A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn.
Negro Leo, Água Batizada The underground sound of Rio de Janeiro reaches a new apotheosis with this album from the prolific Negro Leo (aka Leonardo Campelo Gonçalves), which collides the idiosyncratic psych of Syd Barrett with noisy art-rock and the gnarled Brazilian roots of tropicalia. I haven’t been paying close attention to Brazilian music of late—it’s time for me to wake up.
Hieroglyphic Being I was jogging in Brooklyn recently when an otherworldly pulse poured from my earbuds, transporting me to what felt like another galaxy. The sounds, though, were straight out of Chicago. Jamal Moss keeps a low profile in town, but he’s moving plenty of bodies abroad with the Afrofuturistic post-house music he pumps out as Hieroglyphic Being. On The Disco’s of Imhotep and K.M.T. (with side project Africans With Mainframes), Moss uses vintage drum machines and analog synths to push house into the next millennium.
Juno listens to Jupiter’s auroras These aren’t actual wormhole transmissions, but they’re something even better: kilometer-wavelength radio signals from Jupiter’s intense auroras picked up by the Juno spacecraft on its first orbit around the planet. I guess this isn’t music in the strict sense, but I’m still obsessed with listening to it. It’s 13 hours of data shifted into audible frequencies and compressed into 24 seconds of outer-space bliss.
