Exclusive premiere: ‘Rum-ish’ off GoodMostlyBad’s upcoming EP Baby

I came to GMB’s music while researching women and NB artists from India and the Indian diaspora for an online platform and community I was helping develop at the time. I found this work to be immensely gratifying, however once I came out about being abused by members of the Indian electronic underground, it quickly became clear that while ‘women’s empowerment’ as ethos was a good strategy for them to adopt on paper, in practice it only served to be an inconvenience. It seemed like something to work around, not towards. My posts detailing the abuse can be found here, here, and here.

The reason I bring this up in context of GMB’s upcoming debut EP is because the origin of her most recent work is deeply tied into the horrific misogyny and sexual/emotional abuse undergirding the Indian electronic music culture.

‘Baby’ is the debut EP of India-born and Doha-based Gurmehar Bedi, who produces music, sings, and writes under the moniker GoodMostlyBad. GoodMostlyBad, or GMB, has undergone her share of harassment at hands of one such member of the Indian electronic music scene. The scene’s inherent cronyism meant that the shots just kept coming, long after the relationship ended, sometimes passive, mostly aggressive.

The direct emotional fallout of such an event in your life can be heavy enough, but it doesn’t help that the knee-jerk reaction of community ‘tastemakers’ tends to be to distance themselves from both the perpetrator and the survivor, often under the pretext of being fair and balanced. As any survivor would tell you, there is nothing fair about this. It is difficult enough to process trauma as it is happening to you, but to discover that even acknowledging this trauma is public could result in being rebuffed by potential employers, collaborators, can be disorienting. Is it possible to somehow work through the consequent sorrow and demoralisation towards a salve of sorts? Is there space enough in the body for that?

Baby indicates there might be.

“It [Baby] will take you on a journey of the most intimate emotions I’ve felt over this time, from deep-seated hurt and anger to the absolute emancipation of my heart and soul. Sometimes it takes a tragedy to help you find yourself.”

The vulnerability these words by GMB hint at is profoundly representative of Baby. A common instinct when responding to trauma can be angling for invincibility. You can’t hurt me, I cannot be touched. It can seem reasonable to double-down on the idea that what happened did not affect you all that much, minimising your own experience in the process. With Baby, GMB ruminates on the process of healing instead, complete with tears and sorrow on the title track, drinking and falling back on your support system on the trepidatious ‘Rum-ish’, raging against the narrative on ‘Aunty’, salvaging your self-image and indulging in self-love on ‘I Have Better Sex All Alone’, and some more tears.

What makes Baby tick is that none of the tracks are one-note sentiments, espousing the effortless complexity of being instead. The inherent levity of Aunty, the final track on the EP that features Radence rapping words that GMB wrote, is both contagious and confrontational. The sound of swimming out of and not sinking in trauma can appear self-important — which I personally do not take issue with, but it seems the world cannot accept survivors that do not embrace humility — however, in case of Baby this euphoria sounds genuine, like a tender protest. The beat production mirrors this humour- at once raw and replenishing. It tickles a nerve and it makes you move.

Once could say this is the purpose of art, but I do not claim to know what the purpose of art is, just that there is comfort in knowing that it exists. It is, therefore, a bonus to see personal reflection in a piece of art an artist creates. When asked about how GMB defines her relationship with art and how it may have evolved in recent times, she says, “I think I definitely have a very different perspective on art now. Over the last year I realised how art can be misused to spew hatred and I think that taught me to be more mindful as a human being. I made the decision to be more conscious about anything Iput out. I want it to be impactful [sic] and create healing. I came to terms with the fact that not everyone is going to understand art the same way and I really want to represent issues and causes that I’m passionate about more and more vigorously. Also personally I’ve grown as a musician while working on Baby. I make the best music I have ever made now. I’m more in touch with myself as an artist and the music I want to make for the years to come.”

Baby releases on September 18, 2020 everywhere and the pre-saves are available here. You can hear the track ‘Rum-ish’, an emotional transmission featuring Namrata Nath ahead of its official release exclusively on Lanky Strum below. It was worth my time. It will be yours, as well.

