get disaggregated

Your tax dollars at work, comrades:

Once you start looking you see it everywhere, but it’s different everywhere it appears, and it never stays the same for very long. It's also never purely itself: capital has never been alone in the field of relations facing any given society, always having to evolve in relation to an array of other structures and systems and struggles trying to make claims upon the social. For every question you manage to answer, there's a dozen more waiting in the wings, and before long it all seems to turn into one big question; most of the time, I think, the best you can do is try to ask it in an interesting way.

Lately I've been trying to find ways to ask about class. “Whether it was ever legitimate," writes feminist political theorist Kathi Weeks, "the distinction between proletariat and lumpenproletariat cannot survive the transition from the industrial model of the Fordist employment contract, Taylorist work process, and Keynesian ideal of gendered separate spheres of waged production and household based reproduction to the postindustrial period’s post-Fordist, post-Taylorist, neoliberal hodge-podge of increasingly precarious labour contracts, rise of service labour, and more extensive confounding of what is productive and what is reproductive.” She points out that some of the most exciting and effective political struggles of the past several decades have been waged by those who don’t fall neatly into the traditional categorizations of working class or lumpenproletariat: sex workers, day labourers, domestic workers, welfare recipients; and I would add to this list disabled folks, trans folks, tenants, those without legal immigration status. Thompson’s “obsolete hand-loom weaver” needn’t be categorically different from Foucault’s “cobbler, army deserter, garment seller, scrivener, vagabond monk, all of them rabid, scandalous, or pitiful.” These are the people at the forefront of redefining subaltern formations of power vis-à-vis actually existing capitalism: the abjects, and collectively, that's our subject.

The big question isn't about what exactly it is that needs rescuing from "the enormous condescension of posterity," but about why it should matter in the first place. We've learned by now, I hope, that it doesn't need to speak with one voice or move in lockstep, but what we're trying to do is construct a collective subject that's capable of bringing the thing down, right? It's not about what we are, but what we can do together.

Anyways, here's some songs. Whether it's my advancing age or all the escalating horrors, it's been getting a little more difficult each year to enjoy my usual springtime routine of obnoxiously blasting Operation Ivy as soon as the proper sun comes out. For this mix, though, I've still tried to lean into it, so there are a lot of guitars and drums on this one. Pour qu'une autre fin du monde soit possible ?

Things push off with a couple of warm, earthy folk-jazz excursions from Keith Freund and Fuubutsushi – the former’s exploratory sax and piano meanderings jostled along by a gently insistent static pulse; the latter evoking a spring bloom so emphatically you can almost see cherry blossoms floating by as a propulsive melodic riff materializes a few minutes in. Freund is a multi-instrumentalist out of Akron, Ohio, who describes trash can lamb, his latest, as decidedly “local music - midwest noise, midwest emo, midwest jazz,” and you really couldn’t name a set of signifiers more likely to push my buttons. Fuubutsushi is a bit of a supergroup, featuring Chicago ambient composer and Cached Media label head Matthew Sage, and prolific left-indie superhero Patrick Shiroishi (whom we’ll see again a little later); meridians, their first proper vinyl release just came out and it’s truly a wonder.

Then it’s Deerhoof, the last great indie rock band standing: unpretentious and wide-eyed, always moving with intention and integrity, and among the tightest shows you'll ever see live. “Fete d’Adieu” is at once angular and intuitive, a resolute call to arms for patched-up hearts. Next it’s Guatemalan experimental electro-pop adventurer Fer Franco, here featuring the vocals of compatriot Mabe Fratti, who, like Patrick Shiroishi, is really everywhere these days (so much the better for all of us!). The hazy wash of “Tu Señal” then gives way to “Disappearing,” a shimmering and gloriously overblown nimbus from legendary slowcore duo Low. Hey What, from which this tune is drawn, turned out to be their final album, coming out about a year before the devastating loss of Mimi Parker in late 2022.

