Today we're talking about Dandelion Gum by Black Moth Super Rainbow. Kyle, I just wanted to maybe check in. How are things going? I'm holding space, and by space I mean the void. Hold my one finger, Cliff. I'm holding space for this moment.
This podcast is not live streamed But it is nearly always recorded in such a way where the time frame that you are listening To this episode in we still share the general context of whatever your brain is doing today At the same moment that we are talking to each other and I don't think I have ever felt so excited for such a great fit for a bad moment as this particular record gives us the opportunity to do.
Not only because, well, by the time this drops, everything could be more terrible than it is but things Probably won't be better. no, no, probably not and things are in the running for, uh, capital W worst of all time already. So. It's a hard moment to exist. And threw this podcast.
love and support each other through our love and appreciation for this music and craft and so many of our episodes remind us that Invariably by paying attention to music in even a somewhat serious way We are always going to unearth deeply serious topics because music is made by people in the same time and reality That all the other crazy shit that's ever happened Happened and as such we end up lining up episodes even just in the last three before this one.
We have like Religious deconstruction of paramour and what it means to be like truly accepting of other indifferent people We have grace jones's night clubbing coming from a very particular moment in time and a very particular archetype of person Both of which are right back in another loop in this moment in time of Uh, having to be less open and excited about who you are because the people who want to clamp down on you for being different have become emboldened once again.
And then after that episode, we talk about the non glorification of Project Pat of true and actual 90s hood life in Memphis. Like, we have a good time on this episode and on this podcast.
But. That can all just be a lot and I'm just delighted to present to people today A bunch of fucking bullshit, by, by some goobers, with some vintage synthesizers, who know how to create a really nice hook, and we can just calm the fuck down, and remember that music can also do other things than just make us think about the anxiety inducing, intense things that we have to go through every day. And I am stoked to just take on that angle, for a little bit. Today with you.
Chat GPT, summarize everything Cliff just said. Hey man, got a joint? Because you need a lot of them. I agree that this thing is a bomb. and there are words from a couple of folks that I think summarize, uh, the product summary on the outside of the prescription bottle of the cell. so if things are feeling kind of heavy on you right now, and maybe you just want like some pop, you just want to vibe out, but like the pop. Fair of the radio and whatever isn't your deal.
What about an artist who, quote, Takes trippiness and dreaminess to an all new level With the futuristic music people had hoped to listen to 20 and 30 years ago And that time to hear it is now Future pop for now, people Today That sounds great!
I would like that I would like to imagine being in a different timeline With good pop music and the world not falling apart Um, but if that is not your foot, if you need a, if you need a little higher concentration dosage of your prescription, how about this from Jennifer Kelly?
If pop matters, dandelion gum is one of those records that makes you feel like you're high, even when you're not like you're on the verge of shambolic visions, even if you're taking out the trash, like there's an ineffable order to the universe, even when all signs point to chaos, motherfucker, send me a Costco amount of that right. This second. Let's go. where can I get it? It ships from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania of all places.
A lot of weird shit we'll ship to you from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and we love to see it. Tight neck and neck race for the best drug inspired and oriented music coming out of Pittsburgh between Black Moth Super Rainbow and Wiz Khalifa. You know, not to intellectualize a thing that should not be inherently intellectualized, but comparing this record to Feeling High is real good in the context of what we are talking about.
Because if I can just make everyone laugh for just a moment what is the appropriate level? of World Seriousness for you to be stoned off your ass. When is it ever the right amount, the right time, everything has been taken care of just enough for it to be reasonably excusable for you to just take a break, chill out, and try to remind your brain that it doesn't have to solve every problem that has occurred to you in the last, like, 96 hours? This record does that.
Like Pavlov's Bell does, especially if you listen to it enough, and that is a joy and a treasure that I had relegated to particular records, and this one just like, walked itself right up to the front door and joined that collection, which I'm sure we'll talk some about today, but like, the thing that just puts you in a trance and lets you feel good, the music, It's fun. It's memorable. I understand it.
Like, all those things that just let your heart rate come back down just a little bit, even though you're having a good time. I think that comparison ends up holding Steady a lot more than it should with all this music because this is exactly the thing that I would like to encourage people to do is do the equivalent of getting stoned with music again if you haven't in a while because you also need to remember to relax. Now is an important time for The body's keeping the score, baby.
And you gotta reset the scoreboard every once in a while, you know what I'm saying? I do. I do. I The doctor is in, and his name is Thomas Feck. Moon. And to say a little bit more about it to you, I guess, before we, we get into a little bit more specifics, I, I'm not just being lightheartedly facetious about this, I guess.
Like, I truly think that this was, once again, a nicely timed record to, Have to process and consume in the discipline of listening to listening to music as we have and as we've talked about with the With the calendar and in this idea of listening to music as it kind of comes to you instead of you vibing your way to the music every time and To me this reminded me of something that helps me center myself a little bit in this moment the When everything starts to
feel like really, really serious, which if I'm being honest, it feels that way right now, everything feels like DEFCON whatever the number is that indicates the highest DEFCON, like five alarm fire, everything is jacked, what do we even start to do to me, when the seriousness of everything ramps up, there is this possible inverse that can appear to you. And it's not like. Otherwise known as Defcon 69 or Five Alarm Chili. that will partially align with the point that I'm making, but thank you.
Yes, sort of to that point, the inverse of all that seriousness isn't like silliness, like we're still adults, right? We can't just relax by. Being stupid. I know some people take that approach with life and, you know, if, um, that's basically just alcoholism by any other name. But like, you can numb yourself into ridiculousness every day if that's how you want to detach. There's, I think, a better and more interesting part of that to ride out.
And so instead of the opposite of seriousness being silly or stupidity, It's unseriousness. And I mean that like really specifically because like to me it aligns with that idea absence of seriousness. You mean, not necessarily the presence of silliness, but the like a vacuum of it. Yeah and like Similarly to that phrase, like if everything is important, nothing is like, dude, if everything is on fire, it's time to recalibrate.
And I think this year is going to be a really good opportunity for us as people to remember how to do that. The premise of this podcast is that music gives you a way. To do those types of things for yourself in ways that you might not know how to anticipate, or might not be good enough to do with music yet. And so we end up talking a lot about how to do that and sort of teaching that. This is a good example of a record that's come right to you.
Dandelion Gum is this plush train ride straight out of hell. Just a truly weird thing that you can attach yourself to because it is good and interesting in ways that will surprise you. But I think this gives us something to attach ourselves to that maybe reconnects that portion of our brain that can actually lean all the way back and remember all the things that we can't change and that we can't do.
And. This record did it for me at a time where I needed it to and I didn't expect it That in a meta sense is always the shit that I love about every episode that we do It's always going to hit me in a way. I didn't expect I'm so excited to hear that because I knew, like, Black Moth was one of those things I'd, like, filed away from my out in the streets in the mid and late aughts. Like Atlanta had such a counterculture in those days. That was like, this really captures weird shit.
How shows strange unbathed people just like full of just strange characters and just trippiness everywhere you went. And I feel like I was like out in the streets on the scene at a lot of those places and you were like rightfully minding your own business a little more.
And it makes me really happy that like this, you got on a wavelength with this, cause we have always been on coordinatable wavelengths, I'll say, but that was a time when I think we were both like branching out in a lot of ways and we were getting into really, really different things.
So it's just like, I also like to think of it a little bit of as an artifact of this, like immediately pre Ified internet when like there was still promise in culture and counterculture and you know, the, the hope and change just before Obama's America and just that strange little moment, the, the like 2002 to 2009 10 moment that will be impossible to encapsulate in words forever. And a lot of the artifacts are. Lo fi or gone because it was such a transitional moment and culture changed so fast.
So it's like, I also just on like a personal level, I'm glad that we're capturing a little bit of this headspace for posterity. For sure, I mean 2007 in general is A cool moment to look back on musically speaking and to the context you just mentioned, because that hopefulness of technology and music taking off is, I mean, a big part of the appeal of Black Moth Super Rainbow and how they came to grow anyway, because Two two things were evolving at that time.
One is the ability to create music more easily and at a higher level than before. And then at the same time, the ability to distribute music at scale and in a different way that it never happened before. And just to, recontextualize, especially for folks who may be, you know, young enough to where this wasn't a moment where they were paying a ton of attention.
The same record, or the same year that this record came out, so 2007, was when Radiohead released In Rainbows and sort of flipped around the model of being able to get to music at all. Did the pay what you want thing.
Right, which was, which now seems so simple, but at the time was, I mean, it was the event of the internet, uh, and it was it was pointing us towards a future where, One million blog think pieces were written, I'm sure, in 2007 about the democratized future of music now because if independent artists can make music and they can distribute it directly to people, what do we even need corporations for anymore?
Which is a nice trip to the past reminding us that that question doesn't necessarily result in the future we want. But it also fostered such a curiosity, you know, you know, like people seem to be fascinated with millennials and elder millennials is like a, Oh, a strange little alien thing in the cultural consciousness in good and bad ways. But, you know, what you see in the moment that is 2007 and below the surface stuff like Black Moth Super Rainbow is.
