Episode 45: "FRY COOK" feat. Kieran Press-Reynolds *PREVIEW — FULL EPISODE ON PATREON*

Here we are listening to the free version of CloudForm for the full episode said to Pat Rayon. Nice. Everybody wants to live through an era that feels meaningful, right? There was a real like taxonomical breakdown at one point. All that shit now is worthless. Every week you get a little bit better at spelling. Like what happened to Hyperpop? Like where's Hannah Diamond? It's just like flattened so much into this kind of like meaningless. I was just like interested in like a sociological like. standpoint. That's crazy. Fuck that. You should get the Astro Boy trim. Your name contains a word press. Is there good music here? Like, is there a lot of good music? Arab Spring. It's Vibe City over here. Damn, Addison Rae Hive Dubs like my wet dream. That's Hornetology Michael Jackson. For real. You need to get on Grammarly, man. You're a journalist. Basically evade Twitch's like nudity policy. Sometimes I do wonder if me trying to get excited about this stuff is like a facade or it's like I'm trying to get excited so that I can have something to be excited about. You can take another layer off if you want. I'm sure there's a great bot under there. It's like liquor, you know? It's that addictive, you know? Yeah. That was a great conversation. so just to come back to what we were saying before I feel like you're the person who's been kind of closest to this kind of like second or third era of hyperpop exploding and then kind of closing again do you see something similar happening with music that's coming up at the moment do you ever feel like you can there's someone who pays particularly close attention to this if you can ever see almost like written in the future what you think might happen to artists and who is who is and isn't going to blow up or who is and isn't going to be a fad i don't know i feel like i'm not like i i don't know i i i try not to be like a fortune future teller like i don't i don't know if anybody could really do that and i hate playing like the like the a&r game you know of like

this person gonna blow up i i hate playing music like stocks or whatever i just get excited about like new music that's coming up yeah i think you know for people right now it's hard to it's hard to tell if there's like a scene really like i and i've only been writing about music you know for like six seven years at this point so maybe that's a while but i feel like i haven't had enough time to like really understand how scenes form like that and like i think with the internet everything just i feel like the landscape is just changing so much like it's really hard to like i feel like even music scenes don't know if they're seen you know it's hard to like discern what a scene is i think it's a lot easier to tell like as an internet writer whatever it's a lot easier to discern like internet scenes maybe because you can sort of see like numbers attached to them or like people all these people tagging something a certain way who follows who yeah who follows who like there's like botanica you guys know about that botanica no no idea yeah it's like educate us uh i don't know if it's like a real thing i think people who who make it uh or make things like it hate the term so i'm sorry botanica heads but it's like a strain of kind of post like alexander panos porter robinson-y like so it's like nature like organic themed uh electronic music maybe with like a dubstepy tinge to it um and it's really big on soundcloud and like my friend jameson told me about it and like one way that i think you could tell that it's becoming bigger is there are now youtube videos like how to make a botanica song in five minutes like okay sort of codifying it as a as a distinct sound maybe it's quite interesting that a genre is developing around a term like botany yeah as opposed to like a term that is like a

pre-codified musical descriptor yeah you know it's like it almost reminds you of i'm going to use the term grunge again here it's pretty it's pretty cool to hear that it's like it's much more textural and feeling based as opposed as opposed as opposed to just pointing back to something that you have before that's have you read the the new liz pelly book oh yeah yeah i just finished it i haven't read the book but i read her harper's article on the way you described this music kind of sounds like the the pfc is it like perfectly fitting concept she kind of describes yeah wait which the botanica or yeah botanica kind of or just the way it's like kind of like this kind of like lifestyle um like lifestyle background music i feel like botanica is trying to be a little more than that like it's trying to kind of like make an art form out of it or like do stuff that uh i mean it's sort of like maybe like ambient plug too in a way like bison shed theory type stuff yeah maybe it's like shed theory but more like a lot more like wholesome or you know i don't think there are many vocals in it like it's just pure like oh i guess i more meant like the beat the shed theory yeah maybe it's sort of similar to the beats of that uh but yeah i i feel like it's trying to it wants to do something cool i think a lot of the people who are doing it are like synth nerds and people who just have like like they make their own hardware and it's like oh right okay just kind of like creating creating noises and shit so this is this isn't like a bunch of zoomers that like fruity loops and leaves this is like more of a music heads thing yeah probably somewhere in the middle of that okay i think it's a lot of zoomers but zoomers who are not trying to just like fire off time a dozen beats right okay okay what was what was that like youtube uh algorithm album that everyone was going on about ages ago the the like is it more god yeah the plantasia yeah the moogs moogsploitation yeah yeah it's like i guess how do you think these kind of people who are like like you said because i clearly misinterpreted like these people are truly clearly trying to form this like new genre that is like totally outside of kind of like