Ankit Chugh — mixing, mastering

Rushil Bhatnagar, Vijay Ravi — artwork

Ishita Rajesh — Art Director

Roy Dipankar — Music video creative director

Sarang Sigalikar — Music video editor

Think About You Twice was originally published in lankystrum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Listen to ‘Mouna’ by Jeich Ould Badou

The unorthodox but increasingly sensible recording approach adopted by Chrir Kirkley’s label Sahel Sounds has made waves now and then. In times of self-isolation and quarantine, however, the format in which Sahel Sounds operates becomes more relevant than ever. Right on cue, the third installment of Sahel Sounds’ Music from Saharan WhatsApp arrived four days ago.

The label has done a nifty job of introducing the world to the most disenfranchised musicians of the Western Sahara. Its Music from Saharan Whatsapp series left the traditional label release model behind by letting the artists have 100% of the income generated from sales. Each month showcases a different artist, featuring a catalog of phone recordings Whatsapped to Kirkley only a few days prior to release.

The pay-what-you-want model hints at prioritizing exposure over fiscal health of the artists, most of whom are happy to simply have a platform to share their music at this time. The conversation about artist rights is re-emerging in light of the pandemic, as people rely on entertainment and the arts from the safety of their homes. At this moment it seems almost silly to hope, but here’s hoping that there is a point earmarked in the future where monetary compensation for artists and the arts becomes a mandate, instead of half an afterthought.

At any rate, the Music from Saharan Whatsapp format is a great exercise in collaboration and swiftness. In spite of the rawness of the recordings, or maybe even a little because of them, we hear no stiffness in Jeich Ould Bado’s tidnit — a four-stringed Mauritanian lute — its warbling syncopated playing structure lucidly backed up by an ensemble in style of TOP WZN.

Listen here:

Released March 16, 2020

Jeich Ould Badou — Tidnit
Boss DR-770 Drum Machine (Tracks 1, 2, 3)

Recorded by Jeich Ould Badou on iPhone 7, March 2020
Album Art by Christopher Kirkley

An Obvious Step was originally published in lankystrum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Listen to ‘So Much Love To Give’ by Eris Drew

Persisting in living in the past is purportedly personal growth’s nadir. Longing for our own past, or a past we wish we lived for, however, can be a stabilizing force. Our personal sense of continuity, and the containment of multitudes of our pasts within us can strengthen our roots.

Eris Drew’s debut solo EP Fluids of Emotion indulges in this bittersweet sadness of what is gone, shaping it into what it could become, without turning mawkish. Instead of retreating into a romanticised past it endures change. ‘So Much Love to Give’ takes a house classic and breaks it over the steaming griddle of the present.

Listen here:

This EP was recorded at Eris Drew’s parents’ home in Chicago and mixed in the Interdimensional Laboratories in Detroit with BMG. Released February 10, 2020

The Next Upturn was originally published in lankystrum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Listen to ‘Zoned’ by Machine Girl

It’s all fun and games until Machine Girl drop a demo disc fit to make the most promising terrorcore/aggrotech aspirants bawl. Featuring demos from 2014 on, the 14-track MG Demo Disc runs the gamut of screaming tempos from breakbeat to digital hardcore and electronic metalcore.

‘Zoned’ is a colossal 90s rave classics style tune in hyperbeat that kicks like a mule. This is not a tune for standing in field with glowstick but for breaking it open and shoving it up/down nearest orifice in a state of miscalculated lasting paroxysm. Muggalos, assemble.

Listen:

Released February 9, 2020

Creed of Chaos was originally published in lankystrum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Listen to ‘Hearts Utd.’ by RX-101

The scene loves to dabble in a little contemporary folklore and, to that end, RX-101’s iconography has been taken apart enough times already for several theories to emerge about their identity. Such is the nature of society, that everything decent must eventually connect back to Rephlex.

And fine. ‘Heart’s Utd.’ does skritch along like a quality, early Rephlex simulacrum — a seemingly upbeat progression that falls together to turn dolorous — but it moves past that with lightening speed, making it impossible to identify the arrangement as either maximal or sparse, for it is both, based on what kind of day you’re having.