The fruits coming to bear of like five years of unfettered music access your Napster's your cause as your whatever, and then a real sort of like end of web 1. 0 ecosystem of that curiosity and insatiable sense of discovery starting to pop up. and like, I don't even remember what the, big stuff would have been in exactly that time. Like, was it per pure volume with SoundCloud around yet?
Was it still my space maybe for a little bit, but there were like all of these vehicles where people were starting to curate and go farther and farther out and there, there was just a real sense that anything was possible. and in fact, we had to like do more and try more and. There was so much experimentation and breaking down of artificial boundaries that had existed and genre. And this was just one of the really smart, cool by products of that kind of Petri dish in culture.
Yeah, and to, uh, as we'll discuss, to a shocking degree, that is the case because just to really set the stage, by the way, we're, we're going to tell you all the reasons you're going to like this record, but you need to know how ridiculous the setting of it is in order to fully appreciate the weird vibes it's going to throw at you that you're going to end up liking a lot, and then later finding yourself singing. Uh, ridiculous vocoder esque lines of.
I also think though, it would be very easy to just do a 30 second, like you joke, right before we started recording a 30 second, like, Oh man. And that's just the whole thing. Like, just go listen to it. And it's. It's way more self evident of an enjoyable listen than anything we've done for a while, to Oh, yeah, fair point, Immediately, you're like, oh shit, this feels like getting in a hot tub.
And you're just like, alright, I'm good, check back on me in two hours or whatever and see if I've pruned. It just works on a primal level. So I think doing a little bit of examination around, how did this come to be?
So specific and so good because I think even if you do a million tentacles of recommended, if you like, you're not going to find anything that's quite like this very specific thing, which they have he has chased this sort of very specific thing and made it work for him again and again and just like refine the formula subtly, but it's a thing that works. so knowing like what could have even given rise to that is interesting.
On the flip side, there's a lot of mystery around the artist, you know, quote, unquote, maybe there is, maybe there isn't, and less so as he's gotten older. But that was like a really big deal for a long time. And on the flip side, you can consider like, how little do you really need to know? Or like, how little could you possibly know to still enjoy this thing?
So I do want us to ride that line of, As we use that phrase often, like not cutting the lights on in Space Mountain, just like finding lots of little textures as we stick our hands out of the coaster without accidentally flipping a light switch. Yeah, but this one would be pretty tight. Cause like, I feel like on this one, if you turn the lights on in Space Mountain, It's like, there's a dude downstairs in like, a rope with like, neon silly string or something.
And he's just sort of dancing to himself. And he looks up at you and he's like. Did you wanna watch? Or join? But he's also wearing a mask that he made at his house of like a melting orange. Oh, man. Oh, you saw me, man. I do miss the days of this particular era where the idea of band lore was exclusively ironic. Uh, and could never be like an actual thing because we didn't have at the time We didn't have hives yet, or that, that like deployed around fan bases.
We just had people who were overly proud of liking bands like this and the Flaming Lips, or uh, in semi analogous ways, bands like the Blood Brothers and stuff and like, it's aggressively weird and I like it and you didn't, but you can come with me if you want to. Yeah, but you never ran to your point about hives. You never ran across them in packs. It was one. comic book guy character behind the counter somewhere usually and you're like, sir, I'm just Come on, man.
I'm just trying to go about my day. Thanks for the tip I will go investigate it on my own and then if I come back as passionate as you then we can talk but just real energy and balance right now, man Yes, and we are going to do the equivalent of, uh, you know, an out of town suburbanite walks into the record store and says, give me your best record, sir, please. One of them. And we hand you this fucking record.
Uh, and we tell you, you're going to become a Black Moth Super Rainbow fan before you know it. And sure enough, like one of the things I love about this is I think we can dissect it because even if the music or the artist is. Unserious as we've talked about it.
There's still a lot to talk about in relatively serious ways because it's really interesting and it's really good But like one of my favorite aspects of this record to the points that you're making here Is from second one of the very first song it immediately drops into a hook As you go along, they'll start playing with your disorientation, and then in other songs will start to draw out the amount of time before you can get to the actual underlying hook that you're going to remember.
But I deeply love how hard it immediately drops into basically a halftime beat at the very beginning of the record. And in. In a way that few other records do or can actually sets an appropriate tone for the rest of the journey that you're going to go on. It doesn't introduce everything all at once, but vibe wise, it's directly in, it's on point, it's directionally accurate, and you kind of know what you're getting into.
And like, it's a move in that sense that feels overly intentional and thought out. And at the same time this will be an exercise in contrasts. We are talking about in this case, at least one person tobacco who disclosed in a song exploder interview in 2016 that he quote, doesn't know any instruments and became enamored with a four track recorder that his parents gave him while he was in high school.
in the wildest senses of the word, completely unserious approaches to making music that still nevertheless has made a collection of really awesome, hooky, memorable, uh, stuff that if you haven't heard it, there's a good chance you're going to end up liking it and just be surprised that you do. every characterization That Thomas Feck makes of his own music is interesting to me and a study in contrast and I described it in the show notes as writing the Ouroboros of elitism and nihilism.
There's like such a He has such an old school hipster seriousness of like No, you shouldn't give a fuck like that. And I don't either. But, um, but also hold on. And he's like always calibrating the, the nothing matters but everything does or the, or vice versa or whatever. so the first one in that regard that like really jumps out at me, somebody asked them like as black Moss front man, how do you maintain such an incognito and private identity in an expressive industry?
Do you feel it affects your band's career in any way? And he comes back with something like, It's easy. I just don't put myself out there. I just don't have the compulsion, like most oversharing musicians. That probably does affect my career. And it took me up until this new album, a later one in 2013, to really understand that some dumb motherfuckers need you to spell everything out for them in order for them to get what you're doing, that includes the press.
And that affected my career in the past to a small degree, though. Luckily I've just had enough people. I've had just enough people on board now who don't need it fed to them through a tube and they totally get it. In this era, in this cycle of, uh, stuff though, it was a little less edgy. or maybe actually this was a late and even later quote, he said, Oh man, I have the worst time describing what I do.
I usually start with saying something like most people don't like it, or it's not for everyone. And then something about it being electronic, et cetera. and then I think one really important distinction, like talking about contrast, the point you made when I make stuff that I think people will like that's black moth, super rainbow. And the stuff that might sound totally almost offensive to people, that's tobacco. So there's a whole other strain.
You can eject the cassette of this episode and go to, if you're like, I the hippie shit, the whatever, uh, there is a version of this that exists for like staying plugged into the matrix of 2025 and that's tobacco. the really grabby one for me is the first track of, A record called fucked up friends, which, you know, gives you the thesis statement, I guess. And it's called street trash. And it's all more hip hoppy and low end and Dewey Cox, bad trip, bad trip, bad trip.
and if you don't dig that one, you might recognize solo tobacco work. If you've ever watched the show Silicon Valley because on the followup to fucked up friends, a record called maniac meat. Um, which is what it feels like to be in your body in 2025. Uh, the song Stretch Your Face is used as the Silicon Valley theme song. Oh! Sorry, this is, uh, unhelpful for a podcast recording. That is really sending me on some thoughts. That's really cool. I didn't realize that myself.
Yeah, Nihilist Analog Guy doing the show theme song that is, uh, a parody of all the shittiness of the tech age and what it wrought. The eerily prophetic show. Yeah, A full yes to what you are saying. And also, yeah, and it slaps. And I always wondered why, you objectively good. Yeah. And nothing sounds like it out there. Exactly. And it drops immediately into a halftime beat. Like, Oh, I'm loving this move.
And I I'll mention in a moment when we when we talk through some of the things that occurred to us on. Fresh or, first intentional listens in a while because it definitely very directly connects to a particular move and artist for me. and that's another cool realization and a cool connecting dot. to paint a little bit more of a picture, uh, as well as maybe talk a little bit more as much as we can.
I mean, there's not, honestly, a ton of encyclopedic information for us to draw from for either this artist or this record. Um, that's part of what makes it cool to talk about, honestly. But I think one way that you can catch the vibe of this, especially if Black Moth Super Rainbow is a newer artist to you, in your awareness, is like, this is heavy aesthetics.
it is a capital I important that you Get on board with the feel of sort of what's happening here And that we give you some examples of how those aesthetics played out even in like physical packaging and stuff because this is Once again for it just being music really visual And it helps you kind of fill in a lot of what you're listening to you if you can can catch that And I think that plays out not only in Like we say like visual aesthetics, but also in the way that
this band tried to talk about itself and market itself You've already pulled out some solid quotes so So, Black Mile Super Rainbow was picked up by Graveface Records uh, after 2005 picked them up with a prior record called Lost Picking Flowers in the Woods, uh, and reissued their first two albums, uh, which they had, previously released by themselves. So, They already have a pretty experimental record company picking up on this from totally indie, self published type stuff.
But if you try to place yourself in the perspective of a record company in the mid aughts trying to capitalize on everything we've sort of pointed out so far, but also taking advantage of that true moment of like, weird music got marketed for the first time in a very long time, maybe ever, maybe not.
At scale and so people were trying to figure out how to get you on board with some fucking weird stuff and That results in things like this description from gray face records about about this album quote Deep in the woods of western Pennsylvania, vocoders hum amongst the flowers and scents which bubble under the leaf strewn ground while flutes whistle in the wind and beats bounce to the soft drizzle of a warm acid rain.
