Hello! Pedro here, the main guy behind the Door gallery. I wanted to give a small introduction to our brand new segment here on the gallery, "Lock picks". Small bite-sized written pieces about whatever we, the people from the team, have been listening to, or just overall enjoying, whether that's music, visual arts, books, videogames, media, websites, anything goes here! I sincerely hope you find out at least one cool new thing from these articles we're going to be writing from now on. That's the main idea! A small and fun way for us to share what we like and who knows, maybe you'll find your new favorite thing through Lock picks. Now i'll let Patrick do the talking, he's got some really cool stuff to show you.
Hideki Nakazawa: Hideki Nakazawa Music Works Concert (album)
By Patrick Totally
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Hideki Nakazawa Music Works Concert is a live album in the purest sense of the word. This record got on my radar through the involvement of Taku Unami, who recorded this concert. The record is a completely unabridged document of its titular concert. All of those untitled tracks you see are the spaces in between songs (applause, talking, setup, etc.). This gesture is fitting of what I know of Unami's relationship to the recording space. Debating whether or not the audience's applause is as important as the music itself ignores that the applause did happen during this concert, and that this concert took up space in a room. Unami's approach doubly makes sense within the context of the songs themselves.
Hideki Nakazawa is better known for his visual art, and those accquainted with Nakazawa's massive, colorful illustrations may be surprised by this concert's comparatively muted tone. The concert alternates between performances of "polyphonic tunes created from the Japanese syllabary, and instrumental pieces for solo performance." Though some of these tunes are hard to get my head around, it's a joy to hear notes selected as deliberately as these are. It's rare, it really is. Everything's where it should be, and I get to hear all of it!
Hideki Nakazawa Music Works Concert can be purchased
here.
Cartoon Drips: Dripping in the 6th Dimension (album)
By Patrick Totally
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C'mon, twenty more minutes worth of mid-2000's tape noise scene runoff material won't kill you, will it? This tape's the work of Josh Burke, a man with a thousand aliases and half a dozen label imprints (as was the style at the time). Burke's popped his head up in some strange places over the years. His tape
Babes, released under the alias Criminals, is one of the earliest, and strangest, releases on Orange Milk Records. Most of Burke's output, though, is like
Dripping in the 6th Dimension: self released and conceptual to nebulous ends. The only info included with this tape is sci-fi word salad. "Infmamable bike riders on mud race avenue vs. the windy city alley way creepers," says Mr. Burke. "Cool," says me.
Some of this era's tape junkies were more ambitious with their sci-fi storytelling (Ferraro surely had to script some components of his KFC City), but most of them seemingly intentionally trapped themselves in the aesthetic realm. This is usually framed as a negative aspect of ambient music (and instrumental music in general). I'd say this was one of this scene's greatest strengths. All that's needed to make an album "about" something is to capture an image of that feeling and associate something with it. Any resemblance the audio within has to the image in question is a bonus. There's a complex universe inside of
Dripping in the 6th Dimension, one that will never be properly articulated. This world is unwritten. We're left with its screeches and its automatic writings. It was recorded in 2008 so that it could be an artifact in 2021. It is its own lost episode creepypasta. Most of what I've said about this tape here has been very general, but this tape does have a genuinely unnerving cartoon terror angle that little else I've heard from this period has matched. Definitely worth a listen if you're a fan of this sort of thing.
The label this was released on, Avocado Jungle Cassettes, has long since been taken offline, so I'll be honest and say the best way to listen to this one is to accquire it illegally. Sorry Josh!
The Unravelling: Slaves No more (album)
By Octa Möbius Sheffner
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Sutcliffe Jügend, literally Yorkshire Ripper Youth, the world's most unrelentingly inventive, brooding grandpas tire of inventing (purely on accident, or not) microhouse and ethereal post minimalist chorals in their eternal uphill battle to become the world's most broken up band. Another one of their multiple hour outings in the last 2 years after supposedly calling it quits finds them tasting spacious, darkly ambient, starkly beautiful and sometimes heavenly (most and oftentimes hellish) yeller-songwriter, crooner-horror novelist. Kevin Tomkins finally conquers the part of his voice that fills in the void in the shape of Scott Walker in my heart. It's a cathedral bathed in the shit of the antichrist, or some such. Sometimes you see Christ made in the image of a dog. Living in England really does a number on a burgeoning Whitehouse contemporary if you give them 40 years to cover everything and more.
You can listen to Slaves No More
here.
White Suns: The Lower Way (album)
By Octa Möbius Sheffner
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White Suns are the last of a dying breed, the ever alienating, needlessly hostile and obtrusive deconstructed rock band seeing the city of Brooklyn for what it really is. If I lived in New York I'd too be inclined to start ravaging everything with sharp prancing feedback and a rhythm section that's in equal measures tight and like the irritation coming to your brain when you stub your toe. "The Lower Way" is subnautical. It must be what whales hear when humans blast the ocean with sonar. White Suns might as well be a blue whale who has learned the art of sonar and took to killing stranded fishing vessels with scorching curses in its song. White Suns is the whale drowning rock. A strange, once in a lifetime sight that takes a long time to fester and longer to report. Why these guys record all of their albums two years in advance without releasing them puzzles me, but if I had such arsenal, I'd be scared of the decision to add a drum machine even once too in fear of upsetting some balance upholding the world.
You can listen to The Lower Way
here.
Huayno (genre)
By Pedro P.P
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Following my recent huayno kick, i've been exploring the world of insanely small latino youtube channels and found Cazador de los Andes. I was aware of another singer that went by the same stage name, his real name being Atilio Cahuantico, but this seems to be another one. Kinda funny that there's two with the same name making the same genre of music, but that's okay because "Si Ya Te Vas" really is a great example of what i love in huayno: Melodies that sound insanely abstract to people who aren't used to it, but sound classic and almost cliche for those in the know. Now, i'm not by any means an expert on huayno but i've definitely listened to a fair share, specially in the last couple months. Modern huayno really takes a lot of queues from electronic music with some insanely funky synth lines, so if you're at all into insanely catchy melancholic melodies, give the genre a go. I'd suggest starting by the aforementioned song and just letting youtube guide you through the world of random uploads, since most of these artists live from their live performances rather than youtube monetization.
If you'd like another starting point, i'd definitely give Cahuantico's stuff a listen, specially "Ya No Me Culpes", the song that led me down this rabbit hole. You can check out the two songs mentioned
here and
here.
Ru'Yuon (artist)
By Pedro P.P
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An artist i've been keeping a close eye on is Ru'yuon, purveyor of prolifically abstract artpop-adjacent pieces. What caught my attention at first was their use of furry art for the cover of their two EPs. If you include any sort of furry character on your album cover i instantly expect Renard-esque breakcore-y speedcore-y stuff, but i was taken aback with what i heard when "No Other Choice", the opener for their "Inches & Stitches" EP started playing. An amazing amalgamation of abstract and glitchy ambient pop with some Oneohtrix Point Never flavor thrown in there. I was instantly hooked and to be honest, i cannot wait to see what they'll come up with next. I've listened to their entire discography already, some notable highlights being their remix for "Obsessed" by Addison Rae, as well as "Miami Bitch", a more straightforward pop-y approach which served as an interesting departure from their glitched-out work on both Quill and Inches & Stitches. This is a project to pay attention to.
You can listen to Ru'Yuon
here.