Serenity embodies a distorted, warm romanticism for wintery chills, skittering around us in effervescence. Who gives a spit if it is old material finding life under the sun or new material masquerading as old. Who cares if it isn’t Erik Jong, but yet another skin afx is slipping into. I, for one, am now permanently weary of heroes and worship. Dancing through the sadness, however? I can do that.

Listen:

Releases February 14, 2020

Li’l Mythologisation was originally published in lankystrum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Listen to ‘No Cubau’ by PML Beatz

There’s not a lot I can add to the mythos of Lisbon’s feted label Príncipe. In very short label time, their catalog has come to be coveted by all ofthose that have encountered it. Displaying an immense reserve, Príncipe releases are fairly far and few in between, which is an acceptable failing in a label legitimising batida in the severely white-presenting electronic music mise en scène. Taking from kuduro to kizomba, funaná to tarraxinha, Príncipe releases reanimate the corpse of European techno and house music with a vitality it has a struggle encompassing otherwise.

White Portuguese populace has an annoying habit of relegating African diaspora culture to being libertine, implicating it as lowbrow in the politest terms possible, in true Portuguese style, while simultaneously exploiting it for personal gain and entertainment as and when possible. The work Príncipe puts out in face of this deeply disillusioning paradigm is, thankfully, not attenuated to this standard exacting erasure of identity.

Pedra de 800 Kg is a reassuring confirmation of this, with PML Beatz once again applying the anodyne of polyrhythmic percussion with exemplary competence. My pick ‘No Cubau’ breaks up the monotony of techno without sacrificing the internal balance of the loop, redepositing it to its status as fuel for the feet, beating like the body and flowing like the air around it.

It’s likely this is all personal bias contingent on what only I find appealing, although that seems incredibly trite. Regardless, Pedra de 800 Kg has qualified as the first record I’ve put my pinched penny towards, at the ripe age of 31, to finally put my money where my mouth is. I am not one to wear my affiliations on my sleeve, literally, but starting with Príncipe I am moved to make a change, once the O Principe Sou Eu long sleeve somehow miraculously becomes available again.

Listen here:

Released January 24, 2020

Written and produced by PML Beatz
Mastered by Tó Pinheiro da Silva
Artwork by Márcio Matos

Heat Seeker Thrum was originally published in lankystrum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Listen to ‘Querika’ by Naco

Everything about both Naco and 85acid — the label responsible for Naco’s Amazon / Querika release — at first appears to have been designed to punk people. From the broken English bio descriptor incongruous with the rest of their naming and descriptive conventions, to the almost haphazard delivery of occasional cheek in their social media updates, to the actual releases having a laugh at the expense of ‘serious’ sub-genres — it all seems designed specifically to piss purists off quite efficiently.

Of course, I have no basis for my wild hypothesis. What I do have is enthusiastic approval of Amazon / Querika — a frenetic breaking down of breaks, jungle, techno and everything in between to bite-sized pieces and the restitching of them in patterns familiar yet unrecognizable. This is not us consuming the genres, it is the genres devouring us.

Listen:

Released December 30, 2019

Manipulated Irreverence was originally published in lankystrum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Listen to ‘Spirit forced into objecthood; waiting for the artefact’s revenge’ by Papaphilia

These have been an emotionally wrought few weeks. India is undergoing a national emergency, following the covert and swift enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Bill, now Citizenship Amendment Act — a policy fundamentally unconstitutional due to a multitude of reasons, but mainly because it discriminates on the basis of religion. Masses of protests have erupted all over India, even as the police force openly commits acts of extreme violence against Muslim families who in some cases weren’t even part of the protests and attempts to illegally confiscate their possessions including land and home. People continue to be shot dead by the police. A cursory Google search should do the job, should you be interested.

This may seem unrelated, which it may as well be, but it goes some way towards explaining my avoiding writing about Peace Was Never An Option. I found it necessary to step back from what was from the very first listen seemed to me a consumptive work, and most likely to make it impossible to attenuate an upheaval.