As the sun peeks out from between the clouds, the organic oral concoction of Black Moth Super Rainbow starts to glisten above the trees. On the next episode of hella tubbies. We're like ketatubbies, like, dude, That's what I'm going to start calling Elon Musk. my brain is just casting members of the rest of that show, including the son. Oh, that's, that's deeply bad where my brain is going now. The sun, the sun is just the screaming sun from Rick and Morty.
that's too inviting to, to take that bait. Uh, I'm going to pull back, but that's a nice description. I think of what people are trying to do. If they're going to hook you into this music before you get a chance to listen to it. Uh, it is. further from the edges of what you might anticipate than most things that even in this podcast, we sort of ask you to pick up.
And yet, as Kyle, you and I have already talked about, but bringing in that theme of contrasts, this is both deeply weird music and possibly the most immediately accessible thing we've talked about in A while. Yeah. Yeah, like more than Paramore even Yes.
and like maybe more than Olivia Rodrigo Like this is the poppiest pop album that we have maybe covered period I just kept thinking about how it felt like listening to the Beatles in the middle of a hallucination, you know, all the fractals of time and space crystal break and you hear the White Album or something somewhere, and you can like barely perceive it because you can't perceive dimension or direction.
Honestly, to be unusually fair to the Beatles, there is a lot of that lineage here, and specifically from their weirder records, and the way that they band and record makes me feel more complimentary about the Beatles for the first time maybe ever in my life actually. Yeah. I mean, and giving, in this case, then like giving the Beatles their flowers for like their impact on psychedelia, which is definitely what came out here. 1000%.
Yeah, even, not only will some of the tone and approaches in this music remind you of, you know, to me, more Revolver era stuff but even on a music theory level, a lot of what Blackmail Super Rainbow here deploys. It's just like modal harmony with itself. And that's exactly what the Beatles did to introduce that shifting feeling of psychedelia over pop. That then the Beach Boys would go on through things like Pet Sounds to just perfect.
Which maybe that's a note when we need to find a way to talk more about pet sounds again one day, but there's this really cool lineage all the way through the 60s all the way up to here, but that now is not only introducing some of the later electronic stuff that would come in the decades after, the 60s and 70s, but then on top of that layers in the what would become modern production technique, really dirty forms of production, uh, that made things feel fuzzy while also
being just on the other side of, like we've talked about many times the loudness war and evolution of production there. And like, this was around the time where you could legitimately start to take equipment that you could buy, software that you could buy your. silver ass MacBook that would pinwheel spin half the time while you were doing stuff, but like everything had gotten just good enough to where you could software purchase your way to something sounding right.
And then because, production had more of an established sound at this point, you could sort of cheat your way over to it sounding right. You can make it sound loud at the end of it. And that sort of contributed you were smart or reckless enough. Yeah, in that sense, it also sort of calls up the lineage of man, you mentioned hipster Ouroboros and, uh, nihilism and elitism. So let's just mention the band at the exact dot center of that one, and that would be Neutral Milk Hotel.
the, record that everyone loves, right? The aeroplane over the sea. the aeroplane over the sea. Jesus Christ! Oh, yeah, just, ugh.
But a lot, a lot of people, some people maybe unironically love that record, I'm not sure, but that record represents, the Neutral Milk Hotel one, represented a like audacity in self recording in what became like bedroom DIY recording of otherwise weird indie shit that like wasn't even close to being worth investment by a record company and like, that along with, you know, some of their other eventual contemporaries, like maybe Animal Collective or early Animal
Collective, especially like that sound of, we can make this good enough and we don't have to do that good of a job recording it or producing it in order to get to where we want to go really not only blossomed during this time, but like a lot of us got used to that method of people making music because that is.
Especially for, probably five or 10 years, like if you heard an up and coming band, the first thing that you liked and appreciated from them was some garage band ass shit that sounded real, like handshake murders are coming to mind to me in the moment where it's like, yeah, but if you can get ahold of the one before the one that you started liking, you're going to get a real idea of how everything, uh, I always think of when you brought over the unmastered, extremely loud
Maylene demos before one came out, and it was just the most blown out. Was like, the weirdest Sonic Youth type blowout, like, destruction unit level blowout, it sounded crazy and nothing like what it would ultimately become, but like, we rode around, it was like almost a badge of honor to, to get the weird, the weird shit, the the advanced ones. Yeah, the advanced copies.
Oh yeah, it was a huge deal when we could get the half shitty pre version of, uh, back before Under Oath built its own shark to jump over, right after they're only chasing safety, they had to find the Great Line, and like, that was a highly anticipated record for a lot of people, and a version of that leaked before it got actually mastered and finalized, and like, everyone I knew was listening to that, like, that particular version of it, Man.
none of that exists the same way RAR file, yeah, trading. yeah, getting, getting text messages that cost ten cents a piece from someone who's going, Do you know how to open a rare file? It's pronounced rare. Get off the computer. You have a virus now. Stop. It was worth it. I burned that CD. Well, just download it on mom's computer first and then transfer it over to yours. Back when a computer was a place, and not in your pocket all the time.
Yeah. I laughed at that the first time that I saw it, but that was a cultural shift. When the computer moved from being a stationary place, an event that you could walk in and out of, into, a thing, happening to you, all the room, yes. Perpetually occupied by your little brother. Who, who is definitely not looking at whatever it was that you thought they were looking at before you came into the room. They were definitely playing Hot Wheels online or Roller Coaster Tycoon. Please don't worry.
For. Sure. Check their browser history, see if they know how to, how to erase it yet. mean, They won't. So do you think that there's anything background lore or detail wise that's important to talk about before we kind of talk about first or new fresh impressions of what we listen to? just really quickly, you've hit on lore, you've hit on aesthetics, the lore is nobody knows when this was actually really recorded.
Just, he's been really prolific, Thomas Feck, and so this stuff just sort of Happened in the mid two thousands came out in May of 2007. Put out on great basis. You mentioned a DIY studio set up. In or around Pittsburgh, the, the lore is that they, you know, went off and did shit in the woods, and maybe they were a cult, maybe they weren't. But the reality of it is somewhere around Pittsburgh, wherever he lived, Thomas Feck was doing this pretty much by himself.
And the, the personnel eventually around him were his live outfit. Were and r the artwork. the aesthetic is like an immediate draw. So we've talked about Forever Heavy opening track. Every melody is a chorus level melody, um, and it draws you in immediately, but the visuals do too. You can judge a book by its cover. so two things about the vinyl, which is like, this is right when vinyl really started becoming a thing again. And, the rainbow face on the cover comes from a garbage pail kid.
So there's a huge influence of 80s horror and like shitty low grade VHS culture. is more everywhere now, uh, and accounts like everything is terrible and like places on the internet that have proliferated, like lo fi weird refractions of the ugliness of normie culture. but big earnest fans of stuff like Garbage Pail Kids. Uh, and so the, the rainbow. That a face is sort of slapped on was Stinkerbell or Fairy Mary, the Garbage Pail Kid. And it is literally a fairy throwing up a rainbow.
and then the vinyl, one of the OG runs was a double bubblegum pink vinyl with gold splashes and a gatefold sleeve with a scratch and sniff bubblegum scent front cover. So like 80s, you know, golden books level weirdness, just trying to call up a hallucination of a memory of being the pretty much exact age that we are. And coming up in Reagan's consumer Reagan and Bush one and Clinton's consumerist America.
but not like in a bad, serious rage against the machine anyway, just in a sort of Absence of seriousness. Like, man, isn't everything weird. Here's a melting rainbow face. All right, turn on the music, play it loud. I'm grateful for that recommendation. That's exactly what I did. And it was nice to relieve myself from the regular sensation of mostly listening and trying to absorb, but also searching, thinking, trying to notice, trying to take note as I'm listening to stuff.
It was much easier to release myself from all of that. And when I did do that, I did find, interestingly enough, There are plenty of times that I hook into, anyway, plenty of things I do take note of that I don't need to because even at a very base level, the hooks here will transport me to other songs, and other artists entirely, but in a different sense than just, the, Sort of lineage of influence over time.
It's not quite a they remind me of someone else who was a You know an influence on them or they're doing something new with this type of music not really It's just that the hooks are so good and they're like They're so good without having to have a bunch of layers on top of them.
Like generally speaking, it's just a synth and or a vocoder doing something interesting in harmony with itself and then doing it that same way a few times over that song at just the right cadence that just all feels right. And because of that simplicity, I felt like I could see this band. Um, and I can, I can give some examples of that, but I think just the In general, encouraging people as we turn to how to start approaching this record, just pre lean back. Let it come all the way to you.
Let yourself be surprised. And let yourself kind of hang in there for the journeys that they're going to take you on. Especially through the kind of Timing of different songs, uh, in the way that all of them feel exactly the same, and yet each one is slightly different and sort of takes you through a different path, uh, of the different kind of palettes that they're painting with all of this stuff.
