#5 - Tirzah - "2 D I C U V"
Enough with the proclamations about how hyperpop, digicore, and other cyber-brained artists like yeule capture the experience of being terminally online like nothing else. That’s old news. I can only enjoy so much anxious introspection conveyed with glitchy Auto-Tune vocals and metallic snares. What intrigues me now is less music reacting to online life than stuff that feels realer, more brilliant and expansive than the limitless 4K portal of the internet. I am jaded and numb to the pleasures—I don’t want to log off, I want a stronger drug. One answer this year was trip9love…?, ML Buch’s Suntub, and certain Smerz tracks like “No harm,” all of which you could roughly sort into an unofficial micro-style of hysterical hyperrealism. Not “hysterical” in the James Wood sense of cluttered prose and overelaborate plots, but music that sounds super-sharp and radiantly bright and also makes me feel hysterically, unnaturally alive. Brakence and the cutspace/xang strain of IDM SoundCloud rap fits into this category. It’s music that sounds too high-definition, like you’re wearing glasses with lenses that make everything agonizingly crisp.
“2 D I C U V” emits such an aura I can almost feel lights glow and floorboards quiver around me. It’s like ripping apart the body of a guitar to find a radiant crystal inside. I want to live in a land that looks like this sound, where the sky is a neon pink streak, the river rushes in an always-sparkling blue torrent, and twisting green trees rise taller than the bleach-white stars.
The list:
#10 - bar italia - "Missus Morality" / "maddington" (tie)
#9 - Ken Carson - “Lose It” / “Me N My Kup” (tie)
"It’s like ripping apart the body of a guitar to find a radiant crystal inside." - fantastic image!