Next it’s a little bit of a throwback, with Montréal “post-punk / moody queer” trio HEATHERS’ “Eurydice,” which has honestly become one of my favourite songs over the last several years. They launched the tape with a rooftop show in Mile End, around sunset in the early summer of 2018, and I managed to crawl over after having spent the previous week or so hiding out from the world, waiting for some new meds to kick in and pull me out of some particularly tenacious darkness. So I’ll admit that it may have had something to do with the risperidone my body had just begun to (gratefully) assimilate, but with HEATHERS’ muscular sound rumbling the concrete as the sky caught fire, their warmth and confidence and humility, and the devastating economy of the lyrics – it all felt a bit like the universe itself was trying to let me know I’m welcome here. It was really something special.

Okay, then it’s on to Tijuanan instrumental post-punk ensemble Fractal, who strike a wonderful balance of post-rock ambience, crust-adjacent guitar crunch and arty cello smoothness, orbiting a central riff that’s just huge. Next it’s another one from BIG | BRAVE’s latest, A Chaos of Flowers. After more than a decade of marshalling towering squalls of guitar noise, the new record is an awe-inspiring lesson in sustained tension and restraint. “theft” is possessed of a sort of violent spirit so much bigger than the song itself, but the band know exactly what they’re doing, and keep it just barely corralled; I’d call it “menacing” if they weren’t such lovely people. There’s even a little flutter of Patrick Shiroishi’s saxophone in there for good measure.

On its heels is one from the vaults, a highlight from criminally under-appreciated UK riot grrrl / post-punk trio Red Monkey’s stunning 1999 LP Difficult Is Easy: scrappy, mathy, emotionally raw and passionately DIY. “Kissing With Tongues” felt like the right bridge to the brilliant and confounding art-rock of London-via-Glasgow outfit Still House Plants, whose If I don't make it, I love u LP, from which “Silver grit passes through my teeth" is drawn, released in April. At once impressionistic and utterly locked in, I’m still wrapping my head around their uncanny ability to wrangle such oblique rhythmic shapes and improbable melodic missives into something so deeply soulful, and per The Guardian, “it’s gripping to hear someone put absolute faith in the power of expression without irony or fear.” Heads up, they're playing POP Montreal in September.

Equally fearless is Montreal’s Kee Avil, whose second full length was also released earlier this year, a masterclass in uneasy listening. Unsettling as it, “Felt” is also a strangely catchy affair, Vick Mettler’s breathy and close-up vocals leading us along a barely-there percussive spine. Then it’s Black Eyes, the exploratory punk outfit who burned briefly but brightly for a few years in DC in the early 2000s, two vocalists and two drum kits and a loose handle on some really wild chaotic energy – a classic, really.

Getting close to the end now, it’s a couple of tracks from Please Inform The Captain This Is A Hijack, one of the later projects of Bay Area DIY legend Sarah Kirsch, who in earlier years helmed bands like Bread and Circuits and Torches To Rome among many others. I’ll try to brief but it’d be difficult to overstate the influence Sarah’s work has had on West Coast punk losers like myself (and many of my CVHC comrades). Driven and driving, inspiring and sharp-as-fuck political analysis blended with the passion of early emocore, her work really set the bar for what underground punk rock could aspire to be. She passed in 2012, decades in to what it’d be a betrayal to call a “career” – perhaps “calling” would do more justice – which in many ways felt like it was just getting started. Please Inform The Captain interspersed their proper songs with brilliant and often hilarious sound sample collages, so here I’ve allowed “A Completely New Weapon” to preface “Postcards From The Future,” both of which still give me goosebumps despite the shitty vinyl-to-digital transfer the tracks have obviously gone through.

Finally, things go out with a bang, courtesy of the mighty Lungbutter: eminent sludge-wranglers, signal-destroyers and dear friends, another one shuttered way the fuck too soon. Joni Sadler forever.

• MP3: 24/06 - get disaggregated.zip

• Mixcloud: get disaggregated (jun 2024)

NB: Same as last time, I've included a single hour-long MP3 of the whole mix in the zip file linked above (along with the individual MP3s).

Just real quick: you may care to note that I'm in a Rock Band, and We've Got An Album Coming Out in August (on vinyl, no less!). It's up for pre-order on Bandcamp, with a first track up there now if you feel like listening to some nerds yelling about terraforming Mars?

That's it!

xo, graham