And that feeling is intensified if you take all of the extra material from this era, which he later released as a record called extra flavor. And you play it all as one line. So it's like a 30, you Five, 40 minute record. It's pretty lean because it's a bunch of minute and a half, two minute little vignette type things. And then if you add all the extra flavor stuff, it's like an hour and a half, 35 or 40 pieces of music. it's like a regular hot tub and extra deep hot tub type of experience.
Yeah, and some of that stuff on the extra release.
Give some interesting context to, to the rest of these songs and feels once again, especially mid 2000s because I think what comes out even more in some of those extra release songs, which we won't talk as much about, but like, I think I can really clearly discern the Modest Mouse Decembrist bent in a lot of those songs of the kind of acoustic guitar being a weird folksy troubadour in a fucked up reality thing that we were all doing or that a lot or that a lot
of those bands were doing for a while. You can feel a little bit more of that come out. But it also just made me. Appreciate how dense dandelion gum was when they had all of that to choose from it feels the appropriate amount of dense without ever going kind of too strong out or simplistic. Which is a crazy thing to say about 16 or 17 distinct cuts of music like that. It's a lot of different flavors, no pun intended, but it does. You're absolutely right.
I feel like the exact right curation and the exact right amount of things. So maybe to this end, I'd love to talk about some things that just came to mind for me listening to this, uh, some of which are. Conceptually related, some of them are literal music. conceptually, this is one of those moments where I'm just going to kind of share a thing that came up, even if I don't know totally how to explain it, but it works for me.
For whatever reason, listening to this, especially after I settled into it a bit, This felt like the show Adventure Time to me. okay, you're nodding, so Hundo P baby. yeah, yeah. yeah. I would talk about I think Cartoon Network and Adult Swim Universe is a spiritual cousin of this big time. And yes, for the weirdness of things like the, you know, Adult Swim bumpers between the shows and all the weird vibe and tone stuff that they did, yes, that's true.
But also specifically the way that Adventure Time is Can be a show for adults. They are also simultaneously making an adult show for you. But it's not, it's not that in the sense that they are making a children's show with adult grotesque humor layered in in a way that kids can't understand. See, to me much like Adventure Time or something like that, no, it's just both. It's just both at the same time.
It's just really well done, really well conceptualized, and clever and imaginative in the way that captures both a child and an adult who's willing to just sit down and watch something about the Bubblegum Princess for just a moment, because actually, if you'll sit around long enough in that show, they'll drop some shit on you that'll make you think for a minute, and it's pretty cool. Mike. That's what this all feels like to me. It's ostensibly ridiculous on the surface of the thing.
It doesn't pretend to be serious, it doesn't try to convince you it's serious, but acting like it's not, it's not ten serious people in a trench coat. it's just what it is, And you have the ability to engage with it in a way that, like, feels good, in a way that's hard to get to with other records that are moving you to a place, or telling you something, or painting a picture. This is just, to me, creating a lot more of a setting.
And that is Bolstered by the reality that much, much like my general experience in life, you don't know what the fuck he's saying on this record anyway. And then once you realize that, and you go look into the lyrics, cause you think, maybe there's a reason why I can't totally understa No, there isn't. No, there isn't. The lyrics themselves, it's nothing. It's a bunch of nothing. It is like, artistic equivalent of like, fucking Seinfeld.
It's a thing about nothing that in itself is cool because it exists that way with that level of nonchalance. And like, I had forgotten that that was true about this record, immediately remembered it once we started listening again, and like, found a way to lean all the way into that sensation of it. And I have missed this way of listening to music, to be honest. so a handful of things totally agree with the adventure time thing.
I specifically called out that forever heavy, like really exemplifies that. And I know we've, we've hit on the, this opening track a number of times, but after there's a little bit of vote quarter introduction. It dissipates into an instrumental break just after the minute mark. And that's when it feels like the curtains have been pulled back on the world, the adventure time world.
And you can just sort of settle in to your, you know, your jet pack roller coaster seat or whatever, and take the sort of adventure ride with the thing, it really does. It doesn't feel like. World building or or what it's it's I'm really loving this idea of it's the opposite of anything You know, it's not silly. It's not serious. It's unserious.
It's the absence of it's interesting that this record Aesthetically is so visual But like what comes to mind for me when I think about that instrumental break and think about you providing Really specific visual cue with the idea of adventure time. It's not literally calling to mind the visuals of Adventure Time in my mind, but the spirit of it where the instrumental break clears the visuals out of my field and invites me to build my own visualizations.
Like some Dream Corp LLC shit, you know, like build, build as you go. so very aligned with you on that. I have a bit of a different tack on the lyrics bit, and maybe I'm too much of a sucker for stuff like the creative act, you know, the, the Rick Rubinesque. Ooh, yeah, it's, that's a cleverly constructed sentence and I can build a philosophy. Or a religion around that. That's like, that's all religion is, right? It's just good, good words designed to point your consciousness in a direction.
just manipulation. the lyrics do feel like mantras to me though. And they're silly or like unserious ones, but they feel like a way to reground and touch grass that old Jeff Buckley touch grass thing again, They clear you out to prepare for the doing your own visualization type of thing. So in Forever Heavy, something like, you know, living in a field, you're forever heavy, lying in the sun, you're forever heavy, chewing all the gum, you're forever heavy.
And just the repeating of that thing and the simplicity of that thing. Dog, that's mindfulness 101 to me and you and I are much more practiced in our discipline toward mindfulness now, but I remember reading wherever you go, there you are and being like, Oh, it's exactly what I thought it was. And it's nothing like what I thought it was. And even just occupying those two thoughts simultaneously is like the first step. In getting toward the discipline of mindfulness.
And then there's lying out here. We shine, melt me, melt me, melt me. That's definitely a mantra or going back to aesthetics.
You read the back cover of this vinyl and you see, titles like jump into my mouth and breathe the stardust or when the sun grows on your tongue dog i'm buying a record with song titles like that sight unseen i don't care if it's the worst music i've ever heard in my life kudos on making my imagination explode like a popsicle in my mouth but in the jump into my mouth he says bring us hope start a sunrise we have known and find our way home Mantra. Love it.
and then, my favorite, When the sun grows on your tongue, you won't want to stop him. You're gonna die. We're all gonna die. Come on, man. write all the time. And getting that dead simple is such an act of pure trust in yourself. Or pure nonchalance. That whatever you say, it doesn't matter anyway. I actually think that lyrically this is the perfect intersection point for you and me because it exposes the farce of caring about it in the like inverse way that Kurt Cobain did.
Kurt Cobain was a silly lyric writer. where he was purposely trying to subvert it all the time. This is like, maybe it's good. Maybe it's not. Whatever. I love. I never thought about the lyrics once ever. I never worried or wondered about what he was saying under the heavy vote quarter. but taking some time to think about it made it even more interesting to me. Like it did enrich even though it's not supposed to, but maybe it is, but maybe it doesn't. Who knows? Who cares?
Like it's a no lose proposition, I guess. And that's just sort of the brilliance of it. stuck out or surprised you or gave you a vibe? A lot. I'll mention the music now, but I will just say, I took a note that feels like it maps to what you were just explaining, and I wrote that it feels like meditation for children to listen to this record, and Parentheses compliment. yeah, yeah, yes. meditation for children at its own level is like more serious than meditation for adults.
So I would be coming from the opposite direction. But yes, definitely in a good way. and idea that these lyrics and words. Exist, but I don't have to attack. I don't have to hang the meaning of the surrounding music on them in order to either get them or appreciate them. And yes, so to that end, yeah, we are meeting exactly in the middle of the way that we often approach both like lyrics and vocals and songs. This has been a fun moment, but I think.
What shocked me even more was how fast a simple synth line would take me somewhere else entirely. And to start with the one that I've been hinting at a bit, but it's just was immediate for me. Forever Heavy has a really, really, really similar Tempo and feel to the song Waterfalls by Clam Casino off the Rainforest EP, which also came out in 2007. And like, Both like, if you were trying to put the sounds in your mouth, both would have a, say a similar texture. You know what I well said!
And I mean that with all of my heart, yes! Yeah, and yes, in both records with strong visual aesthetics associated with them, thanks to album art and thanks to this particular moment in time where album art kind of still meant a thing much more than it does these days. But so Forever Heavy immediately takes me in that direction.
And then I start to feel out a few other things that come to mind, some obvious, some a little bit more, this'll be a fun pen to put in somebody's whatever, to go to a different record. But. You know, as you go along, even, even songs like Sunlits you can draw out the Daft Punk record that would come not long after this, right? The Random Access Memories.
Like, you can, you can really hear it and hear what would become some very popular, You know, a very popular record in its own right, but you can hear that everyone was sort of open to that sort of thing and, you know, it found its popular apex there in Daft Punk, but, That's so brilliant and such an internet era thing that calls to mind, you know, we had a couple of years of death grips really like exploding in the underground and then a year later we get Jesus
like Daft Punk trying to make a thing into the zeitgeist, which is. Less of a thing now that everything is everywhere all the time, but there were still some of these moments of like, this feels like a genuinely new thing. Who's going to be the person to commercialize it. yep, so then kind of smaller, outcroppings almost from that.
