The cover art for this month's picks.

FORTHE’s Bandcamp Picks: May 2021

by FORTHE Staff  |  Published May 7, 2021 in Arts & Culture

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FORTHE’s Bandcamp Picks is a regular series highlighting brand new music releases from Long Beach musicians, producers, and bands. This month, our roundup coincides with Bandcamp Friday, which began last spring as part of Bandcamp’s monthly initiative to direct more proceeds to artists in light of the pandemic by waiving its usual 15% service fee for all music purchased that day. That means that today, artists will get to keep 100% of proceeds from music sales, minus a small PayPal or card processing fee. Bandcamp Friday will continue on the first Friday of every month until this May. 

Below are our staff’s picks in no particular order. By purchasing music from their Bandcamp, you can support these local artists directly.

Micah Bournes – Pulp Free

Album art by Chris Campbell.

Me and my whole crew / Knew we had the orange juice / Fresh press ice cold / We pulp free smooth / Every five minutes / Invented some new cool / By the time the crackajakas be jockin’ / It’s old news

Micah Bournes’ newest release is a joyful “ode to the Black man” and what he refers to as their “often imitated, never duplicated, unfathomable flyness.” 

A gift for the eyes as well as the ears, make sure you also check out the gorgeous music video. In it, we see young Black boys in a class with “Welcome to the Black Academy for Male Flyness” written on the blackboard as they get schooled on the myriad of dances, hairstyles, and other cultural aesthetics created by Black men and eventually appropriated by everyone else.

Hip hop griots bodies full of truth / Navigate around the noose / So creative how we move / Unassimilated / We play by our own rules / And we still set trends / For the world wide globe

This is the fourth single Bournes has released this year as he builds up to his second full-length rap album, slated to come out this summer. On his Patreon where he is raising funds for his album, Bournes says, “I wanna make the album I wish I woulda had as a Black teen trying to figure out what it means to be a man in America with skin as black as mine.”

-EMF

Shaine vs. Source Flex – The Wigflip EP

Album art by Dirty Merlin.

Long Beach collective/label GRN+GLD‘s 70th release feels celebratory for more reasons than one. As a collaboration between three of its core members — Dirty Merlin, Shaine, and Basico — it marks Shaine’s inaugural release on the label and the debut of Dirty Merlin and Basico’s new project Source Flex. The result is a six-track collection titled The Wigflip EP, a dance-heavy back-and-forth of Beyonce edits and flips, high-octane remixes of Lil Uzi Vert and RuPaul, as well as genre-bending originals from the trio spanning drum&bass, footwork, jungle, and house. Each track on this EP is a highlight in its own right, but the closing track “No Need to Flex” by Source Flex (ft. Shaine) feels particularly special as we hear all three of their voices sampled from an impromptu session, with them taking turns repeating the mantra “I’m so high / I don’t need to flex.” It captures the contagiously irreverent spirit of GRN+GLD — and it keeps us wanting more.

-EK

DüllHaus – Textures EP

Album art by @sadphantomdesign.

In their first release of 2021, Long Beach industrial/post-punk duo DüllHaus shares what may be their most inspired output to date. Titled Textures, the four-track instrumental EP is a departure from their dark wave and post-punk roots; this time, the Clearwater brothers pull inspiration from the likes of early Aphex Twin, Four Tet, Burial, and Boards of Canada to offer a cinematic foray into largely sample-based production, rendering a collection of heart-stirring ambient-dance tracks that simultaneously feel existential and redemptive.  

The opening track “UFO” begins with a short clip of an early 1970s interview with a man who claims to have been abducted by aliens. With the sustained chords of a string quartet anchored by an old-school analog drumbeat, the dampened atmosphere shifts into one of extraterrestrial beauty, an invitation inward onto our personal UFOs that take us into a deeper realm of being. In “Irithyll,” heavy textures of rain and vinyl flood the atmosphere as languid synth pads and slow-paced melodies twist around a two-step UK garage beat — it’s a feeling of grace in purgatory. 

“Insect Politics” is full abduction mode, with acid synth lines and a high-energy drum machine sequence playing seesaw with tension; and the closing track “Oort Cloud” offers a slow-burning meditation on mortality as an ode to their aging grandmother. The outro — a sample of The Platters’ “Only You” — is the perfect bow to tie this gift of an EP altogether.

-EK

Huey Briss – Grace Park Legend

Jazzy, soulful, and highly autobiographical, Huey Briss’ newest album Grace Park Legend is one of the most exciting Long Beach releases so far this year.

The album is a follow up to last year’s Grace Park Gospel, both named after the North Long Beach area where Briss grew up.

In Legend, Briss’ lyrics span well-deserved flexes and the need to reflect, with the sense of somebody who’s looking down at the ground while hurling into a new stratosphere. The album features meditative instrumental interludes and collaborations with hip-hop artist Reuben Vincent and fellow Long Beach rapper Seafood Sam. Producer Nikobeats keeps each track tight and the vocals front and center with artfully sparse boom bap rhythms.

