, Broken Social Scene, And Stars @ The Anthem
- 8/10 (Mon) Lip Critic, Jade Weapon, Consumer Culture @ Songbyrd
- 8/14 (Fri) Yard Act, The Armed @ Black Cat
- 8/22 (Sat) Flowerbomb - Homecoming Show, Cal Rifkin, Taisha Estrada @ Union Stage
NYC
- 8/13 (Thu) Splendor & Misery Fest:clipping., SPELLLING, Shabazz Palaces, ELUCID, Fatboi Sharif, evicshen, Maria Chavez @ Knockdown Center
Philly
Future Shows
- 9/11 (Fri) Aldous Harding, Sam Burton @ Howard Theatre
- 9/13 (Sun) Shearling, Brother Dragon @ Comet Ping Pong
- 9/14 (Mon) Jeff Rosenstock @ Ottobar
- 9/15 (Tue) Angine de Poitrine @ The Atlantis
- 9/15 (Tue) Anna Graves, Catherine Savage @ Pearl St Warehouse
- 9/15 (Tue) Colin Stetson, Brìghde Chaimbeul @ Pioneer Works
- 9/17 (Thu) Angine de Poitrine @ Lincoln Theatre
- 9/18 (Fri) Kim Gordon, Bill Nace @ Black Cat
- 9/19 (Sat) Grouper @ Lincoln Theatre
- 9/19 (Sat) El Ten Eleven @ Pearl St Warehouse
- 9/19 (Sat) Grouper @ Lincoln Theatre
- 9/24 (Thu) Nitzer Ebb @ Soundstage
- 9/26 (Sat) Slothrust @ The Recher
- 9/27 (Sun) Armand Hammer @ Union Stage
- 9/29 (Tue) Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band, Styrofoam Winos @ Black Cat
- 9/30 (Wed) New Pornographers @ The Recher
- 10/4 (Sun) Unsane, Consumer Culture @ Pearl St Warehouse (DC)
- 10/5 (Mon) Russian Circles, Pelican @ Soundstage (Baltimore)
- 10/8 (Thu) Horse Lords @ Pioneer Works (NYC)
- 10/8 (Thu) Cor de Lux, Editrix, Yuvees, Big Girl @ The Broadway (NYC)
- 10/10 (Sat) Horse Lords with Crying Laughing & Duncan Moore @ Ottobar (Baltimore)
- 10/11 (Sun) Panopticon, Catharsis, more TBA @ Ottobar (Baltimore)
- 10/18 (Sun) The Dillinger Escape Plan @ Nevermore Hall (Baltimore)
- 10/23 (Fri) Yhwh Nailgun with guest KeiyaA @ Ottobar (Baltimore)
- 10/29 (Thu) They Are Gutting A Body Of Water @ Ottobar (Baltimore)
- 11/5 (Thu) Built to Spill Fall 2026 Tour @ Union Craft Brewing (Baltimore)