When I think about the stuff that reminds me of Random Access Memory, but also like Tron era Daft Punk from this record, it also reminds me of one of the big boy records that he dropped, so Sir Lucius Leftfoot, The Son of Chico Dusty it That was the, that's the first one. That's the like tangerine. You ain't yeah, uh, yeah, God, that's such a good record. so it is, and it's great in its own right, but it, yeah. Thank you.
You will hear almost one to one the, Oh, if I can get a good synth hook and a little vocoder thing going, I've got a hook for an entire song. And I think it's cool to connect those dots. I'm sure just a melody or a hook at some point just reminded me of something specific. But the more I listened to it, the more I started to feel like I could actually build out a world of synth and vocoder stuff that.
would never go too far in one direction or another, but really encompassed a surprising mixture of artists who almost Occupied this type of music for a time, and then sort of moved in other directions throughout their career, whereas Black Mouth Super Rainbow, and tobacco in general, just like, was stationed here, at this time, doing just the weird version of it.
but, I think also just gives some context to how something this oddball, Could have been in an indie zeitgeist right at this time, there was a lot of uniformity in the, this little synth type genre that was gaining some popularity during this time and it just reminded me of a ton of that stuff. And then on a longer time scale. This record made me start doing weird math equations with bands that we've talked about.
and I think hopefully this will either invite some people in who aren't convinced yet, or send some people back out to other manifestations of some of this weird energy.
One equation that came to mind was they have King Gizzard energy with Canned Stamina with The unseriousness of like a Sufjan Stevens where it's like everything is weird, but good But we're here for it and we really like it and we want you to like it But we don't care too much if you don't like it But also we will now be doing this without stopping for a significant period of time and you can come along or you can be bothered that we're going to play this one kind of
singular piece of music for a pretty long time and repeat some really good hooks over and over until you start to feel mildly hypnotized by the whole thing. I love that equation. I would add one variable and that's swish a house.
It's like if you took a live bootleg of that super group all on one stage, last Waltz style, uh, like we just saw King is so like silver cord King is where they bring out the big tray of wires and knobs and do dads and they get Sufjan out there doing some like weird stuff and demo. Doing some like stuff as well. And then you took that whole recording and you base boosted it and you slowed it. Way the hell down. That's black mo. Super rainbow. Where you're like, I like you, but you're crazy man.
Was there something in that tea? because you could adored in your neck. That's awesome. What else stood out to you? I would say two things. one general analog mess. and tobacco has had sort of like, has been on a spectrum of his relationship with analog mess and like feeling entrapped by it eventually in his career. But it's like, it's very much the thing here. There was a great, if maybe a little pretentious essay that I read that basically the thesis of it was.
The analogness of what is like ostensibly a synth or electronic record makes you contemplate its relationship to matter and energy like analog in the digital era. There's also a drawn out analogy to the films of Federico Fellini in there. So it's, you want to talk about the elitism and nihilism or Boris it's a mid bite.
it's a mid body snake by, the analogous, I think you can really hear in here's another great title, neon syrup for the cemetery sisters, where the first thing you hear is a lot of headroom in the recording and like tape hiss and stuff. And then it continues to be in the song. There's also subtleties. The analogous doesn't really try to draw attention to itself where I contrast it with a Jack white. Where, you know, elephant had the slapped right on the thing.
Like this whole thing was recorded with tape in one room. One man physically carried it with his bare hands. You know, it's not that sticky sort of thing. All love to Jack and especially Meg White. all the analogness is subtle. in my opinion, mostly subtle in my opinion. So like the back half of Lollipop's Accord, another great title. there's.
Really tasteful delay and reverb in the way like there's a lot of like beat switch, clearly some hip hop culture influence that makes it really different than sixties and seventies. Psychedelia. It's like kind of refracted back into itself. so some delay and reverb and lollipops accord. And then in, they live in the meadow. There's a, the drum pattern and then it back mask and it does that in the loop over and over, but they're not. aggressive, there's subtle analog moments and effects.
And then I think the other thing that jumps out at me is obviously like synth is the star here, but it could be really one trick, but there is a variety of scent, tones, tastes, moments, whatever. So three that I would call out really quickly. the first one being when the sun grows on your tongue, there's Nice modulation on the high end synth and then great tone on the low end.
Never got to see these guys live, but hearing the low end on that song, I was really imagining what it would be like to hear that, like, almost like if they had a Leslie cabinet or something where you can really sort of feel the chunkiness and the vibrato of the low end. A really nice tone. And then on the next, I actually think this is a three track sequence that I'm about to say. Yes. spinning cotton candy in a shack made of shingles. Say that three times fast.
the synth plays a more ambient role and it swirls around a really tight bass, B A S S E bass of a really good sounding sort of Spector or Ringo Starr drum loop and, slightly blown out acoustic guitar. So it, plays the right function. We talked on the me without you episode about how the different songs have different instrument stars. it's sort of a bit of that flavor, you know, where it's not the same one trick every time.
And then one of my favorite songs on the record, or certainly like my favorite black moth archetype of layers, uh, is in drippy eye where it's. Mellotron against monosynth and then the we like that, that type of thing that, feels like a real signature sound for tobacco. another example of that would be on that besides record extra flavor dark forest joggers, which theremin thing. So would be very easy for this to be like synth AC DC, where it's like, here's the thing. Here's the thing again.
Here's the thing again. Here's the thing at a different tempo. Here's the thing at the same tempo as the first song, but inverted or whatever. it's a very tight formula, but but they write it on the board and lots of different fonts or something like that. and that keeps it really interesting. but it's all got like a real cohesive vocabulary because sent this though. the real anchor of the thing. Cohesive vocabulary is a good way of describing it.
I'd also say That I'm surprised to say, this is kind of like an audiophile record potentially. I don't really understand how that comes to be with what we've talked about so far in the, nonchalance with which this was constructed and produced. Not to say there's not Seriousness in the artistry, right? We're not trying to misrepresent that so much as there is not a lot of talk about the seriousness of it.
And most of the context that we have indicates a sort of open handedness about the whole thing. So to have created something that is sonically interesting enough in this particular moment in time with these tools.
To have it become something that is truly interesting to listen to on different audio delivery devices is a shock and mostly a delight, but a huge shock and to your point or comment about like on some of the songs, theoretically being able to like turn up, uh, certain low ends and different bits about it, like this, as much as any other record I can remember lately, uh, will, Change its face if you change its EQ, it will shapeshift based on whatever you're
listening to it on, whatever that space is and moves with your attention as well. definitely one of those, uh, once you start thinking about a particular car, all of a sudden, everywhere you go, you can start to find that car wherever you're looking. Similarly, you can hook yourself into particular aspects of this record to me, like a lot easier than most of the intentionality you have to bring to focus in on something particular on other records. and so this is.
Maybe counterintuitively both a tremendous like audiophile headphone record and also not necessarily the easiest one to get a lot out of by doing like a sitting active intentional listen to the whole thing. I'm not saying you can't, but it's. It's a different experience than trying to trace, you know, a jazz master through their particular instrument and how they contribute to a record.
It's a little bit more like, I wonder what's going to occur to me this time and just letting yourself cruise through it that way. Music for airports. Inside your brain. We've mentioned this a little bit, but just to sort of say directly then, we try to, as much as possible, bring forward a sense of artist intent, as we can draw from, generally speaking, interviews with the artists, or interviews with historians about a given record, or whatever.
First of all, there are no Fuckin Black Moth Super Rainbow historians that I know of. So settle down. I think we're, we're becoming card carrying after this episode. Maybe so. This an husker do. Much to your chagrin.
Um. so we have, um, a dearth of, of all of that source material here, not only because this isn't necessarily an artist that reached the scale of impact of a lot of the folks we talked about but also because, like we said, when, when Tobacco does get interviewed about this, he gives a verbal shrug in your general direction and basically sort of says like, well, it works, And you're asking me questions. So who won this competition?
so we don't have a lot to draw from nor a lot that we have to like stand up as a structure to like understand what's happening on this record. Uh, and that's neither good nor bad, but just a thing that changes depending on which music we're approaching. But there is a quote vague concept album happening here that is through the lyrics that we've already talked about that are In a sense, both, like we've said, both introspective mantras and sort of nonsensical stories in their own right.
There is a central theme of, uh, witches in the forest creating candy. Sure. Sure. Um, you could have said almost any combination of words there and I would believe you. But you can at least have that in mind and sort of apply it. And I think. Understanding that that, as far as we know, is the maximum amount of intentionality that has been applied on a thematic or narrative level, is sort of an important fact in and of itself to carry into this. The music is dense and cool and interesting.
A lot of times we talk about music that's dense and cool and interesting. That maps to a theme or narrative that is also such. Not true. Really here. And that is a nice break. I would like to just hear a little bit more about witches in the forest making candy for now. Take me on this weird psychedelic trip into midnight gospel level. Weird things where I can go back and remember just like that show, what it feels like to be both terrified and settled all at the same time somehow.
And like that feeling gets brought out here, but I think just as we try to point people towards underlying consistent truths about music, we can also point you in directions on certain records and go. You don't have to go over there. There is nothing there. Pfft. Ha Yeah. I think it's just a show don't tell way of saying, come with me and you'll be in a world of pure imagination.
