This is the sixth installment of Honey on the Knife Radio. Listen to the episode here:
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If you’d prefer to read instead of listening, keep reading below.
Precal Dropouts – “Stay... It’s Eventide“
Precal Dropouts encourage us to stay and take in the view of the seaside night sky with them. Like waiting for the night to fall, the track builds incrementally around a hypnotic melody before flourishing into starry-skied bliss. It’s dream pop in its most euphoric form from the group whose debut album Daybreaks & Eventides is slated to arrive later this year.
Molly Punch – “Sleepy Seed”
Molly Punch check all the boxes you could ask for from a band operating at the intersection of grunge and riot-grrl-spirited punk. Over and over on A Monster A Day, their ripping riffs, pummelling drums, and shouted vocals beat me over the head in the most delightful way. It’s the perfect harmony of melody and energy, and one of the funnest albums I’ve heard this year.
Metayouth – “Burger Wife”
Sometimes I enjoy the melodic component of a vocal performance so much that I don’t even realize what the words are until I actually read the lyrics. In the lo-fi noise pop stomper “Burger Wife”, Metayouth is in fact singing about a burger wife with “eyes pickle green” and “red ketchup cheeks”. While it may seem silly out of context, there exists an emotional charm that has me convinced of genuine admiration for this burger wife. Love is real and love is sharing your french fries with the one you love.
datewithdeath – “Aradax”
A genre that has particularly caught my fancy lately is deconstructed club, which emerged in the 2010s as fusion of electronic dance music and post-industrial textures. This club music is mangled, torn apart, and mashed together, becoming a garbled mess of what it was and, in doing so, at it’s best becomes more compelling than the music it is pulling from.
But is it just the music that is deconstructed or is the venue also undergoing this process? Are these apocalyptic soundscapes the representation of the loss of nightlife itself? Clubbing is non-existent in the current pandemic timeline, many independent music venues are shuttering for good, and if and when a return to nightlife can be made, these scenes could quite possibly be forever changed. But until then, I can only speculate and tune into Zoom dj performances and construct the club in my living room, albeit alone.
Aradax is a track that would fit the categorization of a club banger, but refuses to stick to a groove for too long. Headknocking and clanking midtempo rhythms are interrupted by frenzies of busy kicks and glitched out atonality. It seems after if at any second, the track could implode entirely, like a blown out speaker or a cancelled set, but it doesn’t do so. This is dance music in survival mode, beaten and battered but refusing to die.
Star – “Flesh Eating Mothers”
Star, one of the many projects textural guitar god Scott Cortez is involved in, is back with a new album chock full of sugary sweet and deliciously loud noise pop. “Flesh Eating Mothers”, the fifth track on the album, has been out since late 2018, but I wanted to feature it on HotK as it has one of the most insanely infectious riff-as-chorus sections in any piece of guitar-based music.
1.8.7 – “We Are Not Alone”
1.8.7 is the former performing moniker of Jordana LeSesne, a Black trans woman who got her start creating electronic music in the 1990s. Her first breakthrough came when she remixed Blondie’s Atomic and after extensive touring across the world, she signed a three album contract with the indie label Liquid Sky Music in 1996
In 1997, LeSesne released When Worlds Collide, a concept album about aliens arriving on Earth. It was one of the earliest drum and bass American albums, and beyond the alien contact concept, also had more personal themes for LeSesne, who had not yet came out as trans but was preparing to do so. In an interview, she was if the track “Distant Storm Approaching” was intended to be foreshadowing, to which she replied:
“You’re absolutely right. My thoughts were kind of like, ‘I have had to record this album before I was able to come out in music….I feel like a storm is approaching. This is the end of this album and now the end of any sort of facade. I am ready.’”
The following year, she released the follow-up album Quality Rolls. Shortly after, the music video for “We Are Not Alone” would become the first video for a song by a trans woman to air on MTV.
With mainstream recognition building with the video and interest from the Sony music label in signing her, LeSesne seemed to be on the come-up as she embarked on tour for her 2000 album The Cities Collection. After a performance in Kent, Ohio, she was violently attacked by two men while leaving the venue. An arrest warrant was issued for one of the attackers, but the police never filed charges. After learning that one of her attackers had vowed to “finish the job”, LeSesne fled to England for her safety.
Recalling the attack, LeSesne said, ““The tour ended that night, as did much of my career and my optimistic view that I could somehow avoid becoming a statistic.” In the decade that followed, LeSesne experienced what she described as a “parade of additional trauma and setbacks”. An attempted comeback in the mid-00s was derailed in part by a vicious tirade posted by her manager to an online forum, and so she lived in relative reclusivity for the following years.
In 2015, LeSesne reemerged in public view when Laverne Cox commissioned her to score a documentary about CeCe McDonald, a Black trans woman wrongfully imprisoned for defending herself from a hate crime. While more setbacks such an overbearing manager, abusive relationship, and the death of the computer kept her from capitalizing on the momentum from the documentary project, in the last few months of 2020, LeSesne has resumed releasing tracks on Soundcloud, put together several DJ mixes, and is teasing the release of a new album in December.