recommendation based listening yeah like how do you think they kind of like should square a like an entry point you know what i mean so it doesn't get lumped in before you listen to it yeah i don't know i mean it's it's so hard to like even create context online now i mean i think if you're an uninitiated listener you might be like this you know mort garson is is botanica or whatever like yeah i feel like there's no there's almost like no way to just like they're the websites like rate your music that try and like delineate stuff but no matter what it's hard i mean i think that like these people it's almost like the fact that they don't they are like anti-scene itself is maybe the fact like that's the evidence of them not wanting to kind of be lumped in with other things is like they don't want to be called botanica or they don't want to be known for this like monolithic thing when they're they think they're all making independent sounds which like you know maybe they are i'm not that deep into it but it is really hard to like square when that kind of shit becomes like the uh the the image for like natural sounding plant music yeah well i guess actually maybe that's a pretty good segue to talking about your new column because i guess well for me i kind of think that the kind of like return of like gatekeepers is kind of the the best solutions this kind of issue that we have in music where If he was here, we could talk to one of the best filters on the internet. Is he okay? I'm not sure. I don't know. We'll keep going. It's definitely not a you problem. Don't worry. You know, it's okay. But it's interesting because I remember... Do you know who the YouTuber Kyla Scanlon is? No. Are you familiar? She's like a Zoomer economics person who goes on Bloomberg sometimes. And I remember watching a video she did in 2021. So this is... pre even the kind of first iterations of like chat gpt uh-huh and she was talking about the like the own one of the main things that we'll have to become bullish on in the future economy is how we filter the internet and i've forgotten what you were saying before the filters are not working i think that would be a good segue to talk about gatekeepers the return to columns currency column yeah exactly and i think this is exactly it is that yeah i think

we've got we've now got a new form of gatekeeping that isn't institutional gatekeeping it's i think it's much more filtering yeah it's potentially quite exciting yeah i mean i feel like i feel like the columns thing is like i mean it's trying to imitate or replicate the like the sub stack model right where it's like i mean that feels like maybe one of the only ways to even be like a profitable music journalist yeah and all anymore or like jealous even i mean it's like i saw you see what happened with like the washington post today no like they let go of the opinion editor because bezos wants the intent they want the opinion stuff to be only about personal liberties and like economics or something okay like yeah yeah it's all fried uh but yeah i think there's this sort of like fetishization of like it's almost like wanting to make the writer into the artist himself or to yeah that's to make the writer into like someone who can wield a parasocial audience right it's like you want people to really want your voice in particular and so it's like yeah i mean columns have happened forever right like i know even like pitchfork had like altered zones like a decade ago but but i feel like this is the interesting thing i was just about to bring up altered zones so like most people kind of agree the altered zones was a bad thing in the long run because it led to people stopping reading all of those blogs um and that isn't said that i think that's what's going to happen with your column yeah but i feel like i got some stinkers coming up yeah i haven't read i haven't read the yaibogen piece yet i i apologize but i was excited to see that you wrote it do you fuck good yaibogen i do very much so yeah i i on my walk back we didn't have wi-fi this morning so i had to go to a cafe up in bedside and on my walk back i ran up like the yaibu jin archive soundcloud account and i forgot how great some of his stuff was and i remember the the way that i initially found out about him was through a tiktok video talking about his relationship to basically e-dating simulators and how this is what informs his music yeah and i kind of wanted to ask what is that why you chose him or why did you choose him because i feel like of the kind of hyper pop world that we discussed before and i mean he isn't really just hyper pop but he gets lumped in with that lot of artists and i wondered

