Not to reblog the same quote twice in a day, but agrammar (below) hits on what I’ve been hearing in Cox’s music in a much more specific way than I’ve previously articulated.
Pitchfork: Interviews: Atlas Sound (via desnoise)
Then later he’s talking about “chillwave” and saying: “[I]t also combines a lot of the stuff I miss about stuff like Casino Versus Japan — some of these older, more obscure electronic artists from the mid-to-late 90s and early 2000s.”
Then later he’s talking about Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier doing a guest vocal on his record.
This is something that’s always fascinated me about Cox’s music, especially the Atlas Sound recordings, and especially given his age: more than anyone else working this vein, his sensibility seems incredibly rooted in a realm of the mid- to late 90s, this era of comfortably blurry ambience that revolved out of style at the century’s end and is surely — as surely as he says — a slightly forgotten past to a lot of his younger listeners.
It’s hard to draw a neat circle around the sensibility I’m thinking of, but his Casino Versus Japan reference is certainly toward the center. It’s a whole wide spread of things, maybe starting with “important” records like Slowdive’s Pygmalion and Seefeel’s Quique, roving on through forgotten stuff like the full roster of Darla Records’ Bliss Out series (Lilys, Sweet Trip, Orange Cake Mix), ranging out in directions like Japancakes and the American Analog Set and (some) High Llamas, certainly a component of better-known acts like the Sea & Cake and Stereolab, deeper or harder-edged on Kranky releases from Labradford or Stars of the Lid — but mostly found, for me, in late-90s CD purchases by chancer acts filed toward the bottom of the shelves: Flowchart’s Multi-Personality Tabletop Vacation and Tenjira and singles comps, Seely’s Julie Only, South’s self-titled (not the English South; the one on Jagjaguar), Olo’s Olorizedcoloralbum, For Stars’ Windows for Stars, a whole run of this stuff.
Don’t take all those references as exact: I haven’t listened to most of those records in years and years, and don’t have them handy to double-check. (I can definitely recommend the South record and For Stars’ “Catholic School.”) But I tend to be reminded of them when I hear Cox — the run off of post-rock and dream-pop and slow-core into a comfortably stoned late-90s cul-de-sac, its revival into “laptop folk” and Morr Music electronics, etc. If I were nearer those lower CD shelves this list would be longer. Obviously a lot of why I remember the chance generic instances of it is because this was a lot of where I sat through the late 90s, a lot of what I was interested in. What interests me these days is that if you’d handed me an Atlas Sound record anytime between 1997 and 2001, it would have fit right in; it’d have felt very natural to love and maybe even very of-the-moment. (It’s interesting, though, how Cox, who’d have been a bit younger at the time, doesn’t discriminate between indie and pop in this regard — Casino Versus Japan shares the era, truthfully, with LEN and Primitive Radio Gods.)
6 days ago