Wrote Samantha Liedel about LeSesne’s life, “While it’s vital to resist imposing oppressive narratives on Black queer artists, the trajectory of LeSesne’s life so far highlights a pattern of cultural illegibility that is endemic to Black and brown trans people. Whereas their art is routinely mined for pop cultural value (see: drag), trans people of color are prevented from attaining the success and notoriety of their white peers by abuse and violence.”
This is affirmed in LeSesne’s comment on her legacy, stating, “It’s very hard to be a pioneer…I endured a lot back then with little to show for it personally other than my story today.”
Today, there are more and more trans women who are achieving success and receiving acclaim within the realms of electronic music. As the platforms of artists like SOPHIE, Laura Les, Backwash and others continue to grow, hopefully more eyes and ears will find their way to the earlier innovations and works that trans women, and especially Black trans women like Jordana LeSesne, contributed to the development of electronic music throughout history.
I would like to give credit to Samantha Liedel’s article and interview with Jordana, a great piece and the reference from which I took the previous quotes. I highly recommend checking it out for a deeper dive into the career and life of Jordana LeSesne.
Odysseus – “Softgirl”
You don’t have to follow my advice. For example, when I suggested in the last episode of Honey on the Knife Radio that you should check the lofi house mix on Apoc Krysis and Kreayshawn’s phonk.rip Youtube channel, you didn’t have to listen to it. But if you did, you would have heard a lot of good songs. And you would have heard “Softgirl” by Odysseus, my favourite song in that bunch of good songs. Just listen to how those drums slide over those satin smooth pads, with the cool call to action from a woman demanding you put on those red lips, earrings, high heels, and handbags at this very moment. I’ve got mine on and the cab is here. We’re waiting, you coming to the club (pandemic-free scenario, use your imagination) or not?
Again, you don’t have to heed my advice, but every once in a while I might give you a taste of what you’re missing.
Magazine Beach – “Friendless Summer”
Magazine Beach describe their latest release, the Friendless Summer EP, as:
“5 fast-paced emo-adjacent power pop songs about nothing and everything, that have really taken on new meaning to us in the past few months. Although the lyrics on the EP are on the heavier side at times, overall we just wanted it to be a really fun record that reminds us of the shows at our favorite house venues and clubs that we’re all missing a lot right now.”
The group succeed in manifesting that live show energy, with shout-along choruses, snappy drumming, and a masterful command in melody through their guitar riffs and the harmonious interplay between vocalists Angelo Leitner and Jesse McCommas. If you aren’t paying close attention, you might miss the weight of those poignant lyrical moments, such as the defeated yet clever line “I wish my life was a movie, over in a couple of hours” on the title track.
It’s been a year for many marked by reminiscing for better times while “falling apart apart watching Twin Peaks”. Rather than forcing empty platitudes of positivity to make a fun release, Magazine Beach channel that bummed out feeling into cathartic reaffirmation that feels real, rather than an empty escape.
Raccoon Pit – “I Can’t Sing Like Buffy Sainte-Marie”
Tenaya Heredia of Raccoon Pit may claim not to have the vocal chops of Buffy Sainte- Marie, be as eloquent as John Trudell, or have the lyrical flows of Dreezus or Nataani Means. What Heredia is too humble to admit however, is owning the ability to write catchy and energetic punk rock tunes with witty and to-the-point critiques of cops, capitalism, and settler colonialism.
About the title track, Heredia explained, “This track takes a somewhat comedic tone on some of the feelings I have around being a displaced Native. It’s about trying to reclaim culture without any real framework for doing so, and some of the contradictions we have to live by living in two worlds.”
Spartan Jet-Plex – “Fear”
Spartan Jet-Plex is the recording project of Nancy Grim Kells, the founding member of the Grimalkin Records music and zine collective and record label, which also includes several other artists that have made past appearances in HotK radio episodes (Hunting Dog, Quinton Barnes, and former collective member Backxwash).
“Fear” is sparse in instrumentation yet heavy in atmosphere, with vocals brooding over a backdrop of acoustic guitar and droning key chords. A simultaneous feeling of intimacy and space is created, inducing the feeling that you are right there in the room for the recording.
This is the opening track on the Mischief Night three-way split, which also includes songs from i fight vampires and Infinite Bliss. Proceeds from this release are going to the Black Creatives Redistribution Fund, which provides funding, music equipment, and other resources to Black creatives.
Elisapie – “Asuguuq”
Elisapie is an Inuk singer-songwriter from Salluit, Nunavik. This is her cover of “Asuguuq”, originally by the late Inuk singer-songwriter Charlies Adams. The title is an Inuktitut expression with a meaning similar to “Oh my God” and the song, according to a press release, depicts “the state that one finds oneself in when experiencing love at first sight.”
Elisapie’s tender vocals glide over gently strummed guitar chords before the song hits a crescendo with a soul-stirring guitar solo by Joe Grass.
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If you are a musician and would like to submit your music for a feature on a future episode of Honey on the Knife Radio, send an email to contact@honeyontheknife.com