It’s the fall now, I guess! I’m in LA so it’s still summer til December where it hits spring. But the spirit of the “new school year” vibe has hit me with me making some life changes, home changes and big plans for the fall. These are the last of the songs from this summer I’ve been into, and you can listen to everything I write about in this playlist.

Sudan Archives “DEAD”

After putting out my “record-of-the-year” a few years ago, I’ve weirdly put off listening to this one from Sudan Archives but now that I am, I love it!

Double Virgo “alarm bells in central plaza”

Before forming bar italia, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton performed as Double Virgo and have started putting out new stuff. It’s their fuckaround band, and that’s important to have, particularly to me who tends to prefer the fuckaround vibe to a polished masterpiece.

Faye Wong “After the Beep”

“嗶一聲之後”

If you know Faye Wong, you likely know her from one of my favorite movies, Chungking Express. Obviously, you needed to cast the coolest, quirkiest, most beautiful woman of all time to tell the story about a home-invading stalker who spends the second half of the movie screeching and blasting music.

After this, I looked into her music which was primarily a more traditional style of canto-pop, which felt at odds with her very modern persona, and I had somewhat given up until finding this on a playlist created by Michelle Zauner and if finally hit what I had been looking for!

Kitty Craft “Stay”

Did you know I’m twee? Pamela Valfer upgraded her lo-fi twee pop in the late ‘90s with keys and samplers, making really cool shit like this that I’ve been enjoying diving into.

Gelli Haha “Tiramisu”

I talked about Gelli Haha previously but this track is fun and has a bit more of a punky vibe to it.

Jenny Hval “The artist is absent - 89 seconds rewrite”

This song confuses me. It’s spooky and smooth and makes me dance like Napoleon Dynamite.

The Mall “Habit”

I can say the same thing about this one minus the smooth and plus what to me sounds like transmissions from a space war.

Water From Your Eyes “Life Signs”

This record rules.

Masayoshi Takanaka "Tokyo Reggie"

“トーキョー レギー”

I poke around Japanese music quite a bit, but it’s hard to figure out the whole “world” of J-Pop and J-Rock, so I just zero in on artists I like, like Jun Togawa or Shintaro Sakamoto and explore their connections. I randomly clicked on this one and really enjoyed this song, by Masayoshi Takanaka, and discovered he’s a guitar virtuoso and considered one of the most important fusion guitarists in Japanese music history. He’s also a fan of colorful businesswear and crazy guitars.

I’ve since listened to a bunch and found myself sad I didn’t get into him a few months earlier to catch his first American show at the Wiltern.

But the more I listened to this track, the more I found familiar…

I like wrestling, and one of the big events in wrestling is the January 4th Tokyo Dome show, where wrestlers from around the world descend to Tokyo for a wrestling-forward show that feels grand, capping off a week of big events surrounding Oshogatsu, the annual week-long new year’s celebrations. It’s their WrestleMania, but with less C-list celebrities.

One of the things that gets me hyped for this event is the matchcard, soundtracked by a wild VO guy and a killer soundtrack:

Is that the same riff as this song from 1976? I had to dig deeper.

This song is an original piece by longtime New Japan Pro Wrestling composer Yonosuke Kitamura, but there’s not a ton of info about him. But digging deeper into Japanese wrestling music of the past I found there’s some interesting stuff, and it’s all labeled horribly.

I found out that Takanaka’s killer song “Thunder Storm” was also the theme song for 80’s wrestler Genichiro Tenryu, and he even performed it at his retirement show:

So ultimately, I can gather that the composer was at least inspired by this riff and took it from guitar fusion to hard rock. Basically, I dunno but that’s for taking this ride with me.

Charles Hamilton - Scorpion

Here’s another one that caught me by surprise in a similar way. I’ve always wondered about the source of this sample from this song by Charles Hamilton. I always thought it was one of the wildest flips and because it came out on some rando mixtape I didn’t know what it was until…

Raphael Saadiq & D’Angelo “Be Here”

I’ve had this one on repeat past few weeks and everytime the sample comes up at the end I do my impression of this guy in this Damon Albarn clip going, “wholesale!”