👍 vibes of late may '25 👍

good morning ~

bringing you another fat stack of hot tracks today via my Vibes of Late playlist

before we get to that, though, just wanted to mention that I’ll be playing a bunch of shows in the Northeast and at least one in LA this month - - check the tour flyer:

this month’s edition of Vibes of Late features the usual assortment of musicians I’ve either seen live, played with, or done sound for at Avalon, but there’s an unusual source for a number of the tracks on here - the television show Northern Exposure, a viewing of which has just been utterly delightful. really good music on that show!

here’s the Buy Music Club version of the playlist:

bseretan - Vibes of Late May '25

and here’s the Spotify version:

these are slightly different, btw, since not everything is streaming on all platforms. it never cease to fascinate me what music is available where - tracks you’d expect to find on Bandcamp are unavailable, and sometimes Spotify is the only place to hear a particular song. neither of these libraries are complete! and then there are those who are, with good reason, intentionally choosing to eschew Spotify and other streamers altogether, like Nico Hedley and Léna Bartels of the new label Rock For Sale (quote: “no, we do not put music on streaming services. they are bad.”). Their split they just put out is good though.

here are some highlights from the playlist ~

Colin Self - respite for the tulpamancer

Colin Self gave one of my favorite performances of 2023 - in the Tavern at the first Dripping I was delighted to be in the sweaty crowd just in awe of Colin absolutely going the fuck for it, belting and twirling. it was captivating work that captured something of the Ren Faire energy of that fest which famously takes place at a campground designed for LARPing (they have a jousting ring, etc). Colin was embodying layers of shamanic tradition - opera was present, the traveling bard was present, the flames were casting shadows on the walls of the cave, we were in electronic club ecstasy. pleased to hear, then, some of that particular firefly captured in the jar of record on their new album. really love this music!

Ashk Haye Moghavemat - Faraway Ghost & Sunken Cages (Zelzeleh)

really interesting record. a collaboration between Iranian vocalist and frame drum master Kamyar Arsani and percussionist/composer Ravish Momin who both works in jazz contexts and makes globally influenced electronic music under the name Sunken Cages. the resulting music is knobby and gnarled, textural in a way you might expect from a hyperpop production, with mournfully rendered vocals rising and falling in scales novel to my ears and layers of undulating frame drum chugging over electronic pulses. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anything quite like this and it was thrilling to do sound for them when they played Avalon recently - it’s actually amazing you can see music like this in the Catskills.

Naomi - Pleurer sur le dancefloor

had what could be described as a very organic encounter with this song - last week in Montreal we took a break from the gallery in search of hot bevs, wound up at a stylish spot a block down that turned out to be inside the offices of a Quebecois record label. earlier that day I had gone for a triumphant run around Parc La Fontaine and totally sweat through my cap, so I was planning on cruising the vintage stores up and down Saint-Laurent in search of another. waiting for my coffee, I saw a black hat that read “pleurer sur le dancefloor” or “crying on the dance floor,” one of my favorite activities. really spoke to me specifically. I asked the person working the counter what the deal with the hat was and he told me that it was the merch of one of their artists, but he hadn’t heard it. I walked out I and I threw it on, delighted to hear a French-language sultry house banger. merch first marketing! the coffee was good, too.

Ciarra Fragale - Jazzercise is On TV

I think the last time I crossed paths with Ciarra was a show at the now defunct DIY space Big Cat a couple of years ago - she was playing in a triumphant-sounding indie folk band, so it was pretty sick to learn that now a couple of years later she’s about to drop a hard throwback pop album that, when performed live, reminded me of Laura Branigan in the best way: chiming synths, chorus on the guitars, no funny business drum machines and heavy bass chugging away, and melodies sung proudly and with conviction. this song, in particular, is a tongue-in-cheek delight which is both about and embodies the siren-call qualities of sweaty aerobics music. it has a little bit of Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines energy, too, which is never a bad thing.

Eno / Cale - Wrong Way Up

I definitely heard the Sugar Ray version of “Spinning Away” first, which apparently was recorded for the Leonardo DiCaprio film the Beach? Never really gave this album a fair shake, but when the needle drop of “Lay My Love” hit during a recent viewing of Northern Exposure…phew, that was a bonafide television moment right there. I keep going back to this song, listened to it on my triumphant run I mentioned earlier. I got to spend two summers in Alaska in a town not too unlike the one depicted in the TV show and the slow 90s coziness of the series is really speaking to me lately. They were great summers, full of swimming in dangerous places and long walks under spruce canopies, super productive creatively, thanks largely to the 18+ hours of sunlight. I got obsessed with corvids there, too, kept seeing raven wings in my dreams, and when Cale sings “I am the crow of desperation” over the charmingly clunky drum machine programming it really gets me in my feathery feels.

monde UFO - 119

feels like inscrutability is really having a moment right now - as a person and an artist who has remained consistently, I think, hyper-legible, sometimes painfully so, I’m fascinated by a zeitgeist turn towards obfuscation. low resolution images shot on rudimentary digital cameras, impossibly short image captions and artist bios, websites that don’t really work, LP packaging that stubbornly refuses to fully divulge all the typical information, palimpsests and obscuring layers. makes ya wanna dig a littler deeper, listen a little closer. this monde UFO record is just familiar enough with reference to be really enjoyable - there’s some stereolab in here, some musique concrete, even some early Beck DIY / LA genre hopping - but it is so strange as a whole, really does not boil down to something parseable. this song rocks, though. I’m similarly fascinated by this Thomas Flynn track which is *not* available on Bandcamp, where did this enchanting music full of digital metronome clicks come from?

Heights of Abraham - Dolphins

a couple of weeks ago I played a very good gig in New York City at Light & Sound Design. when I lived down there it wasn’t at all unusual to go out and be a part of something deep and insane on a weekday night. not so much the case these days, I’m almost always home by 11pm during the week. so it felt novel when I found myself whipping up a cloud of vocal loops just after sunset in a vibey private loft with an extremely good sound system and a hearty fog machine on a Tuesday evening. the night went on, the mushroom chocolates kicked in, and I spent the last thirty minutes of the Alien D set locked in, rocking in a hammock over the dance floor. this track, the final one of the night, made me sit up and take notice. we went to a bar afterwards, too, really felt like I had gone for a dip in the ol’ swimming pool.

But what about you? have you heard any truly sick ass, new-to-you music lately? if so, how did you come to hear it? what track would play over the end credits of your month?