Essentially, like, take it as a mentor of mine has said many times, seriously, but not literally and the sort of esoterica of all that extends to the commitment to remaining esoteric so that you will just get out of your head and into your imagination of the music extends to their refusal to use their government names.
So instead of, you know, Slipknot zero through nine, you have Tobacco or Thomas Feck, you have the Seven Fields of Ophelion for Maureen Boyle, who's also a great photographer with an Etsy store. Look her up. If or not, who's the drummer, Donna Kyler. Steve sleeve, I assume, but all caps, STV, SLV that's Steve Rydell, also of the hood internet, the early tens mashup Kings.
And, um, in another late aughts, early tens artifact the Tumblr site album tacos, where they just insert tacos in the album artwork. That's it. That's the bit. That's the tweet. and someone who I could find virtually no information on whatsoever, who also hung in the back at the live shows, the other synth player, PonyDiver. So wherever you are PonyDiver, I hope you're doing well, man. Someone just went, I am. Thank you. Yeah. I not listening to this. He's a, he's a coder or something.
He's doing something totally different now and just making, making, making music for fun. I don't think I've ever wanted you to be wrong more. I'm going to remember this moment. I hope to hear from Pony Driver, Pony Diver. I hope to hear from this individual. If you get this far into it, we think this is great. I can hardly imagine that there is an artist who would be less likely to listen to a podcast episode about themselves than tobacco or any of these people in his orbit.
I think he would rather pull his exoskeleton inside out than endure what we are doing right now. This is what, this is for everybody else. Tremendous vote of confidence. I think then, now that we have probably effectively touched on the Nonchalant weirdness across the board of all of this stuff, down to just, like you said, just not even actually knowing who the fuck is in this band at any given time, or necessarily what they're doing.
I think a few things sort of come out to me as where we can start going from here. And again, we, as a matter of sort of principle, try to stay really disciplined to the idea of, not only talking about how to think about a record and take it in fresh, but then we try to talk about, intent and influence and how you can pay a lot of attention to that. And then further, you know, for, you know, so many of the artists that we cover, like the.
Long tale of influence across music and other forms of art, and then everything else that that sort of downstream has kicked off, not to sell anyone short, including the actual and, legitimate influence this band has had on others. At the same time, once again, the, raw amount of source material that we're drawing from here is just fundamentally different because of not only this artist, but this record and how it sits with the other types of records that we cover.
So, with that being said, I think a few things are worth going to from here. So, one would be Just making sure that we hit on the sort of tools of recording we've talked about since and vocoders But going just a little bit further into that and mentioning especially with vocoders I think we both come up with some some ways for people to go. What is that? Again, it's in all of these other songs that you're thinking of and it's, it's got a real interesting lineage of usage.
So talking a little bit about those instruments but then also just maybe quickly covering both the maybe things that weren't direct influences on this man, but like we've talked about all the genres around what they're doing here all the way from the sixties on up. Spiritual ascendance. and then, maybe going directly then into a fast forward future of where can you allow this to take you?
Um, I think all of those things sort of operate more closely to one another than some other records that we cover. Uh, and on top of it, the exercise of, Focusing on something particular in this record and then allowing yourself to discover new things from this record. Those exercises are also more closely intertwined, I think here than on other records where those can sort of be separate exercises.
So mid proposing that kind of structure from here on out but I know that we wanted to touch on things like the vocoders in particular. You mentioned a song under Vocoders that kind of excited me that you brought this up. And now I want to know how all these songs are related to one another in your head. Which one are you talking Oh, Hide and Seek, man. The, to me the most underappreciated thing that was very popular for a minute. That song rips.
And I know that people ended up just calling it the trippy song because it showed up on a WB show or some shit one time. Something like that, I don't know. But like, I legitimately think The OC fans are gonna be mad at you, bro. That's what it was. They're too busy not listening to this podcast. What are OC fans doing now? Adam Brody just had a big thing on the SAG AFTRA awards. He and Leighton Meester just had a big moment. So very weird that you're bringing the OC back into my consciousness.
Or maybe I inadvertently am with Imogen Heap. So image in heaps hide and seek, not technically a vocoder Yes. Or, you know, so I've been told, but like, let's say in the realm of sort of keyboardy vocal effectors Yep. that aren't synthesized vocals that are not Peter Frampton tube talk box. Thank you. Yes. Imogen heaps, hide and seek earth, wind and fires. Let's groove yellows. Mr. Blue sky sky, which uses it in a little bit more of a talk boxy fashion around the guitar solo and stuff.
craft works to the robots, which uses it in the, in like probably the most literal way of all of these tracks, Tame Impalas, let it happen. I am loathe, I will say, toward drawing people to Tame Impala in comparison to this band because I think it's like a cheap wink at modern psychedelia. Both artists are great.
Kevin Parker and Thomas Feck, both like singular visionary artists, but like, I don't want the, the Tame Impala tractor beam orbit anywhere near this cause it's like entirely different energies. It's like different mood ring colors, I'll say, Much respect to both Neil Young's album. Trans has a lot of great vocoder on it. And then trans AMS album, we're probably going to talk about like. Krautrock type stuff. Motoric type stuff. Trans Am was a great post rock slash motoric band.
also really, I think the vision of mostly one person as well. They have a record called Future World where there's some good vocoder on it. the other really, really big example has become Especially big thanks to TikTok and I didn't make the connection until somebody took me to see her at Big Ears. Here's, here's the Big Ears effect again. See me being like a huge evangelist for this festival.
Laurie Anderson with Oh Superman, which is the TikTok sound where people are like telling spooky stories about relatives who died and stuff like So stuff from the beyond. So there's like an ethereal trippy quality to that. And I think she uses it to really, really genius effect. So that's a whole long list, but I would say the image and heap and the Laurie Anderson are two really, really brilliant uses of synthesized vocals.
and if you want to go all the way in the opposite direction to a real Reddit shit posts, use of synthesized vocals, the old here comes Pac Man, that's a bit Liam Lynch y. I think we're just going to have to link to that when we post the episode. But that's one of my favorite OG era viral videos. Cause it's very strange. And that's, I'll just leave it at that. Google here comes back, man.
You also mentioned, like we talked about Scent, but Melotron, your boy John Paul Jones being like a great forebear. Of the Mellotron world, very interesting instrument. Like, I think there is a thread of interesting instruments worth exploring. We shared in a previous episode. I don't remember which one that Josh Homme clip about, Glock and spiel fun machine, vibraphone, whatever, whatever.
There's like a very specific strain of electronic slash analog equipment here with vocoders, Mellotron and the roads, the roads. Fender Rhodes is one of my favorite instruments in the fucking world. It's just such a vibey sound. And for those of you who haven't cancelled Spotify yet, there is a great, enormous playlist called Rhodes Trip. cover art is a guy playing a Fender Rhodes like on the beach. And it's got tons of songs with Rhodes in them.
So that instrument is a world in and of itself to go explore as well. Maybe picking up on that just a bit and extending it forward. So, Rhodes Piano incredible history and lineage in its own right, including how it got used and how it sounds. It, in its heyday, right, slowly lost sort of market share to digital synthesizers in the 80s as those came out.
so, in that vein, Some of the pioneers of analog synths are cool places to go see where people were first learning how to experiment with this stuff.
Yes, I think we could say, yes, if you are interested in this music, you could go listen to some of the people we're about to mention, but I'm not sure that's the best way to consume what we're pointing out here more that, uh, you can reverse engineer a little bit of what's possible and what you're hearing here by appreciating and understanding the truly weird experiments that people were doing very early on pushing further back From, not just the eighties, but further
into when analog sense were getting further developed and experimented with. So. A couple of examples to call out here, Wendy Carlos, who helped popularize the moog in general, uh, who's known for her work from like the late 60s for what was called switched on Bach but also a couple of other fun connections related to sense that had created a fun moment between you and me just thinking about this record before we started recording.
Both Jean Michel Jarre but specifically Mort both very influential, uh, for using synths to create Um, you know, soundscapes, uh, and do some pretty weird stuff. And both examples that sort of came out as forebears of this now we're from 1976 for John Michael jars oxygen, but also we talked about Mort Garson's Plantasia, which is a delightful thing that exists in the world, uh, which we I cannot recall.
But I feel that I had known about previously, forgot, and then got to re remember in the process of this, which delighted me. But Plantasia is an album for plants. and in the year 2025, I ask you, Should you make music for humans more than you should make it for plants? Or should we go back and reconsider who we were doing this art for to begin with? But it's also just a cool record that's really fun to listen to.
On other fronts, I'd love to know if there are other Krautrockish affiliated artists that came to mind for you outside of I know I kind of cheated and mentioned can but that's sort of our canonical example that points people towards all of that music Anyway, did it remind you of anybody else in the vein that we have been talking about it?
credit to you, you also mentioned new, who is a, is a good and I think to an extent you can put craftwork kind of in that bucket and maybe Gary Newman, almost a little even, especially as you're thinking about scent. but there's just so much of the OCS world. And John Dwyer that really feels spiritually aligned with this. It's like a speedball version of all this, you know, that black moth is Indica and OCs is sativa and cocaine.
but there are moments like 12 inch scent of the OCs or some of the jammy or stuff like that long song on. face stabber that I can't remember the name of, where it spreads out and vibes and like, you can especially experience it live when they really let their free flag fly. I see so much spiritual alignment between the OCs and the total idiosyncrasy of John Dwyer's. Orbit and headspace.
