woioi – Tanuki
People may have famously flooded the stands of baseball stadiums for a chance to burn disco albums, but disco won in the end. If anything, even though it’s changed its name and got the papers in order, disco is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the modern pop landscape. Were the critics too soft, or was just dancing around to sometimes brilliant, always unthreatening music what people enjoyed most?
The U.S. has had many such ideas. And, for a while it’s also produced the muscle to seemingly enforce them. The prohibition of alcohol was supposed to bring people back to virtuous living. It was supposed to push them back into churches and toward doing work for orphans on the weekend. Instead, it made the people selling booze illegally incredibly wealthy. Some of their kids ended up as presidents of that country.
It’s best to give in, but not to entirely give in. woioi’s “Tanuki” is really an incredibly chill disco tune. It’s one where the bass doesn’t attack your senses but rather grooves relaxed alongside psychedelic instrumentation. If this were a postcard, it would be a 19th Century one of what people imagined China must’ve looked like. It’s colourful, and there are dragons flying merrily. Frankly, it’s very fun. Maybe disco was always going to win out.
EAVA – Озеро
It’s not hard to acquire enemies. Modern people, in most parts of the world, are hard-wired to dislike those who are unlike them. But the people you insult directly won’t be your greatest detractors. Most likely, they’ll respond violently but only do it once or twice. They won’t like you but will generally assume that you’re unhinged and thus stay out of your way.
The people who will really hate you are the ones who can’t understand you. It goes without saying that artists, especially those who do not follow but alongside their muse, are just as hated as they are beloved. When artists produce something that can’t be easily explained, that provokes the imagination, those who find themselves confused begin to nurture hatred for those creatives.
EAVA’s “Озеро” is a tender exploration of dreams made with what sounds like 90s trip-hop backing. But it is made in a place that, the artist claims, is hostile to these kinds of experimentation. Should it be? Well, this isn’t a tune that can be reduced to a 10-second soundbite or even one that can be described in a couple of sentences. EAVA’s “Озеро” is a song that, ideally, slips into your subconscious and does most of its work there.