why you picked him out i was like i was very interested in that because of the hyperpop connection or just in just in general i feel like he he gets lumped in with a lot with a lot of other artists but is is very singular amongst them yeah i don't know i mean i think like with with this column i want to just like i mean any kind of random like raw thought you know if i think it'll if there's like like legs to it or if it uh captures some story that hasn't been like heavily written about or whatever like i just the idea of writing about yabujin for somewhere like pitchfork seemed really fun to me you know it's like a lot of people who probably would would hate his music and like getting them to listen to yabujin would be cool and i mean i've been a fan for a long time and i feel like he is kind of like like he so many different like vectors that he's you know uh in conversation with or like has kind of intersected with at points like i mean i realized that like reptilian club boys had never been mentioned on the website at all and they're like you know massively influential in the underground and it was kind of like a like an excuse to talk about both the abogen and also like these other people and just kind of like this whole this whole strain of music because i'm really fascinated by like a lot of like the drivel and, uh, kind of like wasteland of like online jump style music, like on TikTok and these like Russian producers. Some of it is really good. A lot of it is just kind of like copying Yabujin's aesthetic. And like, there's this aesthetic, I don't know if he coined it, but it's kind of popular called like X spiritualism. Okay. And it's like sort of his whole design of like, uh, foreign text overlaid over like stretched bodies and like neon colors and it just looks like your computer vomited up a bunch of crap uh but it's kind of cool and yeah i've you know i feel like a lot of this stuff is is big online and it was worth discussing uh because i think yabujin is one of like the jewels for sure of the last like decade of internet music is he playing shows or anything like that or is it a totally i don't think he's ever played a show

It's an online project. Yeah. It's funny. Yeah. It's like very, it is very online, but there's kind of like a, I mean, there's like sort of a materiality to it in a way where it's like, like I'm really interested in like, like people on discord and like one of the main catalysts for the piece was that I found this discord channel called NK web that had 5,000 people. And all of them were just, they just spend their day like devoted to decoding Yabujin's like lore. Okay. Yeah. And so it felt, you know, this like hyper nerd maybe verging into almost like incel territory of just like people obsessed with him and you know it's like a internet rap version of like maybe not queuing on but like just some kind of like deep web and that was really interesting to me yeah well it's it is interesting you talk about the incel thing as well because i feel like that is kind of a core part of his music is at the very least like discussing male loneliness or like young male loneliness um and again with that reference back to um dating simulators and i don't know i just i find that really interesting because again i feel like that seems somewhat antithetical to like the rest of the hyper pop that he might have been lumped in with yeah yeah he's definitely like a lot more like i mean i think yeah He's just so much more isolated in general. And I think that's probably why he's appealing, maybe. Is he Lithuanian? Is that right? Lithuanian, yeah. I don't think he's ever collaborated with any of the people in there. Right. Like, I don't think he's friends with any of the Digicore people, you know? And it's like, I think most people who listen to him are not necessarily listening to him for, like, the loneliness aspect or, like, the emo feels or whatever. Yeah, you really? It definitely struck a chord when I came across it, yeah. That's cool. I mean, there's definitely kind of, like, a beautiful, like... brokenness to it yeah um i was actually really fascinated that i found that two hollis at one point used like the same dating simulator one of the same themes that he sampled i think for i forget what song it is but okay i think i saw a rumor on reddit that two hollis was in like a yabujin discord back in the day and was like talking about how he was heavily influenced by him and yeah it's just it's weird to see that