And also I love the point you made around this being like accidentally or otherwise bad audiophile, like smart, dumb audiophile, the OCs are that too. Those records sound great. They're so pleasing to the ear, but none of them are like objectively technically correct. They're just idiosyncratic and dynamic. And you have some of that same flavor here.
So. You may never go from Black Moth to the OCs and dig it, but I think if you're open minded enough to get to Black Moth in the first place, there are entry points with the OCs extensive catalog that feel right at home and both byproducts of the same culture aughts that that we talked about early in the episode. Right on. I love that connection. And maybe this comparison offends you, but we talked about this, that math equation earlier of a few different folks.
If you cut that equation in half and you're just talking about a black ball, super rainbow with the energy of King Giz, you are not far from OCs, at least in some of that area. That's right. That's right. The OCs are just King mean older brother, you know, like King Giz is a sweet kid with a lot to live for and the OCs are the older brother that's been expelled from school and plays the knife game at its desk.
Speaking of older and younger siblings this part is pretty straightforward but worth mentioning, uh, when you think of contemporary ish artists or very near form influences for this band, you get a few interesting stopping points for sure. Flaming lips, especially late nineties, early two thousands, flaming lips is. spiritually aligned to a lot of what's happening here.
But also if, if we had a sort of serious music history moment to point anyone in the direction of here, if you like wanted to really take this musical lineage seriously, like you would have to go backwards through. 98's Music Has the Right to Children by Boards of Canada and the Electronic Duo. Like, you would definitely go straight through that tunnel, uh, and through that record, which is In and of itself, a pretty important record for a number of genres.
and there's a lot that you can go back through like that. If you want to do the sort of peeling the layer of the onion thing here. But I'm also just trying to give fair warning as a music nerd and lover. Peeling the onion may not be the way you want to approach this one in particular. This album, once again, is going to work better in a lean back and let it come to you type of fashion than it will trying to push it forward into, um, historical realness.
But there's always that there if you want to pull on that thread. Yeah. You got to stay with this record or band and in the world of pure imagination that you build for yourself in it. Like it's almost unfair. Thomas almost never cites influences in any interview ever, but the two, to your point, that he name checks with some regularity are Apex Twin and Boards of Canada, but then you go back to those and doesn't even remotely sonically resemble really like any of the time. Fantastic.
Both are fantastic, obviously, and, and cult favorites for a reason, but you're not going to find a satisfying similarity. I don't think you will a little closer in flaming lips. And to your point about the math equation, maybe there's like some boards of Canada, some flaming lips, and then a little bit of Boris freak out like heavy rocks type flavor, just real light accoutrement on top. But flaming lips is a little closer because you know, they toured together in the dandelion gum era.
They had their first like big touring moment where they opened for the lips and eventually got Dave Friedman. Who's a mainstay flaming lips producer to produce a later record for them called eating us. So there is some alignment there, but there's a using the mood ring, uh, analogy that did once again, different colors between the lips and black moth for sure.
Yep. Maybe just to round that out, briefly everything we said is still the case, but if you do find yourself in the, no, I really want to listen to this Boards of Canada record now, this is where I'm camping out, fine. Also spend Moon Safari by air, and then keep going further back, and if you want, check out the episode we did on Tangerine Dream, because if you're just gonna go back to the, to the Genesis, you might as well do it with the true deep nerds. Who made a lot of this stuff possible.
By the way, I couldn't find the quote, but I swear I saw it where, tobacco was being interviewed and he expressly said he hated being compared to air. but it's, it's not an unfair comparison entirely, but I get it. Just taking a wild guess having just heard that from you, I think I can understand that comparison. And what I'm mostly comparing Eir to is Boards of Canada in this moment. So we'll try to spiritually honor that frustration from him.
Um, but, so I think that that's like, almost an overly simplistic path and in one that we've tried to illuminate a bit in the past honestly, through a combination of like I said both tangerine dream and can episodes in the past.
We like both of those bands a lot in what they did and there's plenty to discover there, but I think Fanning out over the sort of spectrum of places that you can go to here becomes immediately more interesting and to the degree that, uh, in this outline that both me and Kyle are staring at right now, there is a bullet point called Weird, with a bunch of sub bullets, and I think that we should go there next because, If this excites you, it can excite you
in some really interesting directions, that will take you to some other places. And I, and I also see some cool stuff that's exciting me in this list that I didn't put here. What I did put here though, uh, was once again, I think we've mentioned them in the past, but the armed and anyone else who describes themselves as like. Post pop or anti pop or anything that is pushing the boundaries of what we think of as poppy music. That is in a, at a slow BPM, exactly what's happening on this record.
And for bands like The Armed, it's happening at a higher BPM with different. types of influences and instruments, but are similarly looking to, like, stretch things past their logical endpoints to create a sensation of music that is not inherently trying to teach you anything other than, look how fucking weird we can be. Isn't this fun? Which is how I feel at an arm show. Yeah, but specifically with a pop sensibility in mind, like that's the piece of taffy that you stretch beyond recognition.
Yeah, it's the, it's the nucleus that you explode. the armed led to all the other anti gravity pop. examples that I listed, you touched on Animal Collective, I think the work of Panda Bear in general, like all the way down to like the remixes and stuff is another great example, Deer Hoof being a contemporary where that works, Crystal Castles gets into some of the, when I think of Crystal Castles, I think of like kind of the motoric energy, I think Flying Lotus is a really good example here,
we could extend it all the way to other members of Brain Feeder, like Thundercat, but it starts to get a little more nodey. and Cole trainee and present, but I think with flying Lotus, you have some of that weird diffuse energy. and then our old buddy Keenan Phillips turned me on to them and can back when we were teenagers. But the books are another example I was so stoked you said this!
The Lemon of Pink was crazy Yeah, just a totally like the, you know, That quote at the beginning where we talked about feeling like you're on drugs when you're just taking the trash out Like that's what the books are It's it sort of warps your whole reality and makes you walk a little askew after you listen to them but there is something That breaks through and it's kind of accessible about it even though it's like when I heard it the first time I just remember being like what the fuck
is this shit And I really love it now. And it's just, there's no reason to ever put it on ever or, or seek out going to experience it live. which I don't know that you could even do anymore. but it feels spiritually in the same vein for sure. and I just figure I'll mention offhand too, this discussion has reminded me of what it felt like to listen to album 88 in the mid aughts Dude.
Yes. how much I actually think that tobacco record, I think Fucked Up Friends, was in heavy rotation when I was working at the station. I was gonna say, so the, the type of world building that that record station did around music like we're talking about here also brought to mind to me among other things Glostrop by Battles. It was like a really heavy rotation on album 88 around the same time and just has yet another like, Why does it sound like this and why do I like it type of phenomenon?
And that's always a record that ended up surprising me. And, uh, honestly can't say you know, after I was a kid listening to classic rock stations, can't say that radio stations turned me on to too much music. Once I became an adult, I had the internet. Thank you very much. Um, but battles in a few. Related bands came directly from album 88 and whatever those college kids were doing. You remember Jetlag? Yeah! still one of the biggest.
Jetlag with Yoon, Nam, and Tower of Song with the homie Andrew Johnson, two of probably the most consistent vehicles of music discovery for me in the late 2000s, just exploded me toward unknown, unknown, after unknown, unknown. Shout out Alm88, man. What an institution. We appreciate what still exists about it but there was a moment in time where it was a fundamentally different thing that will never be as cool again. That's right.
Yeah, picture KEXP with no institutional backing, no like sheen of doing stuff, just pure freeform push to the edges all the time. So I think we've mentioned a few other Genres, I think we can tap on, you've got some under hypnotic here. So we've talked about can and new and OCS. But I see you called out dead meadow, which is a really cool get or really cool pool.
A band that, uh, is on that very short list of artists I didn't listen to a ton and then I saw them live and it clicked in just the right way because it was just the right moment at the Drunken Unicorn and everything surprised me in a cool way and it was like, I saw my neighbor there who was stoked that I was at a Dead Meadows show, like, what show you're talking about. That was a great show. What else is in here for you that you're describing under hypnotic?
There's a very specific sort of, it can go To like almost into the weird category, or I know we'll get into more ambient stuff. it can go a little too light and then it can certainly go too heavy where you get into like stoner rock type of stuff. And dead Meadows right on that line on the other side of that is probably stuff like uncle acid and whatever, but stuff that is like motoric inspired.
And I would even put stuff like Moon Duo and White Hills and Nod on the other side of that line where it's, it's close, but there's a little too much edge to the energy, maybe so the, these are bands that give you a little bit of that hot tubby feeling, but it's a little more guitar maybe than synth is the through line Foliczoid, uh, Is another great one sort of Hawk Windy space rock type of stuff. Just really great records.
I think that have mostly come out on sacred bones, which is an untouchably good label, and then caribou being another one. Right on. I love maybe being able to take stock of how you're feeling on a given day and chasing that with some of the vibes that we're calling out here. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, look at your mood ring and let the color determine which of these categories to go after. So hypnotic will lock you in. If you want to pull back a little bit, I think.
