Music Moots with Asi Kemera
We are extremely back with Music Moots™, the blogseries where I ask someone to recommend me a song they like, and then I listen to the song and then write a little about it.
Today we have Asi Kemera! An alt-pop artist from Atlanta, Kemera released her second studio album JETTY in September, which is a dreamy confection, a tasty treat, all translucent vocals and somber bass...sweet but with a dark and gothic edge, reminding me of this classic photo/meme format:
JETTY feels like a mix of Sky Ferreira's Night Time, My Time, Blood Orange's Coastal Grooves, and, idk, maybe one of those slowed-and-reverbed-and-listened-to-from-another-room YouTube treatments of New Order's Technique? It is perfect for yearning, daydreaming, and ideally looking out a rain-spattered cab window as you traverse the wet streets of your favorite metropolis.
Asi Kemera recommended I listen to "New Ways" by CC Dust. And listen I did.
Holy bassline. "Send me the basslines of the future," Cameron Winter sang on "The Rolling Stones," but sometimes I wonder if the basslines of the future are no different than the basslines of the past. "New Ways" came out in 2016, sounds like it came out in 1980, but is very much pleasing to me in 2026. Internal/external, brooding but expansive.
On its own, CC Dust doesn't have a huge digital footprint, so naturally I put my monocle on and went detecting. They were a short-lived duo from Olympia, Washington—Mary Jane Dunphe and David Jaques. They put out one self-titled EP in 2016, plus another single, which is where "New Ways" came from. Then they combined forces with members of another Olympia band, Trans FX, and formed CCFX. CCFX put out an album on my beloved DFA Records the next year, which garnered the kind of press run that included a KEXP performance. (I watched it, it was awesome.) Then it seems like the CC Dust duo parted ways. David Jaques joined a dream-pop group called Daisies. Mary Jane Dunphe still puts out solo music, featuring excellent basslines of the past/future.
I love doing this kind of digging—I last did it on Music Moots with the then-defunct group Forth Wanderers (who ended up releasing an album last year on Sub Pop!) and also on my excavation of "blog rock" with DoM (not sure if related, but the old Pitchfork Reviews Reviews tumblr went private since its publication lol). I love an old blog post, a dead link that the Wayback Machine might be able to resuscitate, a Pitchfork score from the 2010s. I like remembering bands that deserve to be remembered. And I like being a piece of the puzzle, a mark on the paper trail. In 2024 Mary Jane Dunphe recorded a song with 9Million, the shoegaze-y group led by the musician/producer Matthew Tomasi...who I interviewed for my old newsletter!
Molly O'Brien
Everything will be connected in the end. What a relief. I decided to end this blog post with one more recommendation, just for fun. Now we're going from Asi Kemera, to CC Dust, to CC Dust member Mary Jane Dunphe recommending a song in a Nina Protocol feature—a song that "made her think about her early 20s," "Beyond Living" by milk music (a rock song bursting at its own self-imposed seams. Strive Rock. Love it.). That rec came from a grid post on Nina Protocol's IG, and it's all that's left of the full feature—after Nina Protocol shut down, it looks like their whole editorial archive has been wiped from the web. Not everything can be saved, and that's okay too.
Thanks Asi, for sending me down such a good rabbit hole! Listen to JETTY here.
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