music moots with Fruit LoOops ("TYVM" by Lord Spikeheart ft. SAIONJI BBBBBBB)
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 Fruit LoOops! The Cincinnati punk trio just released an EP, Everything Is Clear To Me Now: four relentless songs, all dense with various vectors of chaos and disorder, but ultimately guided by a unified mission. Kind of like when you see a bunch of ants swarming and it looks insane but then you realize they're all working together on schlepping some food back to the colony.
godisamachine
Blistering beats, turbulent synths, breakneck tempos, and vocals that sound like intercepted alien transmissions—Jackie Switzer (vocals and pedals), Kevin Hall (keyboards and synths) and Patrick Apfelbeck (percussion) floor the gas pedal and do donuts all over your eardrums. In an interview with see/saw, Apfelbeck described "trying to make fucked up, deranged club music" and I think that's why I'm into it—I'm always down for people getting fucked up and deranged in the club!
Fruit LoOops recommended a song to me: "TYVM" by Lord Spikeheart ft. SAIONJI BBBBBBB.
"Lord Spikeheart shares a lot of our musical values: complex shifting rhythms that make you want to move, a dissonant heavy-ness that makes you feel superhuman, and pushing extremeness into the red in a way that can cause joy and terror in equal measure," they wrote. "Also, a good friend of ours who (whom?) we got to know by touring with his previous band, Duma."
I love doing these Music Moots because there's often a wonderful synergy between the music of the recommender and the recommended. In this case, there's commonality between pairing distorted / impenetrable vocals with overwhelming / unremitting percussion—even though Fruit LoOops hail from Ohio and Lord Spikeheart is from Kenya, both artists use extreme production and genre smashing (techno-metal, electro-punk) to jostle the listener's sensory limits.
I focused on the physical sensations of listening to "TYVM" in different environments. In the car, it enhanced the anxiety of some particularly harrowing freeway driving. On a walk, it made me want to walk faster, blurred my awareness of my surroundings, and therefore caused me to 'lock in.' Sitting at my office chair and wearing noise-canceling headphones, I let it pummel my brain utterly and focused only on the music, almost as a meditation.
One of our mail carriers listens to music, quiet but present, on a speaker as they hit the stops on their route. Last week they dropped off some mail (a supermarket circular, and a hand-addressed letter to a previous resident from the church of Scientology that I really want to open but know I shouldn't) while playing some extreme music. It sounded like metal/industrial, with a raging vocal attack and lots of polyrhythmic pounding drums. They passed through too quickly to Shazam, and I don't want to bother them on their route by asking them for an "ID on the song" so the track will remain unknown for now, which is okay—not everything needs to be ID'd, life is a mystery after all. I just liked the way the intensity paired with the meditative action of walk, deposit mail, walk, deposit mail, and I liked the mail carrier's freedom to add intrigue to their work day through such broilingly heightened music.
Thanks Fruit LoOops!! Listen to Everything Is Clear To Me Now and check out their link aggregation.
Thanks for reading I Enjoy Music! If you like it, tell a friend.
