#digitalregress

The Kiwi Animal, Music Media (Digital Regress, 2019)

We can’t go to shows, we can’t jam with friends, we can’t spend nights talking shit about the scene. We run the risk of slipping and turning into cold, dead record collectors, or—worse—Internet trend hunters. No music lover would want that.

You can use Music Media to ground yourself, to disperse the negative energy. If you feel yourself spinning uncontrollably in the ether, just plug it in your brain and let its complete lack of pretension grab you and take you back to your musical zen garden.

Before starting the Kiwi Animal in 1983 with artist/performer Julie Cooper, Brent Hayward used to be in Shoes This High, a hi-energy noisy blues-punk hybrid who I like to refer to as the Kiwi Birthday Party. For this project, he went the opposite way, ditching electricity completely and embracing acoustic guitars, strings, the occasional horn, tapes, and quirky, provocative but also sweet approach to songwriting.

There’s no jangle and there’s no twee in Music Media. There are folk songs that will stick to your synapses forever (the beautiful spiritual excursion of "Every word is a prayer"), there are sweet, dark Velvet Underground-style pop songs, there are stubborn, claustrophobic tense numbers that sound like acoustic The Fall or Sonic Youth songs. But, most importantly, what seeps through these songs is a unique carelessness. It sounds like it was conceived for an audience of a few close friends, a family gig in someone’s apartment, one of those ones that start with the band awkwardly acknowledging they’d like to try out a few songs and if Peter in the back could kill the lights, please.

I don’t know about you, but I miss this attitude in music—it brings me back to a time when I could spend a whole weekend just fucking around on a 4-track and I could listen to music that was made by my friends for my friends. “I think it’s time to invent some more art,” says Brent in his dada rant on “Radio One", and it might be a way to keep our connection to what we love, and not get carried away by winds we hate.

Click here to listen to Music Media on Bandcamp.

NO TREND "You Deserve Your Life" LP

CRISIS MAN "The Myth Of Moderation" 7"

late show in Brooklyn 

(after Drunks With Guns show at Brooklyn Bazaar)

EXEK  (paranoid, hallucinatory postpunk dub from the sunny beaches of Orstralia)

MARBLED EYE (paranoid twitch rock from the windy hills of Oakland CA)

LAKE RUTH (I’m just gonna say they’re paranoid pop from the mean streets of New York City)