Explore the Soundafide Monthly playlist, a project devoted to giving you fresh underground music. Each week three artists from this list will be discussed. Check out last week’s feature.
Snow Strippers
Witchy-synth-pop-specialists Snow Strippers are here to haunt the rave inside your head.
The Detroit-based duo, composed of Tatiana Schwaninger and Graham Perez, fuse an underlying industrial grime with a so-sweet-it-hurts pop veneer.
Their 2022 debut, The Snow Strippers, is a heavy vat of nostalgia plugged into early 2010’s electroclash and witch house, yet bubbling with an updated pulse.
“Genocide” might be the group’s catchiest, as the explosive bassy intro seethes into a sweet electro-pop banger. Their acidic synthwork assails the eardrums, eating away at inhibitions with ferocious intensity.
Their daunting sound is comparable to the artwork for the group’s April Mixtape 2. Schwaninger’s ghostly vocals and Perez’s keyboard appendages create vivid depictions of character, while the dark, negative-space bass lines are just as important to the portrait.
Their 2022 EP, Fast and Slow, Vol 1, warps the tempo of their already demented strain of synth music. Both sides of speed mutation are equally stimulating, ranging from jittery, cracked out caffeine-pop to warmed up, syrupy electronica.
Greg Freeman
Greg Freeman’s countrygaze is fit for early-morning introspection, late-night anxieties, and every moment in between.
Yup, you heard that right, countrygaze. A modern alt-country, shoegaze fusion, bootgaze if you will, is on the rise. Nevertheless, the Burlington, Vermont 7-piece band is much more than a simple two genre mixture.
The group plays swooning pedal steel melodies and warm jets of horn (in particular, trumpet and saxophone) amidst boppy indie-rock intensity.
You’ll encounter all of this in “Colorado,” just one serving of rustic noise-rock from Freeman’s standout debut, I Looked Out.
Spooked by his own poetic clarity, the multiple narrative song is a speeding trajectory towards the truth of who-knows-what. Freeman’s off-his-rocker, careening delivery is the album’s most unhinged as his uneasy yelps crack under the weight of the subject matter.
For the love of this raucous Vermonter’s down-home distortions, please let his tunes whip your speaker system into shape on your next roadtrip.
Body Meat
Genre-non-conformist, Body Meat, discombobulates music in the best way.
On his projects, Truck Music and Year of the Orc, confounding footwork-influenced drum patterns hold the stage, skittering into chaos while defying Western Music conventions.
Christopher Taylor, born from an Irish mother and Ethiopian father, is the Philadelphia-based musician behind these disorienting creations.
In an interview with Pitchfork, Taylor said that “People call them weird rhythms [yet] in other cultures these rhythms are normal. If you listen to Middle Eastern music, they think of rhythm in a completely different way. It’s not weird. They just got more groove.”
Taylor’s eccentric, auto-tune-drenched delivery weaves in between these patterns while remaining accessible to up-to-date experimental hip hop audiences.
Fit for endless listens, Body Meat songs sound less like experimental electronic clamoring and more like extraordinarily composed danceability with each spin.
Also, Stevie Wonder is his half-brother’s daughter’s godfather. Indeed, that’s all the more proof that Taylor is a pop genius.
Let that be all the encouragement you need to bop a little differently this week with Body Meat.