There are a ton of genres that have stupid names, so I didn't make them, and don't blame me, but Chill Wave is definitely a place you can end up here, uh, The worst name for the best yeah. you know what I mean? But, in, uh, a lot of Um, similar brains to what we've talked about so far and kind of spiritually aligned with the feeling of not taking things too seriously.
And we're going to use music in this moment to all kind of be together, but it's not all the way on the other side of, it's not club music or dance music or whatever, necessarily washed out definitely comes to mind. Someone who's done some really interesting things over, they put together. It's a pretty long career for WSDAL at this point. Probably in the seven or eight record range in this, at this time, I would imagine. yeah, cranking it out for a while.
But more kind of locally specific, like Calm Trues came to mind, like a band I've gotten to see a couple of times who are a little bit, uh, in that range and, It even reminded me, I don't know if you'll remember this one, but uh, speaking of drunken unicorn shows around this time, uh, like, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. It's just spiritually aligned in the sense of, once again, like, the kind of like weird, not too serious type of stuff, but, you know, the artist that we just mentioned.
Are more on the polished end of things took the hooks a little bit more seriously flesh out the instrumentation a little bit more, uh, and it wasn't quite of just a, a backbeat type vibe the way we see from Black Moth Super Rainbow here. But again, lots more to go down in that kind of genre rabbit hole. Any other things to add there? I would quickly add, Neon Indian is not really chill wave, but probably the best places slotted is in this ecosystem.
Chaz, Tori Moi, which like I would specifically say go see him them live or watch some of the live stuff. They're, they do like a great live set in the desert where they play in the round like Pompeii. and it's kind of the vibe of this. I think you can also go back to four bears of Chillwave. That, you know, they may not want this comparison, but I think it's an apt one, zero seven, those first two zero seven records, and then stereo lab.
There, there is a decent amount of comparison to stereo lab that I saw in reviews of black moth Last one we've pre carved out for ourselves, um, which you can just kind of take me on a journey, especially because you already mentioned the probably most accessible entry point into the category of like more ambient music in general. Uh, we made a music for airport jokes. Brian, you know, is never a bad decision.
And so that's always a good starting point for folks especially if you're feeling uncertain and curious. But Kyle, you've compiled quite a list of people here that I think are really cool, uh, set of stones to walk through in this forest and end up somewhere very odd. stones. Ha ha ha ha. so much was called to mind thinking about this era of time when Dandelion gum came out where I was like really getting my mind blown. At Alameda and crate digging at criminal and elsewhere in Atlanta.
so definitely, ambience one and four. Harold Bud's pavilion of dreams is another very, very end of the night after a day full of black moth. Who has a pretty deep relationship with Atlanta. and it's the author, if you will, of ambient three and that, you know, Helmed series. So those are like some of the classics that feel spiritually aligned, but there was a whole modern movement, like talking about the, like immediately pre blog era, just people doing super weird shit, where they were like.
Putting stuff on cassettes before that was back in fashion, like it is now. And it was just. Esoteric and strange and had a sense of analog and whatever. So there's a whole world of stuff. That's not even necessarily directly connected to each other that I love. It's like a specific vibe of stuff that I love. And I buy about two on a very regular basis.
And I've not really had an opportunity to show love to until this moment, and it's shoehorning a little, but I think if you just really dig the lean back energy of it, there's at least one of these things in this list that could be your thing. So stuff like magic lantern or forest swords or emeralds. Or Eternal Tapestry, who had a great, heady record called Transcendence Or Blues Control, or Sunburned Hand of the Man, which feels like it could be a Black Moth song title.
Or Vibra Cathedral Orchestra, or Barn Owl. Who had some great, really heady guitar based stuff or bitch and Baja's who have done great stuff on their own and great collaborations with folks like Bonnie Prince Billy or, one Oh tricks point. Never, which doesn't, doesn't really look like it's spelled. Daniel Lopatin who, you know, went on to do scores for stuff like good time and, Has kind of carved out a niche in the industry sonically.
Um, but my favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite on that list is Daniel Stallone, who releases stuff under the name son or raw, and has like done a collab record with the Congos for the Freakways series, but has, put out a record in Oh seven, same year as this called beach head that I listened to all the time that if you are like really outside of your mind, blissing out. Beach at is a great record.
Heavy deeds is a, another one that's like, if you like the Augustus Pablo episode, that's like a memory of a memory of a memory of Augustus Pablo, that record, Cameron Stallone, son of raw, great artists, singular artists in the vein of, tobacco, A lot of places to go.
The only extra thing I would add there would actually be going, going back to some of the earlier, more ambient work in addition to like Brian, you know, and things like that, if you've never, uh, and we also had mentioned the Plantasia record by Mort Garson in 76.
If you want to go though, further into Ambient history, uh, and this idea of just mixing collected and recorded sounds with, you know, low key music and all that worth mentioning to, uh, Hiroshi Yoshimura's green album from 1986, like one of the most, you know, famous Japanese ambient albums of all time. Like all that sort of stuff is like, if, if even the chill wave recommendations we gave you are a little too lively, you can.
Keep stepping it all the way back, uh, and hit some of this ambient stuff, but Man, I hope even literally Tobacco, the artist, and the other folks involved in Black Mall Super Rainbow would be excited by how big of a box that we can open just by starting with this particular record and sending people in a bunch of places that, um, Are either interesting or important or both, um, but, but without having to, once again, take anything overly seriously as you try to encounter
this record and that has been a kind and a welcome relief this time through for sure. So I think. One thing I saw you mentioned here, Kyle, I'd love to leave people with too. We talk about what to do with what you feel if something hits you in unexpected ways about this record and aligned with something I see that. That you've called out here. I was recently watching the new animated Spider Man thing that's come out.
That's like, speaking of things that are maybe for kids, but maybe also for adults. Who knows? I like it. But one of like my favorite things about like real old comic book, actual Spider Man as translated into modern society is that like, he like is stoked on finding electronics by the dumpster that people left. Like, he's like, a DVD player, like, who would leave this here and why? And he can like, go do some dumb shit with it.
And like, similarly, whether it's going back to a thrift store and hooking some weird shit together that you can afford because it didn't cost any money or whether it's like old analog stuff that you get a hold of and it's a privilege to even work with or whether it's, the newer version of a lot of this.
Concept which to me is kind of affiliated with like maker spaces and stuff like the arduino and raspberry pi stuff of the world where it's like Just give me some stuff and then let me go make something else with it. And just like Whatever I make is what I made the destination is the journey and whatever, dude, like I just wanna make a thing and solder some things together and see what happens on the other side of it.
And like, to me that energy is like really encapsulated and can get motivated by what happens here musically, uh, on this record. Like there's, there's so much DIY energy here that doesn't need to prove anything. And to some of the. Ways that we opened this episode today. Sometimes it's important to remember that you don't have to prove anything to anyone.
And sometimes you can just sit back and do some things with your hands to entertain your body and see what comes out of it and enjoy it and appreciate it and just like take a ride. So, I loved that you sort of brought that up, and it, it just reminded me of the ways that we can remind ourselves on a daily basis, like, just crochet some shit, dude.
Like, just do something that doesn't result in a capitalistic outcome to remind yourself that you exist, uh, and that there are things that you may be able to do, but there's a lot of stuff you can't do, and you just have to take care of yourself in the meantime. I love that we started with lean back, let this clear out your mind. And if that's all this record ever does for you energetically, that's fine. That's great.
But you and I, especially as we've had the calendar now for a year and some change, have talked about the discipline. Of loving music and letting music enrich your life. And the discipline is in the sustaining and mindfulness is all about the sustaining. So I think the way that you sustain that cleared out state, living in a world of pure imagination is by just doing stuff, just making stuff. And that's what the life, that's the artist's way.
Truly is just sustaining a discipline of creating, expressing, making the world that you want to live in. One little weird doodad knob turn wire connection into a board at a time one like one set of eyeballs cut out of a magazine and paste it on to a garbage pail kids rainbow, every creative act as a step in the direction of the world that you want to live like our artists exists to. See the world as it could be not as it is and like create new world. So like you can do that.
There's no us and them around that. Like everybody can be creative if you just do a creative thing, you may hate it. You may think it sucks, but like tobacco is a great, is great evidence in favor of. you don't have to go to Berkeley. You don't have to know anything fancy. There is no great secret. The great secret is. Revealed to you in the doing so I hope that you'll do, I guess, is the takeaway for me.
I think that's also reflected in the okay player review that we cited at the beginning of this episode. last paragraph is so good.
Their bio mentions how their music could be quote pagan rituals and a sugar coaster fairyland or quote sad thoughts on the happiest days What this means is that it goes back to a time when music like this was truly part of the norm when creating sounds like these We're part of being experimental when being experimental meant loving FM radio for hearing something you'd never hear on AM radio Staying up at 2 a. m. To hear that freak on the other side of the airwaves. Give you what?
He or she knows you desire black moths. You have a rainbow probably live up to the statement. When I grew up, I want to make music just like that. This is the grown up sound that dreams are made of but your eyes and ears are open and you can't believe what you're witnessing in this awakened state far fucking out.