However, it is a time for discord and disruption. So, I was ready to tread back in and feel fully and here we are. There is no toning down the apocalyptic orgone of ‘Spirit forced into objecthood; waiting for the artefact’s revenge’, and it embodies an aggressive maximalism that does a great job of transmitting the incredulity I, along with millions others, feel at the resistance to the resistance. If you are in a repressive state — and today there is a greater possibility that you are than aren’t — perhaps you need a similar appurtenance for the incomprehensibility of the world. It’s a song to slap yourself in the face with, when you can’t someone else, because you are trying to remain a person.

And I shouldn’t have to clarify this, but I find I increasingly have to — I mean that entirely as a positive.

Listen here:

Released Sep 3, 2019

Music by Papaphilia
Mixing and mastering by Andrew McEwan
Artwork and layout by James Geoffrey Nunn
Coral scans by Lauren Olinger
Thanks: Dante, Simon, Mossy, Del — for endless support and feedback
This music was composed, recorded and mastered on Wurundjeri Country

Atop the Digital Heap was originally published in lankystrum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Listen to ‘Infrared’ by Chino

Lately I have been nursing a broken clavicle back to health, after having done the same thing once before in 2015. My foremost bond with EBM is embedded in the moments where I feel like I am being dragged across a sawdust floor cruelly by my bad arm. This sounds like a bad thing, but on the contrary it is part of a crucial purging ritual, one that helps me expel fears and anxieties, channeling inner volatility into a type of external response, however temporarily. Blowing off steam, if you will.

This is a requirement that modern body music fulfills, albeit sporadically. I am relieved, therefore, that Unsound resident and Radar co-founder Chino’s The Cave does that all-important job of bringing the sensation of a chainsaw being dragged slowly, almost lovingly across my inflamed brain.

The Cave is teeming with jabs to the guts and everywhere else, and so it might seem that my pick off the tracks ‘Infrared’ is something of an underdog, but I stand by it. It reveals the brutality of its being with a languidness and care that reveals, nay, unfurls itself over a period of many mandatory repeat listens.

Listen here:

Released November 12, 2019

Music by Artur OLEŚ
Art by Karol Jaworski
Master & Cut at Manmade
Press at Monotype
Distributed by Bordello A Parigi

Give Us Our Horrors was originally published in lankystrum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Listen to ‘Terry’s Trips’ by Zequenx

We live with a million passive, benign wishes and one of mine was only revealed upon coming true. Gentle rolling waves of women and queer punters consistently wash upon the still largely embryonic Indian electronic underground all the time, but it hardly makes an indentation in the inevitably masc scene, let alone a door. It is therefore a near miracle when an onlooker slips successfully through to the other side. Zainab Wani is one of these people, finally beginning to live her potential as the supplier of face-melts instead of only being the recipient.

Her first official release ‘Terry’s Trips’ as Zequenx comes after nearly two years or tentatively feeling her way around. Released on a VA compilation made up entirely of original tracks by local artists who played at the recently concluded Far Out Left in Mumbai this year, ‘Terry’s Trips’ is a bit of a curve-ball.

“I feel like the process of making music is helping me find my feet. Others than DJing which is great fun in its own way, producing gives me a sense of purpose and direction, in an otherwise confusing world,” offers Zainab. “I choose to go beatless,” she clarifies in context of the song, “because it felt like I wanted the listener to float through the cosmos. The atmosphere is what I imagine space would sound like if there were any air out there. Some beat-y stuff coming soon.”

Completely absent are Zainab’s customary psy-trance inclinations, giving way to ambient flourishes that expand and contract. The psychedelia, however, is far from gone, transforming instead to a more subtle tension ripe with the imminent threat of acid techno lurking just out of the way. It would be quite weird, truth be told, for any mind-bendery to not be going on in a song that samples Terence McKenna describing a DMT trip with characteristic lucidity. Weirder still is that Zainab managed to not make yet another song about a psychedelic trip sound corny as shit. Well done.

Listen here:

Released November 12, 2019

Mastered by Johanz Westerman

Strange Anesthesia was originally published in lankystrum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.