like inspo leak occur i think even like ken carson was inspired by his aesthetic for like the great chaos right okay like promo stuff wow yeah strange connections just just to play devil's advocate for a second yeah obviously you you know uh the kind of restructuring of pitchfork has allowed for this kind of thing yeah at the same time i would i maybe i don't know if you'd agree or not i feel like there's also been a like kind of huge over compensation for them not speaking about this kind of music throughout the 2010s and you get stuff like in that kind of best the decade best albums list you know you get like Chuka Romani Condori next like Boy Genius or some shit and it's like does it you know at what point do you think you kind of have to confront the fact that like you get to do this as long as it holds up this kind of like industrial complex of like indie you know like food truck day festival music wait what do you mean by the end of that like like i kind of like obviously obviously you know it's cool it's cool that you get to write about this stuff and it's like important music yeah but like it do you like i'm not saying are you going to stage a pitchfork coup but like how how does it how does it sustain itself long run yeah okay i don't know we're doing a hostile takeover so I mean, it's like, I don't know. I feel like I'm on borrowed time kind of like, and I think maybe Mano feels that as well. Like I think it's, it's really cool that I'm getting, and I, you know, I feel blessed obviously to like be able to get paid to write about this stuff and to have such like a long leash. Like, I mean, my, my friend is my boss and it's like, he is down to let me do whatever I want to do. Basically clicks beside the point. and like i fully believe maybe in a year that you know whatever like i have my contract is a year so maybe you know maybe i won't be able to do this forever um because i'm i'm sure that people are not the masses are not reading about yabujin in droves you know yeah um do you do you think the the blade cover story could happen pre-mano uh i don't think so i think it i think it was pretty it was pretty like i think people at pitchfork did enjoy

blade but i think mono really pushed for it and like yeah i mean i i feel like people think of pitchfork as like this almost like secret society right like uh you know the the deep uh government or whatever deep state but it's like it's just like 20 people in a room right and it's like yeah it's just their taste you know so it's like i think in the 2010s there were people who had much different taste profiles you know and they they liked cool stuff. They didn't necessarily like the fried stuff. And that's like, I think what part of the reasons why I started blogging was because I was reading like pitchforks review of young lean, giving it like a four or something. And I was like, what the hell? Like I love young lean, you know, or like even like Alphonse, who's cool, be like negatively reviewing. these like soundcloud rap albums that i thought were genius and like i was like i gotta argue for why this stuff is cool like shout out smoke perp dead star is a classic yeah um but i think now it you know there's definitely some i don't even know what i call it over correction i feel like it's like i think it's like correction maybe it's like this the stuff that is being put on the list are like i think that's like like mono at least that's just like honest opinion you know about stuff um and there are definitely like internal squabbles like about you know it's like the old guard clashing up against the new voices and it's like it's fun you know it's like people kind of like arguing for why this stuff matters and i think like there's been a big discussion about is fake mink legit you know like is that because we've been given have you got best new music yeah right well i was gonna say the main example we always turn to is how do you feel about almighty so too because to us that is definitely not best new music did that get best new music i think it'll be like it got significantly more than it got it got a much nicer review than anything chief keeps ever done wait when did that one that come out last year yeah yeah yeah yeah that's what i'm talking about when i say like over compensation yeah

I mean, I don't even like, I don't even know if I read that review, but I think that there are some specific instances where like people will push something up because they feel like, you know, maybe 10 years ago or something, they, they ignored it. Right. Or like, I don't know. And the reviews are so funny. Cause it's like, it's, it's like one person just gives like a score range. Then it's like, okay, it's that, you know, it's like, it's not really, maybe I think in some instances it is like the whole team. discussing what something should get but yeah uh i don't i don't know oh wait really wait so the person who writes the view gives a range and then everyone else it does like an aggregate no no no it's like uh it's like one person gives like it's like usually like a range of like 0.3 or 0.5 or something okay yeah and then the editor who edits you yeah just like picks one of the numbers okay interesting yeah it's not like it's like maybe it would be better if it was like a team thing although that i don't know i think i mean one of the one of the issues i think that pitch work has is that right is it like you know it's like burdened by the weight of the reputation or whatever and like the past and it's like uh i think that the writing that i love to read is like the writing that is almost like an art form in itself it's like someone really passionate or dispassionate about something not dispassionate but just like really hating on something really whatever um and like expresses it in a intriguing way you know yeah um yeah which i think they're trying to do more now uh pitchfork yeah so hopefully it's for the better yeah uh i don't think i like so about your writing at gq fake niggas they do it all for the clout always running their mouth but they've never been about yo i splash niggas yo in and out Clout is killing our people Clout is killing our people Clout is killing our people Clout is killing our people They move like the groupies, them Sending shots or snap But in real life don't use this gang

You know who likes special entertainment like that?