The single “Grace Park Legend (Norfside)” is like a sonic scrapbook about the 28-year-old rapper’s upbringing in North Long Beach. A video released for the track is part documentary and features old film photos from Briss’ youth spliced together with footage of the artist at meaningful landmarks.

Throughout the album, Briss raps about building generational wealth, racial disparities, the grind of the rap game, the homies in the ground and in prison, and the fruits of grit and ambition. 

Full of memorable lines, vulnerability, and wisdom, there’s no doubt that this release puts Briss on the brink of being the next big name to be repping Long Beach.

-KF

Phoenyx & Phyre – “Cool”

Album art by Lowden Harrell.

Back in October 2020 when Phoenyx & Phyre were still pretty new, bandleader and lead vocalist Phoenyx Kym committed to actively playing twice a month at Los Cerritos Park at an open mic/live music event she co-created called PulsarJams. As a result, along with bandmates Liam Coats (bass), Scotty Salmon (Rhodes/organ), Lowden Harrell (drums), Phoenyx and her talented group have come a long way in refining their unique blend of jazz, funk, and R&B.

Unabashed in their sex positivity, or as stated in a recent press release, “a respectable bit of raunch,” the lyrics of their new song set the scene for a little afternoon of delight for three. Everybody is “cool,” so why not? 

Don’t have to be so serious 
We’re friends, but more, and that’s a plus 

Opening up slowly with a rolling trumpet played by featured musician Nick Reyna, along with sparse drums and a few guitar licks, “Cool” then exuberantly transitions. Soon, everyone is grooving. The good times build as Olivia Malbran, Solaris, and Gary Thomas join the party on backing vox along with Pritchard Proctor Pearce on sax and Ian Martin on guitar. There is even the joyful tinkling of a toy piano by Harrell and handclaps added in by Harrell and Thomas.

This is the second single dropped by Phoenyx and Phyre in the past month (the first was “Drunken Foreplay”). Their debut album Phorged is set for release this Saturday, May 8 at B&B Music Studio in the City of Orange. Admission is free but limited; attendees are asked to RSVP to Phoenyxandphyre@gmail.com. In Long Beach, you can mask up and catch them playing live at Shenanigans on Wednesday, June 23.

-EMF

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[1] Militarily demobilized. Since WWII—which was both the death knell of European colonial empires as well as the starting shot of the American neocolonial era—Europe has had notoriously scant standing armies, and has been able to consistently slash government military spending domestically and as a percentage of their contributions to international diplomatic bodies such as the UN. This is because nowadays European nations very rarely find themselves in situations where they need to independently send their militaries abroad in order to secure trade routes, foreign resources, or privileges within markets overseas; the U.S. has been fulfilling that hard-power obligation for them for over half a century. The social results of Western Europe’s decreased militarization are striking, especially when contrasted with the U.S.: there is not a single country in Western Europe without universal healthcare, labor rights and welfare systems are strong, value is placed on corporate and financial regulation, environmental policy is lightyears ahead, and, not least of all, there is a robust governmental approach to curbing digital surveillance and reining in tech monopolies. Japan enjoys a similar arrangement with the U.S. in which it, too, is militarily demobilized yet is given full access to, and prominence in, the global economy. In the last decade there has been a reversing trend of remilitarization in some of these nations. That trend was hastened during the last four years as a result of Trump’s ultranationalist politics, but is likely to continue even after his departure in large part due to the growing bipolar geopolitical climate of competition between superpowers.

The “owner” bit of home-“owner” appears in scare quotes throughout the text for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

Nothing signals trouble quite like consensus.

More on them later.

And, anyways, what exactly remains “obvious” in an era “post-truth”?

I take as my starting position that even the “obvious” must be won.

It’s like Lenin said, you know…

Whether directly, or through a chain of investments, or through the wider speculative market in real estate.

I use “banks” in this piece as a stand-in for several sources of income that derive partly through the mortgaging of property and/or investment in institutions that have the power to mortgage property.

That is just its “ideology.”

The Ricardian “law of rent” explains that any location with an advantage over another location, can accrue an economic value, called “rent,” to the owner.

This happens without the owner needing to pitch in to create the advantage.

If the owner does pitch in, then the value accrued from that advantage cannot be called “rent.”

“Rent,” in economic terms, is only, precisely, the value accrued from that portion of the advantage for which the owner is not responsible. That is what we mean when we say, “Rent is theft.”

This does not mean places with lower property taxes ipso facto have higher property prices—and that is because the property tax is only one of the contributing factors. You could have zero taxes on land in Antarctica, for instance, and it would still sell for $0. This is why the introduction to the analogy controls for such variables.

This is the logical conclusion of believing two premises:

(1) All humans have an equal right to the Earth.
(2) Vaginal birth is a lottery system

Prop 13 is rent control for home-“owners.” You can learn more about its history and impact here.

“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. Act 4, Scene 5

This is why the lobbyists who spend the most money to support the mortgage interest deduction are bankers, mortgagers, and realtors.

Term

Definition